Hand over fist: a chronicle of Cold War photography

Abstract

Group Material’s Timeline: The Chronicle of US Invention in Latin and Central America (1984) at P.S.1’s Center for Contemporary Art explored the framing devices of installation art and photography in tandem, as a means of reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible at the height of the Cold War. In response to escalating crisis (including continuous Central Intelligence Agency operations being carried out in Nicaragua and El Salvador), this activist project employed postmodern strategies such as appropriation, pastiche and a resistance to conclusiveness in order to suggest provocative and unexpected dialogues between disparate artworks and artefacts across time and geopolitical difference. Artists ranging from Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger to John Heartfield, Tina Modotti and Arellano Bolivar, among others, come together as signs of political and aesthetic conflict, as networks of visual culture that complicate dominant narratives of spatial and temporal reality during the Cold War era. Closer analysis of such works reveals historical ruptures alongside continuities, relayed by official government policy, mass media and the art world more broadly. By excavating a long-standing history of conflict, Timeline addresses the stakes of the ownership of meaning itself in the mid-1980s, with implications regarding art production and politics for generations to come.

Notes

[1] Group Material, ‘best known for blurring installation art and exhibition making’, was founded as an artist-run collective dedicated to the creation, exhibition and promotion of art committed to social change. Group Material’s inaugural exhibition was staged on 4 October 1980 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan (Bishop 2008, 110). As of September 1980, the official members of Group Material were Hannah Alderfer, George Ault, Julie Ault, Patrick Brennan, Liliana Dones, Anne Drillick, Yolanda Hawkins, Beth Jaker, Mundy McLaughlin, Marybeth Nelson, Marek Pakulski, Tim Rollins, Peter Szypula and Michael Udvardy (see Ault 2010, 15). After 1981, the group was reduced to three members – Julie Ault, Mundy McLaughlin and Tim Rollins. Doug Ashford joined in 1982, Felix Gonazalez-Torres in 1987, Kren Ramspacher in 1989 and Thomas Eggerer and Jochen Klein in 1995. Group Material ceased its activities in 1996.

[2] P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center was founded in 1971 by Alana Heiss and remained an independent art space until 2000, when it became an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Artists involved in the production of this exhibition included Julie Ault, Doug Ashford, Barbara Westermann, William Allen and Ann Messner, among others.

[3] Don Oferdorfer (1981). See also William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) p. 80, fn. 41. The phrase ‘drawing the line’ was first used by Alexander Haig when he briefed the Congressional leadership on the State Department’s White Paper, Communist Interference in El Salvador, Special Report Number 80, 23 February 1981 (reported in The New York Times, 18 February 1981).

[4] ‘Mirroring the various forms of representation that structure our understanding of culture, our exhibitions bring together the so-called fine art with products from supermarkets, mass-cultural artefacts with historical objects, factual documentation with homemade projects. We are not interested in making definitive evaluations or declarative statements, but in creating situations that offer our chosen subject as a complex and open-ended issue. We encourage greater audience participation through interpretation’ (Group Material cited in Wallis 1990, 2 and; Bishop 2008, 112).

[5] See http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/heartfield/ Accessed 1 March, 2014.

[6] See New York University’s Fales Library Special Collections for the Group Material Archive. Heartfield’s image served as the cover of a 1933 edition of the German leftist magazine, AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, or Worker’s Pictorial newspaper). For more on Heartfield’s ‘proletarian art’, see Zervigón (2012) and Kriebel (2014).

[7] Guy Debord and the Situationist International describe an interventionist technique known as détournement. In English, the word translates as ‘derailment’ or ‘overturning’ and refers to the act of appropriating images, words and gestures from mass-mediated popular culture in order to alter the ‘original’, thereby producing new, subversive meanings and connotations and challenging the given conditions of everyday social life. See Debord and Wolman (1981); trans. Knabb (1981).

[8] Group Material’s Timeline: The Chronicle of US Invention in Central and Latin America tellingly coincides with the publication of the first English translation of François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984).

[9] A version of Grundberg’s essay was first delivered as a lecture in February 1984 at the Friends of Photography in Carmel California, in conjunction with an exhibition organised by Grundberg entitled ‘Masking/Unmasking: Aspects of Postmodern Photography’.

[10] Ault described how Allen’s posters ‘[m]ark various violent interventions from the North using the same image repeatedly’. From author’s email correspondence with Julie Ault.

[11] In an email to Bishop (2008, 139), Guy Brett described this installation as an ‘abstracted evocation of a Rio de Janeiro backyard’.

[12] See the 1995 documentary Carmen Miranda: Bananas is My Business, directed by Helena Solberg.

[13] In addition to cropping, Prince excised the text from Marlboro cigarette’s advertisements.

[14] Among Reagan’s most famous performances in the role of cowboy are the films Law and Order (1953), Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) and Tennessee’s Partner (1955). On Reagan, see Corkin (2004).

[15] From the Latin comprehendere, meaning to comprise or include, to take together, to unite; to seize or arrest.

[16] See also the first-hand account in Rose Van Hardeveld’s memoir, Make the Dirt Fly! (1956).

[17] 1896 marks the invasion of Honduras by US Marines as well as US troops intervening in Nicaragua. Nicaragua in particular would become a focal point of the Cold War, as the Reagan Administration strongly backed right-wing exile forces in fighting the new-leftist Sandinista government.

[18] Kruger’s work returned frequently in this era to the currency of ‘hands’ as motif for critique. For example, it featured taglines such as ‘We will undo you’, ‘I shop therefore I am’, ‘You invest in the divinity of the masterpiece’ and ‘You are seduced by the sex appeal of the inorganic’.

[19] For a discussion of Christopher Williams’ work regarding this issue, see Godfrey (2008).

[20] Dorothea Hantelmann (2010, 10) argues that ‘above and beyond the artwork … it is the format of the exhibition that is the key factor in art’s relevance to society’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather Diack

Heather A. Diack is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Miami. The author of Photography Collected Us, Diack has received fellowships and awards from the DAAD/Goethe Institute, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Whitney Museum of American Art.