Art: Creative Chaos

• Share

It is hard to imagine a more explosive, splintered era in art making than the past 50 years in America. The roll call is dizzying--happenings, body art, minimalism, earthworks, conceptualism, neo-Expressionism, installations--to name just a few of the schools that have swum vigorously or otherwise through public waters. Then there is the vast sweep of photography, from the voluble street scenes of William Klein to the arch self-reflection of Cindy Sherman. And there is video art, whose evolution has fast-forwarded from monochrome navel gazing to gorgeous spectacle in a scant 30 years.

Yet for all that, there have arguably been just two moments of final consequence to art's mainstream in the past half-century: Abstract Expressionism, with its reinvention of the spiritual; and its brazen opposite, Pop, whose smart, smirking celebrations of Brillo boxes, billboards and Mickey Mouse smiled into the heart of postwar America and found it made of chrome.

In 1963, when Andy Warhol remarked, "I think everybody should be a machine," in witty response to Jackson Pollock's proclamation, 21 years before, that "I am nature," the distance between artistic generations couldn't have been clearer. Here was the age-old struggle of the sacred and the profane updated; here was the earnestness of inner spirit vs. the irony of outer cool.

Now this struggle for the soul of American art is mapped in all its fitful chaos in the Whitney Museum's mammoth, frenetic show, "The American Century: Art and Culture 1950-2000," part two of a yearlong survey, on view through Feb. 13. The first installment of the retrospective, covering 1900 to 1950, was all about American artists striving to find their identity in the shadow of European masters--and finally making the leap with the figure-breaking canvases of Pollock. The sequel shows the rampantly imaginative shattering of that identity from Pollock onward, shuttling at high speed between the spiritually sublime and the subversively crude, with a whole lot of stops along the way.

Hundreds of works are on view, all of the Whitney's rooms and corridors crammed with pieces dating from AbEx to those practically yanked off the walls of today's downtown galleries. Yet nowhere is the primal battle pitted so bluntly as in the opening salvos on the top two floors of the show. First is Pollock's Number 27 (1950), its swooping marks scraping away the recognizable shapes of the world, implying in the skeins of paint a web of pure energy, limitless and deep. Its yellows and pinks, its muted greens and blacks are autumnal; a pure buzz of nature's prodigious, generative force. And then, just one floor below, is this: a towering partition plastered with Warhol's hot pink and green wallpaper covered with cows' heads, like an advertisement for milk gone mad. On it, in clashing hues, is the artist's portrait of Elvis, gun drawn, off register, multiplied by four like a drunken vision. He stares you down, that famously curling lip, with all the swagger and pow of Pop's sardonic message: how a world of glossy goods and superstars is way more gripping than the prayerful hum of our inner lives.