Happy Days are Here Again

Art from the 1980s is back at the Princeton University Art Museum.

By: Ilene Dube

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"Untitled" by Cindy Sherman, who uses herself as a model. Many of her images from the¤’80s were based on movie stills.


   Remember the good old days of postmodernism, when art made us feel like we were living in the future? They’re ba-a-ack! For Presentation and Display: Some Art of the ’80s is on view at the Princeton University Art Museum through June 12.
   If we are to judge art of this era from what we see in the exhibit, we’re likely to believe the years under Ronald Reagan’s watch were the decade of photography. Eighteen of the 24 works are photographs, and even those that aren’t have photographic qualities. The assortment of images does not set out to be a neat survey with a theme connecting the work of the period. Comprised of works the museum owns, as well as those from private collections, it takes a look at the world of postmodern art that succeeded Dada, Pop and Conceptualism.
   "The ’80s has enjoyed much attention recently in a number of major exhibitions, including one at P.S. 1 (in Queens, N.Y.) and another at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, ‘East Village U.S.A.,’" curator Johanna Burton told a group during a recent lunchtime lecture at the museum. Art of the ’80s was also the subject of a special double issue of Artforum magazine, for which Ms. Burton writes.

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Sherrie Levine has made an art form out of appropriation; she photographed a Walker Evans photo from a book and put her name on it.


   "We pick a period to study because of our passions," says Ms. Burton, a doctoral candidate in the department of art and archaeology at the university. (She holds master’s degrees in art history from SUNY at Stonybrook and Princeton and in performance studies from New York University.) "The ’80s have recently become history, but it’s still part of our present. The moment called postmodernism is new territory, or modernism moving forward."
   The title of the exhibit comes from an early ’80s collaboration between artists Louise Lawler and Allan McCollum. For their magazine project, "For Presentation and Display: Ideal Settings," the artists made pedestals with no art for sale in a gallery. "It was about the gallery as a showroom," says Ms. Burton, a teaching fellow at the Whitney Museum in New York.
   Just as "the ’60s" encompassed far more than that single decade, "the ’80s" art period spans the years 1977 to 1991.
   Three photographs by Cindy Sherman run through those years. They are Cindy Sherman classics in which she uses herself as a model. In the first she wears a man’s suit, tie loosened around the neck, and is in bed reading a newspaper in a space that resembles a motel room — filled ashtray, jewelry spilled on a tabletop, an empty water glass, an alarm clock. In the next, she is clad in Victorian dress with a plastic set of breasts showing through. In the most recent, she is heavily made up in crudely applied face paint, wearing a torn wet shirt and, underneath, a plastic vest to look like she is pregnant.
   "Whether posing as a bobby-socked girl on a desolate roadside or powdered and prostheticized in an exaggerated history portrait, Sherman relied on dredging up, and complicating by making conscious, an uncanny familiarity in her viewers," writes Ms. Burton.
   Nearby, Philip-Lorca di Corcia’s chromogenic print, "Fred," shows a suited man who appears to have collapsed on a SoHo-like street, his New York Times and eyeglasses on the asphalt nearby. Somehow, he doesn’t look like he’ll bounce back up, brush himself off and start all over again; rather, his whole world has collapsed.
   Even a charcoal sketch of an American flag by Robert Longo has a photographic quality to it. The one painting in the show, "Untitled" by Jack Goldstein, looks so much like a black-and-white photograph, when you inspect it up close it’s hard to believe this is acrylic on canvas, and not silver halide particles on velvety smooth photographic paper.
   Wait a minute, what’s a Walker Evans photo doing on the wall of a show about the ’80s? And why is it attributed to Sherrie Levine?
   Sherrie Levine learned about art history by looking at images in books, rather than the original works, just as Ms. Burton, who grew up in Reno, Nev., did. "She takes a famous image we all know, and takes the idea of copying to its apogee, rephotographing it and putting her name on it," says Ms. Burton. "It’s an act of love and homage, but also questions ideas of presentation… It’s hard to think of a contemporary artist who doesn’t appropriate. Even Manet borrowed poses from Velasquez — it’s meant to be recognized, it brings history with you. Levine is interested in how far that can be taken. She did this 30 years ago and people are still having this conversation; it makes for debate and intellectual discussion."
   In "Perpetual Photo Number 65," Allan McCollum sat with a camera in his hand while watching TV. Every time a painting or photograph appeared on the screen, he snapped a shot. He blew up these images which became illegible shadows, or a blob. As with a lot of the work in this show, you have to stand back and scratch your head.
   Writing in 1977 in his "Pictures" exhibition at the Artists Space in Soho, critic and art historian Douglas Crimp said, "To an ever greater extent our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema. Next to these pictures first-hand experience begins to retreat, to seem more and more trivial. While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality, it now seems that they have usurped it." And that from the days before Photoshop.
   Not surprisingly, Ms. Burton is writing her dissertation on "appropriation" (the borrowing and reuse of images) in art history, particularly during the ’80s.
   As Reagan made cuts to education, day care, food subsidies, medical care and the disabled, artists continued to make their statements. "The work is filled with joy, fun and dark humor," says Ms. Burton.
For Presentation and Display: Some Art of the ’80s is on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton University campus, through June 12. Museum hours: Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. 1-5 p.m. Free admission. A symposium, Working Through the ’80s, moderated by Johanna Burton, will take place April 14, 4:30 p.m., McCormick 101, Princeton University. For information, call (609) 258-3788. On the Web: www.princetonartmuseum.org