This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s

Guerrilla Girls, The Advantages of Being A Woman Artist, 1988. Courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls © Guerrilla Girls.

Museum of Contemporary Art - Chicago
Curated by Helen Molesworth

By Jeriah Hildwine

Political art risks providing lazy answers to the search for meaning, an undergraduate’s surrogate for personal significance in one’s work. In other cases (Richard Serra’s Stop Bush lithograph from the 2006 Whitney Biennial), established artists put the muscle of their name behind a cause more important than art. Results vary: Remember how, after Serra made that piece, we impeached Bush? Neither do I. Art is often impotent in the face of important issues. Picasso’s Guernica may have spread awareness of the Spanish Civil War, but it didn’t end fascism.

Better is an artist finding inspiration in social issues, but ultimately making work that, like Guernica, stands on its own. ‘Current events art’ risks becoming dated as its subject fades from the headlines, but successful pieces become a primary source granting a unique perspective on the past, and through them, on the issues of our present. These artworks take on a triple meaning: as historic artifacts, as oblique critiques of the present, and as stand-alone aesthetic objects. Some of this kind of objects have survived the inevitable filtration that occurs with time, making their way into the canon, to be included in “This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Organized by Helen Molesworth, the Barbara Lee Chief Curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, “This Will Have Been” is divided into four sections, based on the major themes the curator found running through the works: Democracy; Desire and Longing; Gender Trouble; and The End Is Near. Some works are so perfectly emblematic of the theme that the effect is of a walk-through art history textbook-who would be surprised to see a Félix González-Torres (Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1987-1990) in Desire and Longing, or a Guerrilla Girls (The Advantages of Being A Woman Artist, 1988) in Gender Trouble?

More surprising but no less apt is Eric Fischl’s frail, vulnerable Self-Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man (Gender Trouble). It provides the male counterpoint to the feminist theme of empowerment, asking what men are left with when the traditional power myths are deconstructed. The same wind was blowing two years later when Jim Lutes painted his self-deprecating The Evening of My Dysfunction, featured in last year’s “Seeing Is A Kind Of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion,” also at the MCA.

This exhibition allows the events of several decades past to shed their light on the world today, inviting reflection on how current artists might be inspired to address the issues of the present day. In 30 years, will the MCA mount “Art, Love, and Politics in the 2010s?” There is certainly no lack of subject matter. But delicate subjects require careful handling if they’re to be anything but preachy and didactic. For artists tackling today’s hot topics like immigration, marriage equality and the enduring debates over abortion and gun rights, “This Will Have Been” exhibits crucial evidence of artists’ contributions to the struggles of an era as troubled as our own.

(February 11 - June 3, 2012)

Jeriah Hildwine is an artist, writer, and educator based in Chicago.  He is a regular contributor to Art Talk Chicago, Bad at Sports, and Chicago Art Magazine.