"The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984"

It’s hard to get a handle on something you’ve been close to, a thought that crossed my mind as I wandered through "The Pictures Generation"—the Met’s look at the artists who, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, snatched representational art from the jaws of Conceptualism. I knew some of the featured artists when they were emerging, and being a boomer myself, instinctively understood their point of view: I, too, was nursed on the teat of old-school television, fell in love with film noir and La Nouvelle Vague in college, read Barthes at an impressionable age and was generally paranoid about the media. But one of the hazards of mounting a show like this one at the Met is the context the place creates, and, in this respect, I have to admit that "The Pictures Generation" isn’t going to make anyone forget the treasures offered elsewhere in the museum.

Still, organizer Douglas Eklund has put together a fascinating document which, if nothing else, demonstrates the power of branding in art. There’s no doubting the enormous influence of the "Pictures" artists (the name comes from the eponymous exhibition at Artists Space, curated by critic Douglas Crimp in 1977), even if this exhibit has the unintended consequence of making their overall reputation seem a bit inflated. The best-known figures here—Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, David Salle—hardly need this show, while the lesser-knowns serve only as historical footnotes. The installation suffers from overcrowding, and many of the pieces on view come early in the artists’ careers, giving the show a callow feel. But the interest of "The Pictures Generation" doesn’t lie so much in the artwork as in the story it tells—of the periphery seizing the center. Eklund focuses on two more or less organized groups of provincial artists: one from the California Institute of the Arts, the other from Hallwalls, an alternative space in Buffalo. Together with a few other like-minded individuals, they replaced the dematerialized aesthetic (most notably, the Conceptual art pioneered by Lawrence Weiner, Vito Acconci and Joseph Kosuth), which had dominated the downtown scene during the malaise era, with an art refocused on images. Though the work of the "Pictures" generation was ostensibly a deconstruction of the popular culture in which they’d been steeped, it allowed for the eventual return of traditional modes like painting and sculpture. As a result, their efforts ignited the art-market boom of the Reagan years.

This revolution—if one can call it such—resulted from the collision of several larger forces. By the ’70s, the efficacy of modernism’s progressive narrative, which had held sway throughout the 20th century, and supposedly found its purest expression in Conceptualism’s rejection of the art object, was very much in doubt. Feminism, meanwhile, exposed modernism—and indeed, the whole of Western art—as a dubiously phallocentric enterprise. At the same time, art education in the United States had become formalized. There was now something called an M.F.A., which meant that artists learned, paradoxically, to make avant-garde art according to a prescribed set of rules. Also, President Johnson’s Great Society had left behind an archipelago of government funded galleries, often artist-run, created to operate outside the commercial mainstream. These venues served as a operational base for the "Pictures" crowd, allowing them to exhibit in a way that might have otherwise been ignored.

Given the size, sense of entitlement and impatience of the postwar bulge making its way down the demographic python, these straws in the wind were bound to serve as tinder for some sort of art-world conflagration. But the truth is, the "Pictures" artists weren’t exactly met by heavily defended barricades. The CalArts group had been tutored by left-coast Conceptualist John Baldessari. Indeed, the very argument made for the "Pictures" approach was that the Conceptualism which disassociated object and art could somehow be embodied in objects themselves. It was, basically, an incoherent position. But the go-go market of the Pop Art years was still a fresh memory, and more than a few folks wanted it back. The only people with a vested interest in maintaining some sort of orthodoxy were writers like Crimp, among others, from the leading theoretical publication of the day, October magazine.

The legacy of the "Pictures" generation, then, wasn’t postmodernism as it’s generally understood. All those arguments for the death of the author seem absurd in the face of the millions paid for images of cowboys pirated from ad agency hacks. Rather, what these artists accomplished was a leap from the democracy of images of their childhoods, to a democracy of styles. Thanks to them, it’s possible today to both paint and do performances without breaking an ideological sweat. Just ask anyone in "Younger than Jesus."

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