The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984

Contents : /
Image art after Conceptualism : CalArts, Hallwalls, and Artists Space -- The jump : appropriation and its discontents -- "His gesture moved us to tears" : Pictures art in a reinvigorated market.
Catalogue is published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from April 21 to August 2, 2009.
Book Description : /
"This volume is the first full account of the Pictures Generation, perhaps the most significant group of artists to emerge during the last forty years. They came of age in post-World War II America, when the media culture of movies, television, popular music, and magazines was creating a sea of pictures that seduce us into consumerism and shape our ideas about gender, race, sexuality, and citizenship, molding our very identities. As young artists, they experienced the crisis of authority that permeated post-Watergate and post-Vietnam America. Their doubt and skepticism chimed with the self-questioning principles of the Minimal and Conceptual art in which they were educated and which they applied to their investigation into how pictures achieve their power over us. They also acknowledged the legacy of Pop art—grounded in popular imagery and ironic in spirit—which by the mid-1970s was in critical disrepute. By synthesizing these three heroic movements of the 1960s, they addressed the world in which we exist today, with its fatal attraction to images and illusion.
Many of these artists eventually practiced appropriation, pilfering the images of others in order to comment on authorship and art itself, a strategy that has become widespread, controversial, and intellectually fruitful. Richard Prince rephotographed luxury advertisements, commenting on materialism and sexuality; Sherrie Levine rephotographed famous art photographs to challenge ideas about originality; Cindy Sherman ventured into the image-repositories of B-movies and magazine centerfolds to explore ideas about gender; and Barbara Kruger took the act of appropriating as a theme in itself. Using a wide variety of media—including film, video, graphics, performance, collage, painting, photography, and sculpture—and myriad intellectual strategies, all the artists focus on the ways in which images influence how we perceive the world and ourselves. They were dubbed the Pictures Generation by the press after a 1977 exhibition at Artists Space, in New York.
Camaraderie and collaboration helped the Pictures artists rise to prominence about 1980, despite the lack of avenues open to them. Their meteoric rise ushered in the go-go art world of the 1980s and led to their eventual drifting apart. This exhibition and catalogue trace the relationships and influences between the better-
known artists associated with the phenomenon—such as Prince, Sherman, Jack Goldstein, and Robert Longo—and colleagues of theirs less well known today but ripe for critical reassessment, including Nancy Dwyer, Paul McMahon, and Michael Zwack. The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984 gives new prominence to the early works of David Salle and James Welling, who are not traditionally associated with the movement. Tying together the greatest achievements of some thirty artists, this exhibition and catalogue revisit and revise what we think we know about one of the most controversial and influential of all contemporary art movements."