In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new generation of artists arrived on the New York scene. Artists such as Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Robert Longo, and Cindy Sherman rose to prominence heavily influenced by the dry irony of Pop Art, the dematerialization of Conceptual art, and an American visual landscape dominated by an oversaturation of television, advertising, and media imagery. This was also one of the first generations of artists that were schooled at American colleges, and were heavily influenced by West Coast conceptualism of John Baldessari, and an art history learned not from physical works of art, but an almost limitless amount of projected slides. The entirety of art history was available to these artists with the flip of a switch, rather than the global travel required of previous generations, creating a generation with unprecedented visual memory banks. As a strategy echoing this cloud of visual memory, these young artists used a technique called appropriation, borrowing imagery directly from pre-existing sources. The chief medium for their unique approach was photography, traditionally shunned by the art market as a lesser art form than painting or sculpture due to its ready reproducibility. As such, their work was seen to exist outside of market concerns, critiquing the consumerist culture inherent in contemporary society. In terms of subject matter, however, nothing was off-limits for their Conceptual ends. Sherrie Levine, for example, photographed works by modernist masters such as Walker Evans to call attention to the role (or lack thereof) that women artists had in the traditional art historical narrative. Richard Prince drew his subjects from advertising images in magazines and newspapers, creating typologies of advertising tropes that revealed the undercurrents of consumption and desire in American society. And Cindy Sherman explored the extent to which one’s own identity is constructed externally by societal structures. By using her own body as the primary subject in her photographs, Sherman’s chameleon-like practice blurred the lines between performance art and photography, while creating iconic and stirring images whose inherent narrative was instantly recognizable even if the specifics of the story were not readily identifiable.
This group of artists, represented by the Metro Pictures Gallery in SoHo, was perhaps the first truly postmodern generation to emerge onto the art world. Owing a debt to the so called “flatbed picture plane” of Robert Rauschenberg, these artists blended high and low imagery with remarkable fluidity. The flickering television screens on which a generation of Americans was raised normalized the schizophrenia of this media overload, creating a landscape in which traditional painting seemed to be anachronistic. Just as Rauschenberg could place a Venus from the Louvre next to John F. Kennedy or an American moon landing, the Pictures Generation was able to show the Marlborough Man or still from a Hollywood movie in a gallery setting, thus raising the lower, commercial arts of marketing to a higher plane. Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Douglas Eklund, who organized the first major retrospective of these influential artists, summed up the prevailing sentiments of the generation brilliantly: “What these fledgling artists did have fully to themselves was the sea of images into which they were born—the media culture of movies, television, popular music, and magazines that to them constituted a sort of fifth element or a prevailing kind of weather. Their relationship to such material was positively same mechanisms of seduction and desire that played upon them from the highly influential writings of French philosophers and cultural critics such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva” (D. Eklund, "The Pictures Generation" in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000).
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