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"As Others See Us"?: Fetishizing the Foreign at the Whitney
- American Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 56, Number 4, December 2004
- pp. 1051-1066
- 10.1353/aq.2004.0053
- Review
- Additional Information
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American Quarterly 56.4 (2004) 1051-1066
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"As Others See Us?
" Fetishizing the Foreign at the Whitney
Jane C. Desmond
The title of this exhibition, The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003, begs for quotation marks around each of its key words: "American," "Effect," "Global," and "United States." For American studies scholars, issues of who and what is "American," under what circumstances, and with what historical, political, and cultural effects on whom and why, are central to the current debates in the field. So is querying the relationship between the more neutral, state-linked term "United States" and the more evocative, often mythologized, at times imperial, notion of "America." Thus, in its very premise, this exhibit raises interesting and troubling questions, and in the end it is these questions, not the answers posed by the exhibit itself, that are the most intriguing results of this show.
Curated by Lawrence Rinder, The American Effect featured the recent work of forty-seven artists and artist collectives from more than thirty countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and North and South America. Accompanying the show is an exhibition catalog, which features eight essays by Rinder and distinguished scholars and writers, such as Edward Said and Nawal El Saadawi, each exploring broad themes such as "Freedom," "Abundance," and "Hegemony," and written without reference to the specific works in the exhibition.1
The response of these artists to the United States takes a variety of forms—sculpture, installations, videos, Internet art, paintings, drawing, and photography—and the exhibit filled one floor of the museum. The works range in [End Page 1051] scale from the intimacy of Mughal-style miniatures, titled Friendship After 11 September, by Saira Wasim, which portrays President George W. Bush and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan in an embrace of U.S. paternalism, to the larger-than-life sculptures of tumbling horses and Native American riders in The Battle of Little Big Horn by Senegalese-born and Paris-residing artist Ousmane Sow. Many of the works use, quote, or reassemble elements from mass media, including the newspaper wall installations by South African artist Siemon Allen (now residing in Washington, D.C.), which reveal the sparse attention his native country receives in the U.S. media. Along similar lines, Cuban artist José Angel Toirac, in collaboration with Meira Marrero Díaz and Patricia Clark, contrast Cuban and U.S. television coverage of the Elían Gonzalez incident in their three-channel video installation.
Some of these artists exploit historical forms, events, or images for contemporary commentary. Artist Alfredo Esquillol Jr., from the Philippines, depicts President William McKinley and a red-white-and-blue-dressed Filipino child to evoke the lingering legacy of the U.S.-Philippine War of a hundred years ago. In a particularly powerful work, Japanese artist Makoto Aida adapts photography to the fifteenth-century style of Japanese folding screen painting. Substituting cheap paint for the traditional gold-leaf decoration, he depicts a squadron of World War II Japanese fighter planes flying figure eights over a contemporary Manhattan engulfed in flames. Powerfully evoking images of Al Qaeda and Hiroshima, this work provokes feelings ranging from horror to disgust to anger and fear, as Aida links the past and present.
As an exhibition, The American Effect is a major departure for the Whitney, which describes itself as the world's "leading advocate of 20th and 21st-century American Art."2 For the first time ever, a Whitney show features work done primarily outside of the United States by "non-Americans."3 While this move to go beyond the national definition of the Whitney as an institution could be promising, as the organizing framework for the...