"The Pictures Generation" at the Met
By Emily Hulme
• ‘The Pictures Generation’ is at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through Aug. 2.
A video still from Dara Birnbaum's “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,” 1978–79
In 1977, SoHo gallery Artists Space held a group show, featuring the work of relatively unknown artists, called “Pictures.”
Since then, that exhibit has achieved landmark status in the world of contemporary art. The exhibited artists and their compatriots, the so-called “Pictures Generation,” represented a sea change in the cultural conversation of the time, and a new exhibit at the Met, “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984,” tells their story.
At the heart of it, these artists were reacting against the abstraction of Minimalism and Conceptualism, and experimenting with the manipulative power of concrete images. They worked outside the mainstream — mostly in photography, which was a ghettoized medium at the time — and showed their work in “alternative” venues, mostly to each other.
The scene encompassed more than just art; these artists hung out together and even played in each-others’ bands.
Given how their lives were intertwined, their work shares a sensibility, one of carefree experimentation and curiosity. The subjects they gravitated to were themselves and the culture around them. For example, Robert Longo’s “Men in the Cities,” a series of photographic portraits inspired by young men dancing at CBGB and the like, puts rock ’n’ roll culture at the forefront.
But it wasn’t all fun. There’s a current of darkness underpinning many of these works created in the wake of the idealistic 1960s. Richard Nixon was in the White House, the oil crisis was threatening daily life, consumerism was devouring culture and people were uneasy. Installations such as Barbara Bloom’s “Homage to Jean Seberg,” a response to the French actress’ suicide, are a gloomy reaction to troubled times.
Fittingly, as the “Pictures” artists were all about storytelling, the Met’s exhibit creates a chronological narrative of the era. The work evolves through the galleries from tentative experiments marking the return of representational art to large-scale pieces confidently manipulating familiar images and, in turn, the viewer.
Thirty years later, many of these artists are firmly ensconced in the canon, so it’s easy to forget that, say, Richard Prince’s appropriation of the language of advertising was revolutionary at the time, or that Cindy Sherman’s practice of inserting herself into cinematic scenes was originally not well received. “The Pictures Generation” places the artists in historical context, and tells the fascinating tale of a bygone era.
