“American Art”—Still Relevant?
July 2007
In this well-wired era of worldwide marketing campaigns, McDonald’s, Starbucks and other inescapable brands dominate a global economy in which stock markets can rise or fall with a few strokes of traders’ computer keyboards. From New York to Tokyo, 24/7 mass media pump up or pump out many of the same products: Harry Potter’s latest adventure, Prada’s newest handbag, Britney’s latest haircut.Different cultures meet and mix in a profusion of “fusion” cuisines. Capital flows more swiftly across borders than ever before, and the art stablishment—galleries, museums, schools, specialized media and fairs—has become a completely global phenomenon. For art’s creators, sellers and buyers, what’s new in Paris, Beijing or Johannesburg can be known as soon as it rolls out of artists’ studios—and often can be had just as quickly. Art-makers steeped in postmodernism’s everything-up-for-grabs aesthetic effortlessly reach across cultures for ideas and inspiration to fashion works that defy labels.
Against this backdrop of global pop culture and integrated everything, does nationality signify anything anymore when describing contemporary artists and the works they create? Should it? In particular, does it still mean anything to be called an “American artist” making “American art”? “In a sense, it can’t,” says Laura Hoptman, senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. That’s because, she points out, many contemporary artists who are native-born Americans or hold U.S. citizenship come from multinational backgrounds that have provided them with firsthand experiences in more than one culture and that have visibly influenced their art-making.
For example, Hoptman says, “What do you do with—how do you classify—an American artist like Julie Mehretu, who was born in Ethiopia and brought up in Michigan, educated in Senegal and the U.S., and who now is based in New York? Or Rirkrit Tiravanija, who is Thai and was born in Argentina, but who lived for many years in New York? Only now, in his 40s, has he returned to Thailand.” Mehretu makes paintings whose explosive compositions, based on architectural forms, maps and urban-planning grids, hint at historical narratives or imaginary landscapes. Tiravanija’s mixed-media “social art” installations have allowed viewers to interact with them and with each other by cooking meals, playing music or transmitting homemade television broadcasts.
Both artists have inevitably absorbed or been affected by the wide-open spirit of inventiveness that has long characterized the arts in the U.S., Hoptman suggests, while also benefiting from the endless currents of intellectual and artistic stimuli that are the hallmarks of America’s most cosmopolitan city. Tiravanija’s biographies often indicate that he is Thai—but could he equally be regarded as American, at least considering his long exposure to and involvement in the New York–centric U.S. art scene?
“Speaking as an American curator,” Hoptman notes, “I don’t think there is anything intrinsically ‘American’ in this pluralistic, make-your-own society we’re living in right now that makes the work of American artists or of artists who are living and working in the U.S. particularly ‘American.’” However, she adds, overseas audiences sometimes regard American-made art through cultural filters of their own that can reinforce certain already-established preconceptions. “Such myths are important for those who consume our art, especially Europeans,” she observes.
Some critics and curators point to the fact that French audiences have associated the outrageous-grotesque performances of the Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy, with their squirting streams of ketchup and mayonnaise, with what they think of as America’s cowboy mythology and culture of violence. Similarly, German collectors have long appreciated classic, ’60s-era American Pop art. Perhaps in the neo-Pop confections of a later American artist like Jeff Koons—giant, porcelain sculptures of singer Michael Jackson with his pet monkey or a 42-foot-high topiary puppy— they see the best of the worst of the selfparody and kitsch that flow through so much of American culture and society, from Hollywood movies to the ways of populist politicians.Martha Wilson, the founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive, a pioneering performance-art venue and “alternative” museum that opened in New York in 1976 and now exists only on the Internet, says, “I think the labels ‘American artist’ and ‘American art’ mean less and less these days. Avant-garde artists, at least, have always been international in their outlook and sensibility.” For Wilson, use of the term “American art” in an art-historical context now seems to refer specifically to the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the post–World War II period. By that time, creatively and commercially, the international art market’s center had shifted from Paris to New York.
Today, Wilson observes, artists from all over the world try to maintain active links to New York, or to keep studios in the city. “That way, they can say they’re based in New York,” she explains. That credential implies direct involvement with the U.S. and its culture. The U.S. is also home to countless self-made “American artists” like the Tokyo-born, pop-expressionist painter-sculptor Ushio Shinohara, who came to New York from Japan in the late 1960s and, unusual for his generation, stayed for good. Shinohara has become an American artist in spirit, as he eagerly points out. But is he a Japanese-American–international artist hybrid, too?
In dealer Rae Anne Robinett’s experience, for many foreign collectors and curators, the hyphenated identity labels Americans themselves use are pretty meaningless. “They see artists from the United States as American—period,” says Robinett, a Mexican- American herself who, as the director of Faufitown Projects, a contemporary art gallery in Santa Monica, California, has done a lot to promote the work of Chicano artists. She adds: “Foreigners see me as just another gringa.” (“Chicano” itself is a loaded term, usually referring to persons of Mexican descent who were born in the U.S. However, not all Mexican-Americans use or accept it, perhaps because of its separatist connotations.)
James Ballinger, the Phoenix Art Museum’s director and former curator of American art, notes that the rash of art fairs and biennale expositions that has emerged in recent years all over the world may actually have encouraged artists from the many countries that take part in them to create work with global appeal for an international audience. However, for curator and critic Joseph Jacobs, the label “American art” is “still valid” to describe what some artists are making and presenting. More precisely, Jacobs notes, many artists all over the world “are using the same formal or technical vocabulary, but the issues they’re dealing with are often different. Some artists are still dealing with issues that are very specific to America—for example, the pessimism that has come with the Iraq war crisis.”
Wilson agrees. “A big effect of globalism has been to help people focus on local issues and identities; that includes Americans,” she says. Over the past 30 years, Wilson has worked with thousands of artists from around the world. Recently, she says, she has met American artists “whose Midwestern or Southern regional identities have mattered deeply to them.”
She cites New Orleans–born Rashaad Newsome, a digital-media artist who is creating a performance piece for 60 black women that is based on “black vernacular body gestures” such as familiar, expressive movements of the head or the eyes. Newsome’s choreography will call attention to and celebrate certain specific, sociocultural customs, but in its respectful look at the behavior of a small part of the human family, it could turn out to be something more than just an American work of art. As the art historian Dore Ashton wrote in her 1962 book, The Unknown Shore: A View of Contemporary Art, when artists “transcend locality and place in their imagery,....they enter the universal realm of art.” Such works embody or express ideas that are “far larger than mere nationality.”
Patterson Sims, director of the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, believes the terms “American artist” and “American art" still mean something to many people for the simple reason that “American culture remains the dominant culture in the world against which others are judged.” Artists everywhere, he notes, have recognized and responded to this de facto “cultural mperialism.” Sims cites, for example, the contemporary British art star Damien Hirst, “whose career has been indelibly linked to American culture and largely dependent on his successes in the New York art market.”Then there is an American in Paris—like the abstract painter-sculptor Kate van Houten. Like her husband, Takesada Matsutani, an abstract artist from Japan, she has lived and worked in the French capital since the 1960s. Van Houten offers a unique take on what it means to be an American artist outside her homeland. “I think of myself first of all as an artist,” she observes, “then as an American, then as a Parisian with this wonderful baggage—my personal history—from New York.”
Echoing Ashton, van Houten says she hopes her own work may offer “enough of a universal message” so that “anyone, anywhere may experience it with some understanding.” At the same time, she recognizes that “people of different nationalities will inevitably have different interpretations” of whatever art they may encounter.
“It has to do with what they know and feel, the language they speak, the food they eat, the streets they walk or the music they love,” van Houten says, noting that those same cultural references shape every artist’s outlook and sensibility, too. “‘American artist,’ ‘Japanese artist,’ ‘French artist’— they’re just convenient labels,” van Houten concludes. “They don’t mean much for the artist, though, and they never have.”
ART& ANTIQUES New York correspondent and art critic Edward M. Gomez most recently wrote on art and American culture.