Photo Play

To his credit, Eklund adventurously includes little-known works in various mediums by artists in the movement, such as the late ’70s films of Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum and Mika-TV (Carole Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen). Early performances by Eric Bogosian are represented by videos, and a wide range of early photos by Welling, James Casebere and Brauntuch are included as well. 

After 1977, the downtown New York art world occupied three territories: the East Village, Tribeca and SoHo. The East Village was favored by slightly younger artists like Kiki Smith, Tom Otterness, Diego Cortez and Charlie Ahearn, who formed Colab (for Collaborative Projects) in 1978. This group was partly responsible for the New Cinema, a storefront on St. Marks Place, where artists such as James Nares, Jim Jarmusch, Becky Johnston and Vincent Gallo screened their Super-8 films. Colab was responsible for mounting the 1980 Times Square Show. In this one-month event, 100 artists, including a number of emerging graffiti artists, showed their works in a former massage parlor scheduled for demolition.

By chance, I was afforded a ringside seat on this burgeoning scene when I went to work as a cook for Mickey Ruskin, founder of Max’s Kansas City in the 1960s, the favorite watering hole of both the denizens of Warhol’s Factory and the generation of Minimalists and older artists that included John Chamberlain, Carl Andre, Richard Serra and Brice Marden. They and the new artists were the steady clientele at the Locale in Greenwich Village, the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club on Chambers Street and the storied restaurant on Washington Square known simply by its address, One University Place. All of these places hosted wildly eclectic art shows by their patrons and presented artist-bands like Talking Heads, Alan Suicide and the Patti Smith Group. When the Mudd Club opened, in 1978, in a Tribeca building owned by Bleckner, everyone who didn’t already know everyone else met there.

“For me those friendships were empowering,” says Barbara Kruger, who skipped graduate school to work as an art director at Condé Nast, matching pictures to words. The Met show features a number of early Kruger pieces with cutting texts, such as I Can’t Look at You and Breathe at the Same Time (1981-84). “I didn’t have a group I came out of school with,” she explains, “I met Cindy before I saw her work. I met David Salle before his first show. We got to know what each other was doing, and there was this perfect storm of people who grew up with images from movies and TV, and didn’t think of painting as the only thing that could be called art. And many of us were women.”

This was indeed a pivotal moment for art. “Pictures Generation” features women who entered the art world at levels equal in importance to their male counterparts for the first time. Often, they surpassed men in terms of invention and impact. Most of the women—Kruger, Levine, Lawler, Sherman, Charlesworth, Bloom and Laurie Simmons—worked with photographic imagery, partly because photography was still regarded as a bastard child of art. This was a field they could have pretty much to themselves, while gaining the support, rather than the envy, of the bad-boy painters around them.

“I turned to photography because I thought it was the dominant language of our culture,” says Charlesworth, who is represented in the show by photographs from her first two series of newspaper appropriation works, “Modern History” (1978) and “Stills” (1977). “I remember seeing Richard Prince’s first show at Anina Nosei and thinking, ‘Oh! This guy is interested in the same stuff I am,’” Charlesworth recalls. “Photography suited the things we wanted to address.”

Prince, the token male in the New York group, was taking a critical approach to appropriated photographs, most famously of the romantic Marlboro Man cowboy. But no man in the 1970s could have made Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-80). Nearly a dozen works from the series are in the Met show. Here, Sherman presents female movie stereotypes with a caustic humor that mocks the way men fantasized about women, while giving women who internalize those stereotypes a sharp poke in the ribs.

Bloom remembers seeing Levine’s appropriated Walker Evans photos and thinking, “Oh my God, that is so radical and so insane. It was also brilliant. Sherrie didn’t address any of the esthetic issues, just narrowed it down to the most essential idea about what constitutes ownership of an image, and that was it.”

Joel Wachs, now president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, was a city councilman in Los Angeles in the ’80s and an avid collector of art. In 1984, he saw Levine’s “After Walker Evans” appropriations from 1981 and became the first person to buy one. “I remember having a hard time accepting it at first,” he says. “What was this art, copying someone else’s pictures? Then it started to open me up to a much broader way of thinking about art. The art itself had all the formal qualities I liked and also made people think about male dominance in the art world. Sherrie’s work was $300 and Cindy’s was $800, but some male painters were getting $75,000. When Kruger said, ‘Your body is a battleground,’ that was a clarion call for a political movement.”

Kruger says, “Our stake was different from the men’s. We were all engaged in a systemic critique of the images around us, where the guys were engaged in a substitutional critique. Their careers are filled with envy. Our commentaries were about the way our bodies were contained through culture, through pictures and language.” Charlesworth adds, “I got interested not just in how women are positioned through visual language,” she says, “but how as a culture we order and organize our relationships to world events.”

These conversations became a cultural force in the decade Eklund covers in his show. The Pictures artists eventually became individual brands that, Eklund says, turned friends into rivals who competed in the marketplace, institutionalizing artists who had, up to 1980, expressed only distaste for institutions. “It’s no accident they became known as the Pictures generation, rather than the Blank generation or the Me generation,” says Eklund. Yet, adds Lawler, who never even used to sign her work, “You made objects to stimulate a dialogue, and if you’re not part of the dialogue, you’re not happening.”

Eklund’s show is not the first to take on this group. In 1989 both the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles mounted exhibitions featuring many of the same people, but the Metropolitan Museum gives the movement a certain institutional prestige. Eklund may insist that the artists’ immersion in common images started in school, but it was their personal associations that turned like-minded individuals into a generation whose pictures once made meaning and now make history.