New York 2015, part 2

The Whitney

So the immediate raison d'etre for my trip was to make my bourgeois pilgrimage to the newly relocated Whitney Museum of American Art. As part of the revitalization of lower Manhattan, the move of a major cultural institution downtown reflects the return to urbanism that we've been hearing about so much lately. The new Whitney fits right in. The design is obviously informed by the aesthetic of the Apple Store, right down to guides dressed in color-coded T-shirts. Perhaps without the hubris of labeling things Genius bars, but definitely in the same wheelhouse.
Much like its spiritual sister on the West Coast, the new Getty museum overlooking Los Angeles from the West Side, the Whitney provides overlooks on the city it's part of, the people who are performing in the act of attending a museum, and how architecture remains a social signifier of a great city or a great institution. Being modern, I took part in the self-performance by taking a selfie. This was more a form of protection from the relentless march down from the top of the museum to its bottom, passing through the history of American art from 1900 to the present along the way. The name of the exhibit is America is Hard to See and boy is it.
As is well-known, the collection here is nowhere near the quality of the Museum of Modern Art. But it did provide at least one example of teaching me to see: Bill de Kooning's famous painting of Woman with Bicycle.

He's a controversial figure now because of his tendency to reflect the sexist social norms of his day (the link provides a more nuanced view, and also includes the story about my favorite conceptual piece of art, Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing), but he was generally considered by his peers to be one of the best painters of the Abstract Expressionists. This painting is less abstract than Rothko, but for the first time in contemplating one of his paintings, I could see what people were talking about. There were feelings about the woman, her hands moving in a cubist swarm but rendered in suggestions of paint wildly applied but perfectly under control, a suggestion of the bicycle moving by her, both future and past, her mouth in motion, with the second image of teeth and red lipstick famously suggesting a necklace, her feet in high heels. But unlike the carefully worked out abstractions of Braque and Picasso, the wild but perfectly controlled application of paint adds an unsettling element. So if for no other reason, I'm glad I went because he's been a nut I've been trying to crack for years.
But what I found really unsettling from the exhibit, which consisted entirely of works from the permanent collection, was how many times in the 20th century that artists were trying to tell us about social injustice. The plight of the striking coal miner, the lynchings of blacks, the war in Vietnam, the AIDS crisis, slumlords in Manhattan, over and over: to what end? Maybe it was a literal and also metaphorical hangover from the joy of Pride the previous day, but the show reminded me that America is Hard to See because our project is never done, our original sins of genocide, slavery, and racism, and our newer sins of capitalist rapacity are never behind us. Just today, I was reading an article about how the US Chamber of Commerce is fighting anti-tobacco forces around the world: the ur-text of American capitalism starts at Jamestown with the discovery of tobacco, our first cash crop that led to all the other victories of capital over the people and their land. As I write, I pass Mystic, CT, the site of the Mystic Massacre where the good Pilgrim fathers did in the Pequots who were standing in their way.
Thanks to the haphazard collection policy of the Whitney, examples of all these were on display all at once, so it was a little overwhelming. But where are the artifacts for the future? Will Facebook threads and tumblr feeds and twitter rants survive 100 years for our future selves to contemplate and understand?
I promise to remember the good things about America in time for the 4th of July.