Shows of Force
Power, Politics, and Ideology in Art Exhibitions
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
It has long been considered a mark of naïveté to ask of a work of art: What does it say? But as Timothy W. Luke demonstrates in Shows of Force, artwork is capable of saying plenty, and much of the message resides in the way it is exhibited. By critically examining the exhibition of art in contemporary American museums, Luke identifies how art showings are elaborate works of theater that reveal underlying political, social, and economic agendas.
The first section, “Envisioning a Past, Imagining the West,” looks at art exhibitions devoted to artworks about or from the American West. Luke shows how these exhibitions—displaying nineteenth- and early-twentieth century works by artists such as George Caleb Bingham, Frederic Remington, Frederic Edwin Church, and Georgia O’Keefe—express contemporary political agendas in the way the portray “the past” and shape new visions of “the West.”
In “Developing the Present, Defining a World,” Luke considers artists from the post-1945 era, including Ilya Kabokov, Hans Haacke, Sue Coe, Roger Brown, and Robert Longo. Recent art exhibits, his analysis reveals, attempt to develop politically charged conceptions of the present, which in turn struggle to define the changing contemporary world and art’s various roles within it.
Luke brings to light the contradictions encoded in the exhibition of art and, in doing so, illuminates the political realities and cultural ideologies of the present. Shows of Force offers a timely and surely controversial contribution to current discussions of the politics of exhibiting art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Luke ( Screens of Power ) analyzes the social and political contexts of paintings in 16 exhibitions around the U.S. In the first section he discusses why corporate sponsors support exhibitions of painters of the American West, including George Caleb Bingham, Frederic Remington and Georgia O'Keeffe (whose utopian images, the author claims, boosted the profits of Southwestern Bell). He then assumes a broader focus, beginning with a Washington, D.C., show of the art of Japan's Daimyo culture. Exploring Japan's role as the new world power, he portrays the U.S. as a ``colonized third world country,'' in sharp contrast to the proud cultural dominance depicted in the first section. Other essays include a comparative criticism of the cultures of the U.S. and U.S.S.R.; a critique of a U.S. exhibition of Hispanic art; and a discussion of Sue Coe's radical art. Luke's main contention is that an artist's work is co-opted by society in order to reinforce cultural icons and ideals (e.g., Remington's WASP warriors conquering the West). Unfortunately, mere repetition does not endow a truism with depth and dimension.
