An essay on Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s (Feb 14–May 13, 2018), an exhibit held at The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Originally published on The Mantle, July 26, 2018.

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden concluded their recent exhibit, Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s (Feb 14–May 13, 2018), with a gala in honor of Jeff Koons. This retrospective, curated by Gianni Jetzer and Leah Pires, featured nearly 150 works by “a new generation of artists in 1980s New York who blurred the lines between art, entertainment, and commerce.” Brand New is itself a great slogan for a particular ethos shared throughout the alternative art scene of the 1980s. With the rise of more sophisticated means of financing (that is, more money), the increasingly globalized art markets grew more self-conscious of how they could price works of art. Art wasn’t just created anymore. It was financed, manufactured, and fabricated for the supply and demand of the market: now openly incorporating its marketing strategy as a part of its aesthetic appeal.

Jeff Koons, New! New Too!, 1983. Lithograph billboard mounted on cotton; 123 x 272 in (312.4 x 690.9 cm).

A number of works in Brand New touched on artists and fame. A 1986 ad for an investment banking firm featured Warhol, sitting on a chair in front of his own self-portrait, with the words, “I thought I was too small for Drexel Burnham.” Sarah Charlesworth’s Cibachrome Golden Boy (1983–1984) and Virgin (1986) are highly stylized photos of famous icons of the era, like David Bowie and Madonna, against a black backdrop, which formed an aesthetic strategy Charlesworth employed throughout her Objects of Desire (1983–1988) series. In 1985, the art magazine Z/G presented profiles on these “Art Stars: Out of the Studios and into the Glossies.” David Robbin’s Talent (1986), pictured below, took this intersection between artist as celebrity further in a series of 18 professional headshots of a number of the artists who would be featured in Brand New. MTV’s Art Breaks also interviewed some of these artists, like Jenny Holzer and Richard Prince, through 30-second promotional videos played in lieu of commercials.

From the left, on the wall: David Robbin’s Talent (1986), 18 photographic headshots. In the panel: “Art Stars: Out of the Studios and into the Glossies” (1985). Z/G magazine. From the right: Andy Warhol’s Self Portrait (1986). Underneath: Mike Bidlo’s Not Warhol (1984).

The pale-blue, disembodied faces of Andy Warhol’s Self Portrait (1986) loomed heavy over Brand New as the last in a series Warhol had produced throughout his career. When taken together, these portraits document the persistent self-mythologizing of, and by, Warhol, as they all bear his immediately recognizable print-screen aesthetic. A Self Portrait from 1964 shows a young, surprisingly square-jawed, Warhol with his short blond-grey hair swooped to the left side of his face, while the self-portraits from 1978 reflect his highly publicized brushes with death. Warhol made his career by mining both the surplus-value of other people’s fame and the ubiquity of name-brand consumer goods. In turn, Warhol became as famous as the subjects his art transparently reproduced.

So it made sense for Mike Bidlo to do the same thing to Warhol and his infamous aesthetic. Not Warhol (1984) was the first in a series of recreations of famous contemporary artworks, which included “not”-ted versions of Franz Kline, Man Ray, and others. Mike Bidlo Presents The Factory at PS1 (1984) took this act of mimicry one step further by reproducing Warhol’s Factory in his own studio and getting his artist friends to play the celebrities who frequented it. Yet it was Jeff Koons who truly picked up where Warhol left off. Koons’ art studio is “a gargantuan operation that has brought to mind Henry Ford’s factory in boom times,” as opposed to The Factory where Warhol once “fabricated” his art (at least in terms of employment practices).

Koons’ studio employs hundreds of artists to create his massive artistic spectacles. In 2008, Koons’ 11-foot installation in high chromium stainless steel, Balloon Flower (Magenta) (1994–2000), with its sleek, transparent, magenta coating, sold for a record $25.7 million. Works like Puppy (1992) are notable for the hundreds of thousands of flowers designed and planted as a part of these glossy, massive, site-specific nods to Koons’ signature Neo-Pop aesthetic. Yet in one year, the great recession would decimate the prices Koons’ work could expect to garner in the current market. But Koons and his studio persisted in taking on more ambitious and “gargantuan” projects. The Gazing Ball (2014–2015) series, for example, included a painting department of more than 100 painters who painstakingly repainted 35 classical paintings, including Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Like Koons, much of the work in Brand New is self-serving for the artist. Their courting-as-critique of art-world fame and name brand recognition would, in turn, help to bring them fame and success. Yet to dismiss the artists in Brand New as entirely self-serving and parasitic would be a disservice to what their art communicates about the nature of capitalism. The two pieces by artist collective The Guerrilla Girls, for example, had anonymously called out both the gallery spaces that represent 10% or less of women artists and all the male artists who were complicit in their exclusion by continuing to work with the galleries. These artists expanded the possibilities of photography, film, and conceptual art as they employed them to reflect on the nature of art and commodity. Their reaction against the mindlessness of consumerism demonstrated art’s potential as a means of effective activism.

To what exactly were these “alternative” artists responding? Jetzer clarifies in the catalog to Brand New:

“[In February of 1979,] twenty-nine-year-old Julian Schnabel has an extremely successful sold-out show at Mary Boone Gallery on West Broadway in Soho (in the same building as the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery) followed by another in October. His Neo-Expressionist broken-plate paintings creates a stir and opens up a new market for contemporary art.”

The neo-expressionism of Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Francesco Clemente dominated both New York and international art markets during the 80s. These artists framed their paintings through formal developments in German and Italian abstract art. The following works of art, however, exhibit alternative, divergent narratives to the predominant one of painting as fine art: of which Neo-Expressionism was, at the time, its latest iteration.

Guerrilla Girls, These Galleries show no more than 10% women artists or none at all., 1984–85. Offset lithograph; each 11 x 17 in.

If this was the kind of art the most prestigious galleries in New York were interested in representing, then these marginalized artists needed to create new spaces for showcasing their conceptual and mixed-media work. These spaces were not limited to formal galleries either, like the influential, yet short-lived, galleries that popped up in the East Village, like Patti Astor and Bill Stelling’s FUN (1981–1985) or Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher’s Nature Morte (1982–1988). They also included the non-profit exhibition spaces of White Columns (1970), Artists Space (1972), and Fashion Moda (1978). New markets were developed both through and as a function of their art, as they infiltrated and subverted existing forms of media. These works were themselves exercises in artistic self-branding.

GENERAL IDEA, The Boutique of the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, 1980. Galvanized metal and plexiglass, prints, posters, publications: 60 1/4 x 131 7/8 x 102 3/8 in.

Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson were three Canadian artists who, for example, comprised General Idea: a pioneering queer art collective that explored the era of kitsch, which preceded the coming tragedy of the AIDS epidemic. General Idea reached out to 16 male and female artists by mailing them a brown taffeta dress with their logo, business card, and application to apply for The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant. This pageant was a massive undertaking with a red-carpet and live-television broadcast. The subsequent staging of the pageant turned into an ongoing conceptual/performance art hybrid, as General Idea leaned more and more into its own self-reference and kitsch.

The Boutique from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant (1980), featured in Brand New, now stands as a deserted “artifact” from the continuous “rehearsals” they had staged for years, in which they actively destroyed the pageant as they exhibited it through a number of different sites. The Boutique parodied gift shops and trade show pavilions while embracing its business model as a way of generating revenue through branding and merchandise.

Pictures and the Art of Appropriation

Barbara Kruger’s, Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) (1987).

One of the most iconic images featured in Brand New is Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) (1987). “I shop, therefore I am” is the secularized version of Rene Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum.” With “I think, therefore I am,” the mere act of doubting one’s existence immediately reaffirms that existence as, at the very least, something discrete and particularly worthy of questioning. To think about and doubt ourselves through skepticism and existential dread is what reaffirms ourselves as rational individuals whose actions matter. Descartes’ cogito operated via a form of circular logic that assumed the benevolence of an omnipotent God. Why would God create thinking beings and endow them with specific capabilities in order to purely deceive them? This God, in Her benevolence, would not have created mankind to experience reality one way unless reality itself naturally corresponded to the images of reality that we perceived.

Ashley Bickerton’s Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) №2 (1988)

Kruger’s “I shop, therefore I am” is far more nihilistic in its reformulation. God is dead under the logic of late-stage capitalism. The only remaining truths are the ones that can be capitalized on and sold back to you through the promise of consumer goods. It becomes increasingly doubtful whether the concept of the self can even exist outside of the things we buy and consume. What if there was no God to ground us to reality and reality was never absolute and given over to us in a “rational” or “natural” way (per the promise of Enlightenment thought)? Instead, our reality is always being manufactured in real-time by marketing, special interests, and competing ideologies. Ashley Bickerton’s Tormented Self-Portrait (1988) is “tormented” by this alienation, as reflected by this disembodied self-portrait, pieced together solely by the brands that Bickerton consumes the most.

You Rule By Pathetic Display (1982) reflects Barbara Kruger’s early work in advertising, as its observer asks, “Who rules by pathetic display?” Is it the woman who wields the knife, or the advertiser that displays the false promise of their goods? Female artists like Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman restaged everything from classic paintings of male artists, still-images of films, and magazine centerfolds through their photographic reproductions. Sherman’s Untitled #121 (1983), in which she posed in place of its original subject, could be a restaging of a Penthouse-style centerfold or a still from an old Western. With each restaging, the audience had to grapple with what it meant for the artist to transform herself as the object of the work she restaged.

These artists, usually grouped together as the Picture Generation, were instrumental in establishing photography as conceptual art (and conceptual art as photography). They staged interventions into mediums like photography, by (re)appropriating existing images to undermine photography’s presumed function as a mirror to the reality it claims to be able to reflect. The once presumed static and mechanical representation of photographic subjects had–framed by the light around them and “captured” through the lens of a camera, onto a roll of film–splintered into the various degrees of context-dependency entailed by their staged re-presentations of images and photographs. Moreover, these artists smashed the glass ceiling for female artists trying to break into the male-dominated world of art.

The bleak, abstract paintings of the neo-expressionists failed to reflect the present landscape of mass media. Perhaps this was what Gretchen Bender was trying to declare in her 1982 Untitled (The Pleasure Is Back). In a similarly ironic gesture, a postcard by Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine read, “His gesture moved us to tears,” as it announced their upcoming 1981 exhibition: A PICTURE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR ANYTHING. They demonstrated how a picture is no substitute for its context, which is subtly reproduced by its observer in real-time, based on their ability to recognize its visual cues through corresponding social and cultural shorthand (e.g. text, iconography, pattern repetition, etc.).

Lawler’s Who Are You Close To? (Red), for example, photographed a collection of S&H stamps that Andy Warhol had rendered blue via silkscreen. For nearly a century, these stamps were given out by retailers in exchange for purchasing their goods. This functioned as a rewards program, in which stamps could be redeemed for items listed in their catalog. These were so popular that by the 1960s, S&H claimed that they issued three times as many stamps as the US Postal Office. And so without this context, Levine asks what they, the observers, are closest to: is it Warhol’s silkscreen of these stamps framed above a fireplace; or is it the two porcelain statuettes of blue horses standing on opposite sides of its mantle; or is it something else? For most, without this context, the answer will be the massive field of red that frames both the stamps and the fireplace.

Adrian Piper is considered a pioneer in conceptual art, yet Brand New chose to instead feature a poster for a 1978 exhibit in which she participated in with Lawler and Sherman at Artists Space. For this exhibition, Piper re-presented a black and white photograph of a group of black men, originally taken by National Geographic, as they walked towards the camera: three of whom are clearly visible; all wearing suits and bowler hats; the man closest to the lens has his thumb sticking out, but his gesture seems more defiant than a friendly thumbs up. In a corresponding, taped monologue, Piper asked its observers in real-time,

“How do the images in this picture relate to each other? How is the two-dimensionality of the picture plane treated? How are receding spaces signified? How are the tonal contrasts distributed across the picture plane? Does it matter? Are these the right questions to ask about this work? Why use a photograph instead of really creating something original?”

Not only is this one of the earliest and most concise statements on the use of appropriation in photography, but it is also a statement on the role of race in the appropriation of images.

Brand New exhibited Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares #8 (1986), which was created as part of a series of charcoal drawings done over existing pages of the New York Times. A glamorous white woman, in a monochrome advertisement for Bloomingdales, is now enveloped by five shadowy, drawn in figures. With her eyes closed and an arm stretched above in ecstasy, these shadowy black men embrace her from behind, as one bites into her collarbone like a vampire. The name of the brand being advertised reemerges over the forehead of one of these men as “POISON.” Notice how the word “poison” later reemerges in Piper’s essay, “On Becoming A Warrior” (2001):

“Can I see such people and their actions clearly without dehumanizing them–and thereby dehumanizing myself? Can I see them clearly without demonizing them–and thereby poisoning myself? Can I see them for what they are without poisoning my perception of everyone else (the paranoia extreme)? Most important, can I see them clearly enough to actually understand and feel compassion for them, and for the pain and fear and rage and despair that ultimately motivates all human injustice?”

Ken Lum, Alex Gonzalez Loves His Mother and Father, 1989. Chromogenic print on sintra, mounted on acrylic sheet with screen printed ink text.

In contrast, Canadian-Chinese artist Ken Lum’s Alex Gonzalez Loves His Mother and Father (1989), seems downright wholesome in the way it subverts the potentially racist expectations of its observer. It pairs the text next to a young, shirtless Latino subject, who looks directly into the lens with his arms crossed and head slightly cocked to the side. Taken from Lum’s Portrait-Logo Series, these works paired a photograph taken by Lum next to stylized text that branded their identity through a corresponding slogan. Other examples included: a picture of an older Native American woman with the text “NATIVIDAD CASTILLO WANTS RESPECT!” and a young Asian woman sitting in an office, as she turns away from her typewriter and toward the camera, with the text “MARY SHUM HATES HER JOB.” This series did not limit itself to commenting on race, which is to say that Lum also photographed white people engaging in their own kind of branding: like a hair metal band that announces “WE ARE sacred blade”; and a photo of a poor family gathered around a dumpster, stating “GARBAGE PICKERS,” with little stalks of grass around the text.

Julia Watchel, Love Thing, 1983. From the Brand New catalog.

If Piper and Lum served as examples that effectively used appropriation to comment on race, then Julia Watchel’s Love Thing (1983) did not. It is the only work in Brand New that included an artist statement written in advance of its showing, in which she explained her intentions in appropriating existing images from greeting cards “that carried racist, sexist, and classist messages.” Watchel stated, “by putting the two images of the objectified women next to each other, I was attempting to show how we are positioned as voyeurs to these images and perhaps become unconsciously complicit in our gaze.” But by repainting these two disparate images together, within the same painting, Watchel risks equating the cartoon image of a frowning Native American woman, dressed in stereotypical garb and headdress, as an arrow sticks out of her ass, with the 1950s style cartoon of a pretty, domesticated white woman holding a pair of scissors while her cat stands behind her. Both figures take up equal space in Love Thing.

Reconceptualizing Capitalism

Peter Halley’s Glowing and Burnt-Out Cells with Conduit (1981) resembles the abstract geometrical figures of Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. Yet Halley pushed their abstraction towards the soft geometries of post-industrial capitalism. In his 1986 essay, “Response to Barnett Newman’s The Sublime Is Now,” Halley argued, “the grid is without memory. On the grid, there is only a numerically determined position and temporally calculated speed. Once an event is removed from the grid, the grid’s relentless structure swallows it up, leaving no hint of its existence. On the grid, there are no monuments. Only the grid itself is a monument to its own endless circulatory nature.”

Left to right: Peter Halley, Glowing and Burnt-Out Cells with Conduit, 1981; Joel Otterson, Devil/Jesus, 1986; B. Wurtz, Three Orange Mops, 1986. Photo: Cathy Carver.

The two cells in this painting are equally sized and similarly textured with bumps: one is painted a vibrant red that pulsates, while the other resembles a bubbling pit of black tar. Beneath these glowing and burnt-out cells runs a conduit that frames both as a visual representation of their “numerically determined position and temporally calculated speed.” Without this context, these glowing and burnt-out cells become the geometrical expression of the 0s and 1s of binary code, the on and off function of circuits, and the carved out and tightly regulated spaces of urban landscapes.

Untitled Furniture Sculpture, Present (Hirshhorn)

In contrast to New Media, the following conceptual works of art appropriated found objects. The closed-off, square or grid-like configuration of couches by Ken Lum, in the ongoing, Untitled Furniture Sculpture (1980-Present), foreclosed their potential use as couches by its observers who may have wanted to sit down on them. Their configuration into a grid-like structure offers a projective no man's land that doubles as a meta-expression on the use-value of both these four peculiarly configured couches and the nature of couches and living rooms in general. This conceptual art piece was originally designed as site-specific. The couches were rented for the 1982 exhibition in Artist’s Space and then returned afterward.

Ken Lum’s Untitled Furniture Sculpture, 1982 (Artist’s Space).

The Hirshhorn, however, chose to buy the particular couches featured in this exhibition. Brand New thus transformed the conceptual nature of this work into a now stable, privately-held commodity. How does the act of buying these couches affect their potential exchange-value? If the Hirshhorn were to resell them, its new price would reflect the “surplus value” imbued by its association with Lum, its exhibition at Brand New, and even this essay that discusses it.

Haim Steinbach, Shelf with Ajax, 1981.Wood and plastic shelf; Ajax cleanser can; 22 x 14 x 14 in (55.9 x 35.6 x 35.6 cm).

The Israeli-born artist Haim Steinbach began working with found objects in the late 1970s by re-placing them onto different, corresponding shelves that he specifically constructed for each set of objects. In Shelf with Ajax (1981), Haim reconfigured segments of tree branches underneath a plastic shelf that resembles a real piece of wood: underneath the shelf, and behind its branches, is a floral wallpaper print; above stands a bottle of Ajax. In another piece, supremely black (1985), two black ceramic pitchers are next to three, largely red cardboard boxes of Bold detergent. The segment of the shelf underneath the black pitchers is alternatively red, while the segment underneath the red box of detergent is black. The shelf resembles the minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd, which he referred to as “specific objects.” This juxtaposition of the specificity of the shelves and the mass-produced objects on top of them attempts to reorient its observer outside of their alienation under the logic of consumerism (i.e. function/pleasure).

Erika Rothenberg, Freedom of Expression Drugs, 1989.

Conceptual art frequently tries to transform some found object into art by rendering it useless in some way. The pieces by Lum and Steinbach, along with B. Wurtz’s Three Orange Mops (1986) and Alan Belcher’s Fence Posts (1987), are all doing a version of this. Yet the conceptual art of Krzysztof Wodiczko attempted to do the opposite. The Homeless Vehicle (1988–1989) series were intended to be mass-produced in response to the growing homeless population: following the Black Monday of October 19, 1987, when stock markets around the world crashed. These vehicles functioned as transportable, single occupancy homeless shelters. Not only could their owners transport their stuff around NYC, but they could also lie down and cover themselves with its retractable tarp. Wodiczko had also conceived of his original, 1988 projection in response to both the events of his time and to the particular architectural stage offered by the Hirshhorn, which had commissioned this as a part of their public-works series.

The Hirshhorn decided on restaging Wodiczko’s 1988 public projection as a part of Brand New, but was postponed by its creator as it would have immediately followed the February 14, 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. In response to the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Wodiczko made the following statement, “…the 30-year-old projection appears to me today strangely familiar and at once unbearably relevant. More than ever before, the meaning of our monuments depends on our active role in turning them into sites of memory and critical evaluation of history as well as places of public discourse and action.” An invisible, shadowy figure stands in front of a podium that records and transmits his meaningless words. The man in a suit holds a freshly lit candle to the altar of thoughts and prayers, while the other hand worships the revolver it points at the audience. What was timely in 1988 has proven more timely in 2018.