Sheila Gallagher. Plastic Lila, 2013; melted plastic on armature; 81 × 64 1/2 in. Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo: Stewart Clements Photography.

While State of the Art presents a diverse group of artists, certain aspects of the exhibition reinforce stereotypes of regional art. A number of works in the show eschew traditional media, with several using typical craft materials, like yarn, children’s toys, and fake foliage. While such materials have certainly been seen in mainstream contemporary art over the past several decades, commercial art centers and art fairs tend to feature accustomed media, like oil or acrylic on canvas, that appear sparingly in this show.

This focus on unconventional media is one of the show’s central conceits, and it becomes one of its strengths. Shelia Gallagher’s Plastic Lila (2013) embodies this embrace. Appearing at first as a large, brightly colored abstract painting, the work is revealed by closer inspection to consist solely of melted plastic items, created in sections using a typical barbeque grill. Similar to Marcel Duchamp’s declaration that the tube of paint is a readymade—meaning that paintings are indeed “readymades aided,” in his words—Gallagher’s painting explores the concept of what makes a painting by using found objects in the place of paint.[1] The wonderfully surreal sculptures of Jeila Gueramian are composed with crocheted quilts and other textiles, materials tritely connected to craft though increasingly appearing in mainstream art. Works that show the persistent experimentation with materials include the large, geometric-painting-like End of the Spectrum (2011) by Ghost of a Dream, which consists of a vivid array of hundreds of used lottery tickets.

Jonathan Schipper. Slow Room, 2011–14; installation: household furniture, cables, pulley, and electric motor; 192 × 192 in. Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo: Edward C. Robison III.

The show also emphasizes artistic labor; several works in the show are evidence of Herculean degrees of meticulous detail. Though there are works with predominantly conceptual natures, most of the works on display are firmly objects.[2] During a presidential-campaign season, such a selection aligns with the tropes of hard-working, blue-collar, middle America. This is not to say that object-based, labor-intensive work fails to succeed. On the contrary, Hiromi Mizugai Moneyhun’s works, such as Seminole (America) (2014) are astounding, intricate portrayals of culturally specific hairstyles made of hand-cut paper. Jonathan Schipper’s installation also involved substantial labor. His Slow Room (2011–14) is a meticulous recreation of a banally decorated, middle-class, American living room. Subverting his labor, however, he attached every object to strings that will slowly retract during the course of the exhibition, eventually destroying the installation.

Throughout the show, a focus on landscapes also reinforces a mythical connection between artists and the vast land that forms the country. The portrayal of landscape played a significant role in American art history; the painters Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt and the photographer Carleton Watkins were some artists who used landscape to support the ideology of Manifest Destiny. The enduring interest of artists in the relationship between society and landscape—as well as efforts to control such landscape—is well represented in the exhibition.

Jason Vaughn. Endeavor, WI, 2013; archival pigment print; 40 × 50 in. Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo: Jason Vaughn.

Among the works portraying landscapes are Jason Vaughn’s photographs, which feature different deer-hunting stands set in forested areas. The images are bucolic and reserved, but their subject matter addresses the supposed balance between society and nature, demonstrating humanity’s attempts to control or become part of the surrounding landscape. Jeff Whetstone’s video Drawing E Obsoleta (2011) shows the artist trying to draw a landscape using only a black snake on a white background; the snake’s writhing makes the task nearly impossible. Other artists use the theme of landscape to explore identity: Cobi Moules’s Untitled (Yellowstone, Swan Lake) (2014) utilizes the eponymous national park as a stage to explore his transgendered identity in the face of a Christian upbringing. And while not a traditional landscape, Chris Larson’s video Heavy Rotation (2011) shows the artist manipulating his immediate environment, cutting through a studio floor before making the entire room appear to rotate.

Vanessa L. German. Artist Considers the 21st Century Implications of Psychosis as Public Health Crisis or, Critical/Comedic Analysis into the Pathophysiology of Psychosis, 2014; mixed-media assemblage; 40 × 55 × 26 in. Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo: Edward C. Robison III.

State of the Art illustrates the wide range of issues and types of media employed by artists currently working across the nation, not just those that benefit from the commercial spotlights on the most cosmopolitan locales. The show crafts a narrative: that America’s artists continue to experiment with unconventional materials, especially those with a certain folk history; that labor- and object-based works are valued; and that the theme of landscape still has a deep resonance with artists. With the exhibition’s broad curatorial aim that attempts to find common ground between a large, disparate group of artists, it can be difficult to find substantive meaning. Still, the exhibition features much work that should be seen, and showing the work of underrepresented artists should be a mission of all museums.

State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now is on view at the Telfair Museums through September 4, 2016.

NOTES

[1] Thierry de Duve, “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” in Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1966), 163.

[2] One good example of a work with a primarily conceptual cast is the series Geolocation (2009–13) by Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman, in which the artists traveled to the locations indicated by social-media posts (with geo-location services turned on) and took photographs; these are displayed along with their respective messages.

Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, 2015; installation view, Jepson Center for the Arts, Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of Telfair Museums. Photo: David J. Kaminsky.

The exhibition breaks the decade into three thematic sections that also represent chronological periods. The first of these is “Identity Politics” (with the date range 1989–1993). After that, the exhibition transitions to “Digital Technologies” (1994–1997), and concludes with “Globalization” (1998–1999). Each of these themes is so complex that a museum may struggle to fully explore a single one within an exhibition. Thus it appears a herculean task to successfully encapsulate them in one show. Ultimately, despite a few awkward moments, Come As You Are integrates these disparate themes.

One of the strong points of the exhibition is its selection of powerful works. The curators of the show reference several pivotal exhibitions of the ’90s, including The Decade Show (1990) at the New Museum, Black Male (1994) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Third Havana Biennial (1989). Many of the works within this show appeared in those exhibitions, which lends Come As You Are considerable authority. In this way, Come As You Are consists of works that helped to define such topics as identity politics rather than works bolstered by a burgeoning art market.

Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, 2015; installation view, Jepson Center for the Arts, Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of Telfair Museums. Photo: David J. Kaminsky.

The stronger works in the show are the ones that operate within more than one of the themes addressed by the exhibition. One example is Mendi and Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale (2001). For this work, the artist duo listed the blackness of Keith Obadike’s skin for sale on the then-increasingly popular website, eBay, which removed the listing after four days, claiming the material was inappropriate. Installed physically in the “Globalization” section of the show, the work shares roots with the earlier periods of identity politics and emerging digital explorations, and remains powerfully relevant today, speaking to a society still grappling with race-related issues.

Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, 2015; installation view, Jepson Center for the Arts, Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of Telfair Museums. Photo: David J. Kaminsky.

Other works stand well on their own. Beverly Semmes’ Famous Twins (1993) consists of two absurdly large dresses, with comically long sleeves, and points to the construction of feminine identity. This topic is reprised in various works throughout the show, notably Shirin Neshat’s untitled work from 1995 (from her Women of Allah series) and Nikki S. Lee’s photographic series Hispanic Project (25) (1998), The Ohio Project (7) (1999), and Punk Project (1) (1997), in which the artist adopts specific cultural stereotypes. Works by Pepón Osorio (a couch with a suicide note left by the mother of the artist’s friend) and Ellen Gallagher (a monochrome-like collage with latent racial imagery) are also noteworthy inclusions to the show.

Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, 2015; installation view, Jepson Center for the Arts, Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of Telfair Museums. Photo: David J. Kaminsky.

As a collection of artists working in temporal proximity, Come As You Are demonstrates the highlights and the limitations of such period-based exhibitions. While the works in the show stem from a specific moment in society and thus share similarities—hence the three major themes—some fascinating curatorial decisions seem unfathomable, and yet they succeed serendipitously. For instance, in one section of the exhibition, the viewer encounters a number of works: an untitled Laura Owens painting (1995); a series of mise-en-scène photographs by Sharon Lockhart; a Jorge Pardo hanging lamp, bathing a section of the gallery in yellow light; and finally Alex Bag’s well-known film, Untitled Fall ’95 (1995), a work that anticipated the style and ubiquity of digital, internet-based video of the past two decades. Due to the curators’ adept selection of works and attention to historical context, the connections between the works may seem nebulous but are rewarding.

Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, 2015; installation view, Jepson Center for the Arts, Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of Telfair Museums. Photo: David J. Kaminsky.

Thus exhibitions that examine art from a specific period in time can be worthwhile scholarly endeavors. Though the curators carefully constructed Come As You Are through rigorous research—which is evident in the show’s catalog—the lack of historicization of art from the ’90s presents challenges that art from earlier eras does not. Nonetheless, Come As You Are excels in connecting three major themes in art—identity politics, digital technologies, and globalization—and illustrates the underlying connections between them.

Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s is on view at the Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center for the Arts through September 20, 2015.

This article is made possible by our Writers Fund, thanks to readers like you. Help us keep it going!

Nicolas Sassoon. Studio Visit, 2014 (still, detail); looping GIF. Courtesy of Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia.

GIF Studio was organized in conjunction with the 2015 Pulse Art + Technology Festival held January 21–25, 2015. It enters an international debate concerning not only the status of GIFs as works of art, but also how GIFs are meant to be viewed. Artists have been experimenting with small digital-animation files since the mid-1990s, but the popularity of the format has exploded in the last several years with internet platforms as modes of distribution.[1] Once the domain of the web, GIFs have made their way into galleries and other fine-arts settings like other forms of digital and net art—and this migration has helped elucidate the essential qualities of GIFs.

Critic Paddy Johnson, who curated an exhibition of GIF works titled Graphics Interchange Format at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, writes, “While people have theorized, criticized, and categorized GIFs to no end, they remain in a kind of browser-based Neverland that is unfamiliar to many of those in the art establishment.”[2] The fact that GIFs exist only in the realm of the digital and have either an extremely short or infinite (via looping) duration renders them distinct from traditional forms of art like paintings and sculpture or even video and performance. It goes without saying that although exhibitions of GIFs on monitors or computers are becoming more common, such an exhibition model is still experimental in terms of exploring the medium and the display format.

Nicolas Sassoon. Studio Visit, 2014; installation view, GIF Studio, 2015. Courtesy of the Artist and Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia.

GIF Studio enters this conversation by existing in a hallway. While not the equivalent of a web browser, this way station to other parts of the building offers a somewhat distracted viewing experience for the show, and this element of distraction is a connection to the GIF’s native environment—the internet. The installation of the televisions also reinforces this connection; by installing the monitors at equal intervals and at the same height, the exhibition can be viewed in a grid-like configuration, mimicking the layout a viewer would find on Tumblr or other similar GIF-sharing sites.

The particular selection of GIFs is another factor that helps GIF Studio explore ideas of medium-specificity and viewing environment. Nicolas Sassoon’s Studio Visit (2014) is one example: This GIF has a massive resolution and the image portraying the (digital) artist’s studio is too big to be viewed at full size on any conventional computer screen. Online, viewers must scroll around to see it; thus, before this show the work had only been viewed incrementally. With its installation on a 4K TV, however, the work has been brashly divorced from its native viewing environment. While this may seem reckless, it is fascinating to see the entire work at once, and with this decision, the Telfair explores how GIFs are constructed and viewed.

Left: Eva Papamargariti. And Here Where Are We Now? (excerpt), 2014; Right: Nicolas Sassoon. Studio Visit, 2014; installation view, GIF Studio, 2015. Courtesy of the Artists and Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia.

Further pushing the status of the GIF outside of its native digital context, the exhibition features Drew Tyndell’s GIF Loop 9 next to one of his paintings. The GIF shows a series of scrolling geometric lines and shapes—like many digitally created abstract works—but the animation was in fact made by drawing each frame by hand.[3] The painting, Abstract House 2 (2014), is associated with the GIF by way of similar colors and fractured forms. It offers an interesting comparison between GIFs and more conventional art forms.

The work of Anthony Antonellis also scratches at the distinction between GIFs and traditional works. In his Put It on a Pedestal (2011), the artist creates a virtual warehouse-like gallery environment complete with a multitude of pedestals and GIFs. Visitors use a computer trackpad to move the pedestals around the gallery and install the GIFs on them, as if the GIFs were valuable sculptures. Antonellis’ other work in the show is even more tongue-in-cheek: GIF Salon (2012) consists of a projection of several GIFs in old, decorative frames hung salon-style on the wall. Though Antonellis does employ humor, the works probe a serious distinction in seeing GIFs on the web versus viewing them in galleries.

Drew Tyndell. Loop 9; looping hand-made GIF. Courtesy of the Artist.

Though not a large show, GIF Studio presents an interesting collection of works that comment on their own status as GIFs. Due to the show’s small size, though, it is hard to argue that the exhibition advances the conversation around the digital-specific nature of or the proper viewing environment for GIFs. What it does achieve is an elucidation of how GIFs as media still operate in multiple modes at once: on monitors next to—and on par with—paintings within a gallery, and on websites as easily transferable digital files. The exhibition shows that GIFs adhere to the quantum mechanics of art—works that are able to exist simultaneously in diverse states and environments, defying classical definition.

GIF Studio is on view at the Jepson Center of the Telfair Museums through April 12, 2015.

[1] See Paddy Johnson’s history of the gif on artnet. http://news.artnet.com/art-world/a-brief-history-of-animated-gif-art-part-one-69060

[2] http://news.artnet.com/art-world/will-galleries-and-museums-ever-embrace-animated-gif-art-9650

[3] Tyndell’s GIF is not the only hand-produced animation in the exhibition; the work by T.S. Abe, which is effectively a GIF self-portrait of the artist, is also produced by hand.