Response to Provocation: Living Memoirs of the Culture Wars - Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Wojnarowicz
Curated by Dr. Royce W. Smith, Associate Professor, Modern & Contemporary Art History, Wichita State University
McKnight Art Center (West) Atrium, Wichita State University, 1845 Fairmount, Wichita, KS 67260-0067
September 28- December 7, 2012 (opening Friday, September 28 from 6:30-10:00pm)
Itroduction
Wichita State University's School of Art and Design is proud to present the provocative art exhibition, Response to Provocation: Living Memoirs of the Culture Wars -Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Wojnarowicz. As the first institution in Kansas to stage this collection of some of the most thought-provoking works from influential and prominent artists Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and David Wojnarowicz, this exhibition explores the parallels between the Culture Wars of the 1990s and the current, often-divisive social issues of our day. Through David Wojnarowicz's incisive documentations ofreality (banned from the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and shown for the first time in the State of Kansas), Nan Goldin's poignant photographic presentations of everyday life from the 1970s to the present, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres' expansive installations of shimmering, foil-wrapped candies, each of these artists together and individually provides an intriguing visual perspective that stimulates discussion, debate, and dialogue about our nation's past and present state of unease about various cultures, identities, and issues.
Curator's Exhibition Statement
This exhibition serves as a re-visitation of pivotal works that issued from and contributed to the Culture Wars of the 1990s. As a continuation of these rich, vibrant, and unresolved histories, these works will initiate new dialogues as they resonate with the ongoing Culture Wars of the twenty-first century. Given our nation's caustic disagreements about women's health issues, gender equity, gay marriage, and State support of the arts in 2012, the display of these works will powerfully interact with the simmering debates of our time - demonstrating their importance not just as historical works of art, but as living memoirs of the Culture Wars.
About the Artists in Exhibition
Nan Goldin (1953 - ) was born in Washington, D.C. and remained on the East Coast of the United States throughout her childhood and adult life-coming to rely on the spontaneity, accessibility, and forthrightness of photography to document the lives of her close friends, acquaintances, and partners. Capturing the struggles, triumphs, frustrations, intimacies, and vulnerabilities of her subjects, Goldin's snapshot-like style of photography helped to forge a crucial bridge between fine art photography and the ever-changing rhythms of urban everyday life. Her work included in this exhibition, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1978-2001), is described by Goldin as "the diary I let people read" and consists of over 700 photographs of the artists' friends, acquaintances, and lovers-all of whom are entangled with the challenges of New York City life in the 1970s and 1980s. Goldin 's slideshow-like presentation-accompanied by a range of music selected by the artist-exposes the raw dysfunction and depression, addiction and emotion, illness and intervention that swirled around her in times punctuated by the AIDS pandemic and conservative government. Nan Goldin is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, and retrospectives of her work have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and Whitechapel Art Gallery (London). Two ofGoldin's photographs are included in the collection of the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996) was born in Guaimaro, Cuba and, after time spent in Spain and Puerto Rico, and eventually settled in New York City, where he received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 1983 and his MFA from the International Center of Photography and New York University in 1987. Gonzalez-Torres produced a prolific body in a relatively short span of time-synthesizing some of the most pointed debates and images of the 1980s and 1990s into art works that embraced subtlety and understatement. Believing that some of the day's most urgent crises could be addressed through the simplicity of and pleasures found within everyday materials, such as candies, chocolates, paper, beads, fabric, and strings of light, Gonzalez-Torres' works encourage relationships with viewers that change with each installation and over the course of time. The two works selected for exhibition at Wichita State University include "Untitled" (Placebo) (1991) from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York-a carpet of over 1000 pounds of silver foil-wrapped candies that may be taken and enjoyed by visitors. Referencing the pharmaceutical world's constant search for the drug that "works" amidst a range of often-failed therapies (all too common in the ongoing search for a cure for HIV/AIDS), this installation is often described as an expansive insistence on pleasure and enjoyment amidst the loss of those who have died from complications of HIV/AIDS. His work, "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) (1987-1990), on loan from the Dallas Museum of Art and the Rachofsky Collection, consists of two unassuming office clocks installed alongside one another in an equally unassuming location in McKnight Art Center. Drifting in and out of synchronization with one another, the clocks are quietly emblematic of perfect love, unconditional companionship, the persistent cadence of time, and a unique message to the artist's lover, Ross Laycock: "We are synchronized, now and forever." The Estate of Felix GonzalezTorres is represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation (established in 2002) maintains a substantial archive related to the artist's works and associated critical and curatorial projects.
David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was born in Red Bank, New Jersey and spent much of his adolescent life in unimaginably difficult circumstances-escaping an abusive family life, living on the streets of New York City by age 16, and working as a prostitute in Times Square in order to support himself. Much of Wojnarowicz's art issues from his observations of people occupying the margins-from individuals he met in bus terminals and train stations to the homeless whose lives and struggles had been pushed from view in both the contemporary art world and the increasingly conservative political discourses of the 1970s and 1980s. Wojnarowicz's works-often biographical in nature-use the artist's own powerful gift for writing as a lens into provocative and poignant imagery. Wojnarowicz's film, A Fire in my Belly (1986-1987), is an unsettling expose of contemporary culture's insatiable appetite for-or at least its implication in-spectacle and the suffering of others. Removed from an exhibition entitled "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 2010, this film is presented for the first time in the State of Kansas. Juxtaposed in this exhibition with Felix Gonzalez-Torres' "Untitled" (Placebo), the video serves as a reminder of Wojnarowicz's very different manner of engaging with the Culture Wars-relying on unapologetically honest imagery in order to remind viewers of the frailty of human life and the need for empathy and compassion in their day-to-day exchanges with others. The Estate of David Wojnarowicz is represented by P·P·O·W Gallery, New York.