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American Visions by Tim Montie

Before I saw the American Visions videos there were a few things I had yet to learn. I knew the basics of “The Empire of Signs”. How there was, and continues to be a sense of American superiority. I also knew a good amount about the “Age of Anxiety”. About confusion, indecision, how it was an age when people were looking for truth, leadership, freedom, and rights.

I never saw from an artist’s point of view on the idea of an empire of signs or the age of anxiety. When I went to museums and saw works by Pollock, or Mark Rothko I would laugh at the primitiveness and how “It looks like a five year old did this.” I failed to see how seemingly random splatters of paint, or a canvas divided into one side black and the other white could be seen as art at all. What I was missing was the idea behind these simple, but profound paintings and the fact that there is more to a piece of art than what you can see.

With the world changing rapidly there was need for change. New styles of art were being introduced. The New York School comprised of some of the best known abstract impressionists were on the forefront in new styles of expression in art. Human were blind to the world they lived in and artist knew it. The question was how to get people to realize what’s going on around them. The answer was pop art.

Robert Rauschenberg was a master of engaging the human mind. He used collages of modern objects and signs to force the mind into a swirling storm of thought and questioning. Simple images, repeated, distorted, or misplaced as Andy Warhol arranged them made people wonder, and even see a little truth even though they may deny it. It was the brutally honest truth.

Until Romare Bearden art excluded African Americans as a part of society. Not that there wasn’t African influence on art but African Americans were never seen as a centerpiece in artwork. Bearden took experiences and images from his own life in Harlem and put them in tile montages for the world to finally see. African culture was placed on the map of art.

The age of anxiety was a time of chaos, confusion, disgust and freedom in the art world. Artists started experimenting with subjects never addressed before. Donald Judd took his art and ran with it in the opposite direction of nature. He used hard edges, corners, and metal to explore simple shapes which told nothing of the world around them. He created pieces such as empty houses with chrome boxes all the same size, in perfect rows, not reflecting nature at all. Bruce Nauman did something with art that had never been touched before. Instead of creating something appealing and pleasant he went the complete opposite direction. His art made you cringe. It was disgusting, disturbing and annoying visually, mentally, and even audibly. Nauman’s piece “Carousel” is disturbing in every aspect. Metal animal carcasses hang from a carousel, one of which drags on the floor producing a screeching scraping from the contact of the metal sculpture and the cement floor.

Though it seems as though all these artists’ works compared to each other are random there is an order. All the artists are exploring the opposite of what was art was thought to be. Instead of embracing nature they rejected it and showed it very bluntly in their art.

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