With the arrival of the new Whitney Museum on Gansevoort Street, New York’s once notorious Meatpacking District completes lower Manhattan’s transition from a no-man’s-land populated by artists and outcasts to a stomping ground for fashionable elites. Befitting of an institution that represents the American art world—which has long positioned itself within both these groups, often simultaneously—the Whitney would seem to want to have it both ways. With the museum’s inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See, audiences are presented with a chronological reworking of the history of American art as collected by the Whitney. The works installed on five floors of the gleaming Renzo Piano building tell a story that is complex, and at times contradictory, while demonstrating the limitations of official art-historical narratives in articulating the various trajectories of art and culture in the United States and in the 20th century.

Whitney Museum of American Art, view from Gansevoort Street, 2015. Photo: Ed Lederman.

The good news is that Whitney curators, led by Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs Donna De Salvo, have systematically sought out gaps in the museum’s permanent collection and attempted to fill in missing contributors to American art history since the late 19th century, with particular attention paid to works by women and people of color. Less encouraging is the limited impact that these new introductions have had on the curatorial framing of American art’s influences and objectives. On the eighth floor, covering the years 1910 to 1940, unfamiliar names like Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and Richmond Barthé join a familiar roster that includes Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, Lyonel Feininger, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Isamu Noguchi. The historical narrative is expanded a bit to include African and Asian influences as well as European modernism. Yet, non-Western influences are cited only in discussions of the works by artists of color, while the overarching themes of industrialization and geometric abstraction as American art’s primary interests in that period are preserved from earlier presentations of the collection. An opportunity to connect American modernism writ large to the United States’ emergence as a global power is thereby wholly missed.

Glenn Ligon. Rückenfigur, 2009; neon and paint; 24 × 145 1/2 × 5 in. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art © Glenn Ligon.

On the seventh floor, covering the years 1925 to 1960, images of immigration and alienation in the cities from artists including Charles White, Maya Deren, and George Tooker begin to compete with heroic depictions of the American West by Andrew Wyeth, Grant Wood, and Chiura Obata (whose Ukiyo-e woodblock prints of America’s national parks represent a major recent acquisition and a collection highlight). These themes converge in the work of Edward Hopper, who blends the clear light and detail of the landscape genre with the psychological charge of Surrealism. Mannerism as a tool of social critique appears in works by Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, and Paul Cadmus, which invoke the exaggerated caricatures of German Expressionists George Grosz and Otto Dix, though that relationship is not articulated at the museum. Social Realists working in printmaking and photography, including Mabel Dwight, Hugo Gellert, Margaret Bourke-White, Lisette Model, Walker Evans, and Weegee, depict the era as tumultuous and divided: plagued by poverty, labor abuses, racist violence, and war. A suite of important paintings by Jacob Lawrence, War Series (1946–7), and a major work by Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–1932),  situate these themes within a larger historical sweep. Sited somewhat incongruously at the center of this storm of passion and rage is Alexander Calder’s whimsical Calder’s Circus (1926–31)—one of the Whitney’s best-loved works—which embodies the energy but not the anxiety of the works in its vicinity.

Woodblock prints by Chiura Obata, 1930. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Gyo Obata. Photo by the author.

That combination of energy and anxiety continues, although stripped of historical specificity, in the adjacent gallery of Abstract Expressionism including works by Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Alfonso Ossorio, Alma Thomas, and Joan Mitchell. While some artists such as Gorky and Guston can be said to have been responding to social upheaval and ethnic violence, the historical engagement of the Social Realists has been replaced by introspection and metaphor. Abstract Expressionism’s reputation for large-scale machismo is beautifully challenged by the central placement of Lee Krasner’s The Seasons (1957), a work nearly 17 by 8 feet large that is rambunctious and pastoral at once. Painted shortly after the death of Krasner’s husband, Jackson Pollock, The Seasons shows Krasner coming into her own as both a major painter and a woman who no longer fears the critics’ dismissive characterizations of her work as “feminine.” Complemented with sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and Ruth Asawa, this arrangement balances the traditional masculine narrative of the period with female points of view.

Alfonso Ossorio. Number 14-1953, 1953; ink and wax on board; overall: 60 1/2 × 38 1/2 × 1 3/8 in.; sheet: 60 × 38 in. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Anuradha Vikram.

The sixth floor, including works from 1950 to 1975, fluctuates between the serenity of geometric abstraction and the clamor of assemblage. A tranquil, meditative tenor is established by paintings from Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Jo Baer, Carmen Herrera, and Jasper Johns, only to be radically disrupted by the reentry of day-to-day life into art’s refined spaces. Arguably the strongest grouping in the whole museum brings New York art stars like Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, and Ray Johnson into dialogue with West Coast artists such as Noah Purifoy, Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, (Marjorie) Cameron, and Jess (Collins). Artists of color including Raphael Montañez Ortiz and women including Lee Bontecou are given pride of place, effecting a balance of perspectives as with the Abstract Expressionist gallery above. These groupings are rewarding because they respond to diversity without reducing the curatorial narrative to a lecture on diversity—allowing each artist to function as an artist, engaged with form and material, and equally entitled to ambiguity and open-ended interpretation.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz. Archaeological Find, Number 9, 1964; wood, steel, plastic glues, rope, fabric, and horse hair; overall: 76 3/4 × 66 3/4 × 22 in. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Anuradha Vikram.

This openness and inclusion is maintained throughout the sixth floor, with works by Yayoi Kusama, Marisol (Escobar), Malcolm Bailey, Lee Lozano, Nam June Paik, and Betye Saar alongside Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud. Regrettably, these works from the 1960s and early 1970s are the last in painting and sculpture to challenge official narratives within the exhibition as a whole. A gallery dedicated to Minimalism includes Rafael Ferrer, Eva Hesse, Anne Truitt, and Michelle Stuart, but subverts these artists’ contributions to an established discourse centered on Donald Judd and Richard Serra, who dominate the space. On the fifth floor, covering 1965 to the present, a terrific collection of videos approaches gender, racial, and geographic parity by linking the interests of Suzanne Lacy, Eleanor Antin, Lynda Benglis, Hermine Freed, Cynthia Maughan, Howardena Pindell, and Ulysses Jenkins with more frequently shown works by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas, and William Wegman. Feminism is very much on display in video and photography by many of these artists as well as Hannah Wilke, Dara Birnbaum, Laurie Simmons, and Adrian Piper; however, with the exception of Lacy, artists representing the Feminist Art Program and the Women’s Building that emerged from Los Angeles in the 1970s are absent.

Eva Hesse. Untitled, 1969-1970; latex, rope, string, and wire; dimensions variable. © Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.

In works from the 1980s through the present, the influence of the contemporary art market seems to inform selections in painting and sculpture as much as, or more than, the interests of posterity. Works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, Mark Bradford, David Hammons, and Jimmie Durham do less to challenge the official narrative than to demonstrate how contemporary art frameworks have adapted to incorporate artists of color and social-justice themes within a thriving luxury-goods economy over the past 40 years. This is not to say that the work is weak. Basquiat’s Hollywood Africans (1983) is to the Whitney what Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is to the MoMA collection: a watershed. Martin Wong’s Big Heat (1986), Mike Kelley’s More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and the Wages of Sin (1987), Fred Wilson‘s Guarded View (1991), and Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) will likewise be recognized by future generations as significant points of departure. Still, these works operate less like counterpoints to an official narrative than as its reinforcements, as the story has shifted from one of America’s heroic, masculine exceptionalism to one of America’s heartfelt yet superficial remorse at the inequality and pain we would prefer to believe we have left in the past.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Hollywood Africans, 1983; acrylic and oil stick on canvas; 84 1/16 × 84 in. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Anuradha Vikram.

Two works best encapsulate the conflict at the heart of the new Whitney Museum: Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), and Karen Kilimnik’s The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers (1989). Haacke turns his critical eye on real-estate transactions in lower Manhattan, chronicling exploitation of dire economic conditions by the wealthy to profit from the displacement of working-class New Yorkers. His work hangs in a gallery inside a $422 million building atop a natural-gas pipeline on a street that, in 1971, was home to slaughterhouses and transgender sex workers, and today hosts exclusive restaurants and a Louboutin store. Kilimnik’s installation considers a 1966 episode of the British serial The Avengers, “A Touch of Brimstone,” in which the titular spies infiltrate a fictional BDSM club that shares a name with one of the now defunct sex clubs of Gansevoort Street circa 1980–1990. Banned from broadcast in the U.S., the episode represents how popular media both absorbs and defangs what was once underground. Perhaps few people would begrudge the glittering river views of the new Whitney building for the AIDS-related anxiety and crushing poverty experienced by New York’s LGBTQI community between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. Nonetheless, the disappearance of that history from the shiny new Meatpacking District comes with an unaccounted-for cost. As Suzanne Lacy admonishes, it’s important to “learn where the meat comes from.”

Karen Kilimnik. The Hellfire Club episode of the Avengers, 1989; fabric, photocopies, candelabra, toy swords, mirror, gilded frames, costume jewelry, boot, fake cobwebs, silver tankard, audio media player, and dried pea; dimensions variable. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Peter M. Brant. Courtesy of the Brant Foundation. Photo: Anuradha Vikram.

America Is Hard to See is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through September 27, 2015. 

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

You walk in to a darkish room where ever-changing shapes move like a school of fish across the walls. After your eyes adjust, you find that the there are two benches sitting among six sculptures that are producing the schools of fish and that the fish are made out of nothing but light beams. These sculptures are metal. Simple geometry (sphere, cube, etc). The room is quiet and calming. Everyone who has been here talks about the unexpected smiles that slip onto their cynical faces, and it happens to you too.

Installation view Otto Piene: Lichtballett. Photo: Gunter Thorn. All photos courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center

To understand what is going on here, you have to look back to the 1960’s, which may have been the high point of art at MIT. During the sixties, arts funding was partially used as a counterbalance to the political consequences from the institute’s complicated and financially fertile military industrial connections. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) was founded in 1967 by Gyorgy Kepes and immediately went about funding exhibitions and visits for some very interesting artists. With the available capital, an unavoidable optimism of postwar boom, and a complete lack of habits (good or bad) Kepes attempted to foster “media geared to all sensory modalities; incorporation of natural processes, such as cloud play, water flow, and the cyclical variations of light and weather; [and] acceptance of the participation of ‘spectators’ in such a way that art becomes a confluence.” (pdf)

Two of the first artists who were invited to visit MIT were Otto Piene and Hans Haacke (as well as Stan VanDerBeek). Piene was in the first round of fellows (meaning he was in residency for a year), and would succeed Kepes as director in 1968. Haacke was invited for a solo show at MIT in 1967. The body of work both presented consisted of systems, those very cloud/water/lights that Kepes hoped to present as art media.

Installation view: Hans Haacke, 1967.

This fall, Haacke’s solo-show has been reproduced at the MIT List Visual Art Center (LVAC). VanDerBeek and Haacke were both deeply influenced by the ideas of cybernetics. Haacke felt that controlling the storm, moving the meteorological indoors, skipped a layer of abstraction and released the artist from reproducing essential features of the world; immediacy was the only type of innovative art left to pursue. Unlike VanDerBeek’s social videos, Haacke created kinetic art systems, objects that set in motion an action that had no end point.

The approachable physicality and comic impossibility of watching a ball float on a jet of air, or seeing a refrigerator coil (covered in frozen ambient humidity) as a sculpture reminds us just how useless art can be; how archaic and aimless we could make our art. These works are unlike our current trends: useful and solemn responses to the internet, the economy, or the social conditions in relation to capitalism. These are objects that bewilder and add to our aesthetic understanding by wonder and query. The closest these sculptures get to being explicit is to make visible the relationship between the whole and the part, between the center and the exterior. 1967 was a very delicate moment in American history: the Vietnam war raging as were race riots, but it was still before the chaos of 1968. Instead of making politics explicit, for which Haacke is usually applauded, these sculptures sing wordless songs about the 1960’s societal changes. These examinations into natural systems granted him tools that he later used to investigate social systems, like the gallery and politics of Germany, but were timely investigations that presage his later work.

Otto Piene: Electric Rose, 1965. Polished aluminum globe with 160 timed neon lamps. Photo: Gunter Thorn

On the other side of the LVAC, Piene’s light sculptures from the 1960 and 1970’s have been painstakingly restored and presented (some for the first time in decades). Despite the opportunity of seeing some vintage Piene sculptures in perfect condition, the two new sculptures, One Cubic Meter of Black Light and Lichtballet steal the show. Both project light through perforations in their skin. Lichtballet is a wall of rotating lights hidden away from sight, the circular pattern of holes in the wall filters the light, manipulating the light into physical motion in the surrounding room. There is almost no reason to look at the objects that Piene has created, instead, you should be looking at their effects on your environment.

The sensations we see flowing around the room are light, directly and with no symbol. Instead of seeing how light lands on a sculptural object, the sculpture provides its own light, and uses the light as a physical material. It may be a sculptural analogy for Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Has Piene released light from being a shadow on the wall? It’s hard to tell, as every time you step into the room, you are enthralled by the light show’s charms. You immediately forget any theory laden narratives you may have about the work, and instead experience the motion and change for what it is, a grand environment that undercuts words and explanations. It’s a direct experience. It’s that visceral art that we’ve left behind. It’s an example of Kepes hope to present the art object as a confluence, a meeting of viewer and natural process.

Otto Piene: Lichtballett and Hans Haacke: 1967 are on view at the List Visual Arts Center through Dec 31, 2011.

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying

In the yellow haze of the sun

Recent contemporary photography, particularly examples frequenting the walls of major museums, often seems drained of political poignancy, given over instead to aesthetic and commercial concerns: epic scale, vivid color, and the elastic potential of digital manipulations. But if the traditional—and vital—imperatives of documentary photography have been superseded by the tropes of high art, a compelling show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art rethinks the terms of this transformation.

Laurie Simmons (American, born 1949) Walking Gun, 1991 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1998 (1998.440) © Laurie Simmons

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection is on view in the Met’s dedicated space for modern photography, a short walk from the snaking lines of viewers patiently waiting for a turn in the dramatically presented Alexander McQueen exhibition. As Associate Curator Douglas Eklund writes in the introductory text, the 25 pictures gathered together represent the first time this space has engaged directly with the state of the world, our ‘culture at large’. But this is a show as much about the state of the medium, and about the commitment of the museum to represent the diversity of photographic practices. All of the pictures here have been made in the last three decades, and many of them are recent acquisitions.

Hans Haacke (German, born 1936) Thank You, Paine Webber, 1979 Gelatin silver print and chromogenic print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010 (2010.416a, b) © Hans Haacke

The show juxtaposes more obviously politically potent work from the era of the culture wars with more recent conceptual work. The appropriated and re-configured text and images from a corporate annual report in Hans Haacke’s Thank You, Paine Webber, 1979, points to the absurdly feeble attempts of corporate America to sooth its collective conscience, and the constructed, surreal violence of Laurie Simmon’s Walking Gun, 1991, calls up an active resistance to gender inequality that is strikingly powerful if somehow also nostalgic for a time when such imagery felt more like a loaded gun.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Moyra Davey’s Copperhead Grid, 1990, anchors the room, ten neat rows showing the decaying surfaces of American pennies, an elegy for the economy.

Adjacent to it, an early Jeff Wall, The Storyteller, 1986, sits casting its signature glow in the corner. Despite its contextual relevance here—it shows a group of Vancouver’s down and out gathered by a looming overpass—it is still a kind of elephant in the room, edging out some of the work around it by sheer girth, and foretelling the waning of the artist’s own political interest and the general shift in tone his brand of ‘museum’ photography has led.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

But the show also offers the possibility of a sea change, or at least a subtly altered, more socially engaged institutional perspective on recent work.

The state of war and US military strategy is the subject of two very different pieces. Trevor Paglen’s work uses sophisticated technology to track covert American military activity, often resulting in abstractions of captured light—in this case, KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 186), 2008, shows a streaking satellite purportedly on a reconnaissance mission somewhere above Yosemite. A recent work by An My Lê, in contrast, shows detailed images of its titled subject, Suez Canal Transit, U.S.S. Dwight Eisenhower, Egypt, 2009, that invite close examination. Sequence and perspective, however, are intentionally confused, destabilizing any feeling of a fixed point of view.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art March 22, 2011 – January 2, 2012 Images © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

On the wall opposite, one of James Casebere’s meticulously photographed cardboard constructions has never seemed so fragile or so perfectly chosen a subject. In this model, Landscape with Houses (Duchess County, NY) #1, 2009, shows a complex of suburban dream-houses, the likes of which we have seen vanished in the recent housing market collapse.

James Casebere (American, born 1953) Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1, 2009 Chromogenic print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2011 © James Casebere

Like the repetition of Davey’s pennies and these rows and rows of houses, and despite the inevitable encroaching visual power of each piece on one another, the pictures in this room undeniably gather force together. The gallery space is occupied by their collective energy: violence, decay, suspicion, and the slow-burning failure of late capitalism.

A constellation of images by Wolfgang Tillmans (who was involved in their arrangement), including a sleeping baby and Shanghai’s TV tower, ends the show in a glittering attempt at restoring some meaningful connection to the alienated world pictured in the surrounding room.

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, born 1968) Oriental Pearl, 2009 Inkjet print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010 Image courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York © Wolfgang Tillmans

As in the three-verse Neil Young song it invokes, the idyllic past and dystopian present conjures an irrevocable passage that leaves space only for a dream of a possible future.

After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection also includes work by Gretchen Bender, Philip-Lorca diCorica, Robert Gober, Katy Grannan, Curtis Mann, Adrian Piper, and Christopher Williams. It is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until January 2, 2012.