New York, November 2000 - The Path of Resistance traces 40 years of socially critical and politically charged art, revealing that as times have changed, so have the forms and tone of protest. The exhibition, on view from November 5, 2000, to January 30, 2001, features prints, photographs, and posters, with an additional selection of paintings, sculptures, drawings, artist's books and underground carnies, and ephemera. It will be accompanied by a film and video series opening on December 22, 2000. The Path of Resistance is organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Video, and Susan Kismaric, Curator, Department of Photography. The exhibition is a part of Open Ends, the final cycle of MoMA2000.
The first section of the exhibition is dedicated to political posters from the last four decades. Installed in the stairwell gallery, the posters confront the viewer with their bold graphics and angry or satirical slogans. Examples include posters decrying the proliferation of nuclear arms, and those protesting governmental inaction in combating the AIDS epidemic. Also included is the Art Workers Coalition's Q. And Babies? A. And Babies. poster, which was made in 1969 when Americans first learned of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. An accompanying vitrine features magazines and other documents that chronicle the controversy surrounding the creation of the poster.
The opening galleries are devoted to political art from the 1960s and the 1910s, which tends to be openly confrontational in responding to civil strife. Apartheid in South Africa, the torture and murder of Cambodians in a Khmer Rouge prison, and the troubles in Northern Ireland are among the many stark events documented by photographers.
In the 1960s and 1970s the United States had become morally divided over the deepening conflict in Vietnam, disillusioned by the cynicism of Watergate, and despairing of the riots and violence that made Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of racial harmony seem hopeless. To many artists, the idea of turning a blind eye or remaining impartial was intolerable. In Cleaning the Drapes, her photo-collage of 1969-72, Martha Rosler depicts a housewife too preoccupied with her chores to notice a war raging outside her window, as much a sly comment on the stifling effects of domestic isolation on women as on our wish to deny the horrors of Vietnam. In Algiers Motel-Detroit (sic), his drawing of 1968, John Fawcett meticulously reconstructs the scene where three African-Americans were killed in a gun battle with the police, touching off one of the worst riots in Detroit's history.
Filmakers and photojournalists captured vivid images of antiwar demonstrations and womens and gays liberation marches, and bore witness to the massacres at My Lai and Kent State. John Szarkowski, then the director of MoMA's department of photography organized an exhibition of photographs taken of the protests that followed the killings at Kent state University in 1970. Presented in The Path of Resistance is a selection of these photographs, which are pinned directly to the wall as Mr, Szarkowski originally installed them.
The subsequent galleries examine the shift in the 1980s and 1990s toward art that is less event-oriented, and more concerned with the aesthetic challenges of representing endemic problems of radical and sexual discrimination and class inequality. Political artists of this period have tended to complicate, rather than simplify, our understanding of these seemingly intractable problems. In Feliz Gonzalez-Torres's "Untitled" (Supreme Majority) (1991), seven paper cones that resemble dunce caps, Ku Klux Klan hoods, or the spiked peaks and valleys of opinion polls were intended as an oblique rebuke to the demagogy of the recent political landscape, or an allusion to the seven Supreme Court justices appointed by Presidents Reagan and Bush.
Cindy Sherman evokes the horror of sexual violence in Untitled #188 (1989), a photograph grotesquely staged to depict what seems to be the aftermath of a rape, its victim a twisted blow-up sex-doll left lying amid the detritus of a wild party. Sue Coe's graphic painting Women Walks into Bar - is Raped by 4 men on the pool table- while twenty watch (1983) does not simply evoke a brutal event, but rather implicates the gallery viewer as a voyeur and suggests that all too often we stand by passively when such sexual violence occurs.
In her haunting installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-96), shown in its entirety at MoMA for the first time, Carrie Mae Weems appropriates daguerreotypes of slaves and other old photographs and superimposes her own texts over them, calling attention to their racial stereotyping and inviting us to
consider our own prejudices.
The film and video component of this exhibition, on view from December 22, 2001 to March 4, 2001, charts the development of these mediums as revolutionary tools of social criticism. The exhibition features approximately 50 feature films and shorts, documentaries, experimental and animated films, and videos, from countries as far ranging as China, Senegal, Brazil, Poland, France and the United States (see separate press release and screening schedule for more details).