THE PICTURES GENERATION, 1974-1984

JAMES WELLING, MIDDLE VIDEO, 1973, PART 1

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
April 21 - August 2, 2009

This is the first major museum exhibition to focus exclusively on “The Pictures Generation,” a tightly knit group of New York artists working in photography, film, video and performance who created some of the most important and influential works of the late-twentieth century. Born into the media culture of postwar America, their overarching subject was how pictures of all kinds not only depict, but also shape, reality. What these fledgling artists did have fully to themselves was the sea of images into which they were born—the media culture of movies and television, popular music, and magazines. Their relationship to such material was productively schizophrenic: while they were first and foremost consumers, they also learned to adopt a cool, critical attitude toward the very same mechanisms of seduction and desire that played upon them. These artists purposely departed from the prevailing trends of Minimalism or Conceptualism, using recognizable images that reflected postwar consumer culture and opened photography to contemporary art. These artists including Jack Golstein, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Louise Lawler, Matt Mullican, Allan McCollum, James Welling and Laurie Simmons — became known as the Pictures Generation. And now, three decades later, they are figures of inspiration to many younger artists.