Postmodernism undone.

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York City

April 21-August 2, 2009

Although Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement effectively replaced Abstract Expressionism as the primary genre that defined American contemporary art, a war of images gradually emerged as artists continued to reappropriate cartoon strips, news clips, photojournalism, and print advertisements into their work. "The Pictures Generation, 1974- 1984" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art suggests that Postmodernism was not as much of an aesthetic wash as it had initially seemed. By returning to the shadows of the Vietnam War and the deception of the Nixon era, curator Douglas Eklund identifies the four-artist "Pictures" show at Artists Space in 1977 as the defining moment of a growing multi-media, photo-based movement that ran the course of ten years. "The Pictures Generation" not only takes American photography away from its documentary past, but examines and deconstructs the mass-produced image in an attempt to question the divide that has long existed between photography and fine art.

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The exhibition opens in the museum's small, narrow gallery space used for the display of contemporary photography, and extends into additional space usually reserved for large exhibitions of American and European art. An array of collages, drawings, sound, video, and small sculptures appear alongside a large number of photographs that portray the complexity of their era. Since the handheld camera could not clearly represent moving objects, the photographers of "The Pictures Generation" returned to handwork in an effort to create objects that could capture frozen movement without leading to any visual distortion. Paul McMahon's Postcard Fan (Girl in Bathing Suit) (1975) for instance, features a postcard of a bikini-clad bathing beauty that was copied more than two dozen times and then arranged in the form of a circular fan. The postcard model only appears once, undistorted, as her legs and knees continue to spin around in a circular motion.

Similarly, Jack Goldstein's three chromogenic prints, titled The Pull (1976), reflect the minuscule form of a parachute jumper who tumbles through the sky. Although the figure is almost the size of a speck and appears only three times, the vast blue-and-white empty space suggests a dramatic, rapid fall that leaves one in suspense because the parachute does not release within either frame.

Robert Longo began his motion studies in sculptural form. The American Soldier (1977) in particular shows the swooning figure of a white-collar worker suggesting a gradual fall to the ground. Longo's metaphor of middle-class labor with military war resonates strongly. Moreover, this particular type of physical movement had appeared primarily either in war movies or in slow-motion television shows, intended to extend one's curiosity with every phase of the experience. Longo eventually translated his ideas into a series titled "Men in the Cities" (1979). Derived from projected film stills, these drawings render the photographic, frozen moment in human scale.

The relationship between word and image is questioned most prominently in David Salle's Untitled (1973). Consisting of four 24 x 20-inch black-and-white gelatin silver prints, the artist portrays women of different ages standing in their respective kitchens sipping coffee. In addition, Salle applied four different coffee labels at the bottom of each image, suggesting the context of these moments was more commercial than personal. However, real life continued to mix and mimic images seen in advertisements as if there was no difference.

Around the same time, Paul McMahon altered the reproduced newsprint image with pastels. Using color to bridge the gap between art and life, McMahon applied vivid colors to black-and-white images seen in the pages of the New York Times. The colorful enhancements added to reproductions of Impressionist paintings that appeared in a 1974 article titled, "Met Museum Serves Up A Feast of Impressionism," ironically portray art upon the mass-produced image. James Welling's collages of Marlboro and Winston cigarette advertisements go one step further to identify the ways in which a product was associated with either the macho cowboy or the quiet, easygoing couple.

However, the tension between word and image surfaces in Sarah Charlesworth's April 21, 1978 (1978), which examines the format of a newspaper's front page. Covering one gallery wall, the artist reproduced mastheads of various international newspapers. By arbitrarily placing copies of newsprint images in different locations, the artist suggests that the particular juxtaposition of a photojournalist image with text generates more significance and meaning than the news itself.

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Throughout this exhibition, Cindy Sherman bridged the mundane with the ideal in a series of self-portraits. Untitled (1975) consists of about two dozen small, black-and-white photographs that begin by representing the artist as a butch, 1970s cosmopolitan woman. Throughout this group of images, however, Sherman's face evolved from a plain-Jane look to one that is elaborately made-up, including the suggestion of an extravagant cocktail gown in the last image. The artist further exploited her own fiction by hand coloring each print for the sake of visual effect. In Untitled A-I (1975) Sherman's face appears close up. As she smiles and her head moves back, her bare neck and shoulders, combined with the fire-engine red that covers her lips, suggest the erotic.

Sherrie Levine questions authorship in relation to the photograph as a mass-produced medium in a series titled "Untitled (After Walker Evans)" (1981) and Barbara Kruger inserted text over image, attempting to subvert one with the other. As a result, the notion of meaning and its significance became a line of defense even though the constant dissemination of images created an impending sense of meaninglessness filtered throughout much of the postmodern era: a time when vast numbers of "-isms" proliferated as opposed to a significant art movement. The image, in other words, evolved into a site that argued against the linear relationship between the sign and the signified. Therefore, the perfect representation that captured rows of Campbell's soup cans did not signify an object in particular but rather the socio-political development of conspicuous consumption that characterized postwar American society during the 1950s and '60s.

JILL CONNER is an art critic based in New York City.