Gallery visit: Museum of American Art (3.7.24)
Nam June Paik's television works
Rows 1 and 2: Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska,Hawaii (1995, installation - 51-channel video installation (including closed-circuit television feed; colour, sound), custom electronics, neon lighting, steel, and wood)
Row 3: Zen for TV (1963/1976, manipulated television set)
Description for Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska,
Hawaii (1995): "Paik predicted, in 1965, that "someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk." Over the decades, his own work stayed in constant conversation with how new technologies reshape the world. Electronic Superhighway playfully engages three such forces: the US interstate highway system, cable television,
and the emergent internet of the 1990s.
In this TV map, neon-outlined states play a mix of borrowed and original footage. Each distinct channel reveals Paik's associations with or understanding of that state. Some video collages draw from personal connections, like Paik's recordings of longtime collaborator and cellist Charlotte Moorman filling the screens in her home state of Arkansas (along with images of then president Bill Clinton, also from Arkansas). Others incorporate existing media representations, with the movie musical Oklahoma! filling Oklahoma, and edits from a documentary on the 1950s Montgomery bus boycotts echoing from Alabama.
A closed-circuit camera marks Washington, DC, where gallery visitors can see themselves in real time. This suggests the map is also a portrait, reflecting how media and mediation shape views of ourselves and each other at national, regional, and individual levels."
Description for Zen for TV (1963/1976): "In a 1963 exhibition in Germany, Paik displayed a room full of electronically altered and arranged televisions, making him one of the first artists to use actual TVs and broadcast content to make art. One set arrived broken, compressing all received signals into a thin line of light. Paik embraced its broken state and titled it Zen for TV, playfully and profoundly linking its accidental minimalism to the meditative focus of Zen Buddhism, a religious reference he often used to signify an Asian perspective in Euro-American contexts. Zen for TV became one of Paik's signature works, and over the years he created select versions like this one."
Firelei Báez's Untitled (Premiere Carte Pour 'Introduction à L'Histoire du Monde) (2022, oil and acrylic paint on archival printed canvas)
Description: "What do you see in Firelei Báez's plumes of orange, red, and blue? Her painting might evoke the eye of a hurricane, an exploding supernova, or consuming flames.
Beneath the swirling streams of paint lies an image of the Atlas Historique, a map created in 1718 to document the recently conquered European colonies. Charting the farthest reaches of human knowledge at that time, the Atlas joined the earth, the solar system, and the constellations into one view.
Originally from the Dominican Republic, Báez thinks about the ways her own life has been shaped by the legacies of colonialism. She sees her art as a conversation with this earlier period, opening up space for questions and alternative histories. Here, she might be imagining the world represented by the Atlas ending in dramatic fires and floods. Or she could be continuing its traditions: her own imagery was inspired by the fantastical pictures of outer space transmitted by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2021 - today's equivalent of the eighteenth-century star map."
Thornton Dial Sr.'s The Beginning of Life in the Yellow Jungle (2003, plastic bottles, doll, clothing, bedding, wire, found metal, rubber glove, turtle shell, artificial flowers, Splash Zone compound, enamel, and spray paint on canvas mounted on wood)
Description: ""When I start making something, I gather up the
pieces I want to work with." Thornton Dial once explained. "Everything I pick up be something that done did somebody some good in their lifetime.. When you make things beautiful out of another person's ideas, it make the world more beautiful."
Dial mastered the art of speaking through objects-he gathered, combined, and painted them to create artworks that ask us to look closely and think carefully. Here, he invokes a jungle landscape, a place where survival can be hard. In Dial's 'jungle scape', wild and urban realms are indistinguishable: plastic cups and bottles are plants, rubber gloves and rags are vines. The entire scene is conjured from something found, repurposed, and reimagined.
Across nine decades in Alabama, Dial experienced racism and oppression firsthand, but he discovered that he could speak freely through artmaking. Dial's critiques of race relations were often somber, dark in color and mood. Yet here, warm hues shower the day in optimism; polarised divisions of black and white give way to a sunny palette of possibility."
Louise Nevelson's Sky Cathedral (1982, painted wood)
Description: "Can you identify any of the everyday objects in
the black field of Sky Cathedral?
Louise Nevelson was an avid collector of objects, and she assembled various found wooden scraps - table legs, bannisters, rolling pins, milk crates, mouldings, and other architectural fragments-to create her sculptures.
Although it's possible to see the shapes and outlines of these elements, they are absorbed into the large, uniformly painted black wall.
Nevelson aimed to create a spiritual experience out of everyday objects, transforming them from the material to the immaterial. Sky Cathedral evokes what Nevelson called "the heavenly spheres, the places between the land and the sea" that lie beyond our experience of ordinary things."
Alfred Jensen's Honor Pythagoras, Per I-Per VI (1964, oil paint on canvas)
Description: "Alfred Jensen strove to reveal the connections between art, science, and spirituality.
For him, the thousands of strokes of colour that he applied across these six conjoined canvases expressed the unity of all things. The coloured triangles represent prisms that break white light into brilliant hues, and the geometries and numbers underlie the basic order of the universe.
Jensen was inspired by mathematics, but also by visual forms from around the world, including calendars and counting systems from Arabic, Mayan, and Chinese cultures.
The painting - one of the artist's largest - contains complex symbols and ideas, yet it operates very simply on another level: undiluted colour, shape, and rhythm combine to create a harmony that appeals to the eye and the body as much as to the mind."
Kenneth Victor Young's Untitled (1973, acrylic paint on canvas)
Description: ""I've always been interested in … outer space,
inner space, and the development of what occurs - force, magnetism, and that kind of thing." - Kenneth Victor Young
In Untitled, Kenneth Victor Young cultivates an uncertain sense of space and scale. Black orbs float in a dark field, potentially representing either a microscopic or celestial view. The colorful halos
around the orbs were created by applying paint "wet into wet" and allowing it to freely blend and move.
Like Sam Gilliam, whose unstretched painting Swing hangs nearby, Young grew up in Kentucky and studied painting at the University of Louisville before moving to Washington, DC, in the 1960s.
Only after settling in DC, did either artist begin working in a fully abstract mode."
Simon Gouverneur's Mara (1989, egg tempera, acrylic paint and coloured pencil on canvas)
Description: "With its rings of colorful shapes and patterns,
abstracted eyes, hands, pyramids, and letters, Mara appears to be at once puzzle and code.
Simon Gouverneur constructed his compositions from a visual vocabulary of images and symbols derived from various religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Jewish mysticism, and ancient American traditions. Influenced in part by the painter Alfred Jensen-whose work is on view nearby-he sought to reveal a universal language that joined spiritual practices across cultures.
Gouverneur worked very slowly: he mixed his own pigments, rather than relying on commercially available paints, and applied his paint with many tiny, meditative strokes. His methodical process connected him to generations of artists but existed in tension with the expansive and mystical experiences he aimed to create."
Gretchen Bender's TV Text & Image (DREAM NATION) (1989, live television broadcast on a monitor with vinyl lettering)
Description: "How does today's news relate -or not-to your idea of a "dream nation"?
Unlike most screens in an art gallery, this monitor is not showing prerecorded, artist-made imagery. Instead, the artist intervenes in regular broadcast television by printing DREAM NATION on the surface of the screen. Gretchen Bender's work invites you to contrast your current take on these words with what is on TV at this very moment. When displayed in the nation's capital of Washington, DC, it can also feel site-specific, invoking this country's dreams and dreamers.
Bender was part of a generation of artists, including Barbara Kruger (whose work is on view nearby), who responded to the rising power of mass media. Using what she described as "guerrilla tactics . . . to make some kind of break or glitch in the media," Bender took on television to make the "underlying patterns of social control" visible."
Kapulani Landgraf's Puka mai (2002, handwoven silver gelatin collage)
Description: "Made from hand-cut and dry-mounted photographs, Puka mai calls for Kanaka 'Öiwi (Native Hawaiians) to hold on to their connection to their birthplace and thus their ancestors. The images that make up the collage reference important metaphors to the indigenous people of Hawaii.
At bottom, the long, pointed bills of marlin fish - traditionally used by Hawaiians as daggers - are woven together to suggest the aboveground roots of the hala tree, symbolically securing Hawaiians to their homeland. Above the bills runs a line of 'aumākua (family gods) sculptures topped by images of hö'i'o (young fern shoots).
The unfurling shoots represent future generations of Hawaiians."
Isaac Julien's Lessons of the Hour (2019, short film installation - 28 mins 44 secs)
Description: "Sir Isaac Julien's Lessons of the Hour immerses us in the towering legacy of abolitionist, writer, and philosopher Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). Julien, an innovator of moving-image installations, interweaves period reenactments across five screens to share a vivid picture of Douglass's world. Douglass gave thousands of antislavery lectures, several of which focused on photography's power in "reaching and swaying the heart by the eye."
Julien draws dialogue for Lessons of the Hour from three of Douglass's speeches. Additionally, the artist meticulously restages the studio of African American photographer J. P. Ball (1825-1904). There, Douglass, the most photographed American of the nineteenth century, sits for his portrait. Julien also filmed Douglass's historic home in Washington, D.C., with actors playing Douglass's first wife, activist Anna Murray Douglass (c. 1813-1882), and his second, Helen Pitts Douglass (1838-1903). Julien includes them and the abolitionist's wider circle to emphasise how collective action produces radical change.
Footage of contemporary Baltimore, the city where Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838, interrupts these reenactments. We witness fireworks erupting over Baltimore harbor and FBI aerial surveillance of protests over Freddie Gray Jr.'s 2015 death in police custody. During this sequence, Douglass, played by Royal Shakespearean actor Ray Fearon, recites his speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" Entangling past and present, Lessons of the Hour poses Douglass's prophetic question to us.
Lessons of the Hour represents the first joint acquisition between the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As Julien brings Douglass's work to bear on "this very hour," we hope this installation, displayed at the center of our nineteenth-century building, will inform your experience of both museums' historic collections. Through deep research, creative speculation, and a marriage of poetic image and sound, Julien foregrounds Douglass's enduring lessons on abolition, justice, and freedom."
