Title: Afterimages: Echoes of the 1960s
Dates: Through 2030
Location: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Introduction
Like an image lingering on the retina, the cultural currents of the 1960s continue to shape our consciousness. It was a decade of hope and disillusionment, marked by rapid social, political, and technological change. Everyday life was saturated with an ever-growing stream of new consumer products, advertising, and images of celebrity culture, alongside extensive coverage of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and antiwar demonstrations. By incorporating media imagery and new methods of commercial production into their work, Pop artists dissolved the boundary between “high” and “low” culture. During the same period, many artists adopted Conceptual and Minimalist strategies, using industrial materials and serial repetition to question social structures and established methods of artistic production.
© Richard HuangDrawing on the Fisher Collection and SFMOMA’s holdings, this thematic exhibition examines the far-reaching influence of artistic innovations that emerged during the 1960s. It begins by considering how artists engaged with celebrity culture, scrutinized the media’s portrayal of war and conflict, reflected on private and public forms of mourning, and challenged social structures. Subsequent galleries explore how other artists examined and manipulated basic artistic forms and materials to create work with social and political content. Through reduced and serial forms and unconventional materials, they challenged prevailing ideas about value, authorship, and identity. Together, these artists demonstrate the continuing resonance of the decade’s defining questions and ideas.
Celebrity, Self, and Culture
During the 1960s, media and advertising images circulated widely through popular culture, shaping how people understood themselves in relation to an image-saturated world. Borrowing strategies from the commercial sphere, Pop artists drew inspiration from Hollywood films, advertisements, news headlines, consumer products, and popular music to create enduring portraits of their time. Later artists appropriated and critiqued these models, reproducing the techniques of mass image production and distribution to reveal the role images play in constructing identity.
The works in this gallery recast familiar images of people and products, dismantling and reassembling their meanings. Andy Warhol used the photographic process of screenprinting to emphasize repetition and capture the cinematic quality of the silver screen.
© Richard HuangDolly Parton, Andy Warhol, 1985. This portrait depicts the American country singer Dolly Parton. Made using screenprinting, it employs several vivid colors—especially pink—to accentuate Parton’s features, her voluminous hair, distinctive clothing, and influence on music and popular culture. The painting belongs to Warhol’s “Celebrity” series, created in the late 1980s.
© Richard HuangTriple Elvis [Ferus Type], Andy Warhol, 1963. Warhol was fascinated early in his career by celebrity, fame, glamour, and Hollywood. He produced numerous images of movie stars on silver-painted canvases, including a 1963 group based on a publicity photograph of Elvis Presley from the 1960 western Flaming Star. The works show a close-up of Elvis posing as a cowboy, wittily recasting Hollywood’s popular ideal of masculinity. Warhol screenprinted the figures at varying intervals and densities, allowing them to overlap, separate, or merge. The result was what he called a “jumping effect,” which animated the figure and gave the composition a cinematic quality.
© Richard HuangBrigid Polk, Gerhard Richter, 1971. This is one of the many portraits Richter made of Brigid Berlin, also known as Brigid Polk, an American artist and frequent collaborator of Andy Warhol. She habitually carried a Polaroid camera and used its timer to capture moments from throughout her day. Richter based this painting on one of the many Polaroids taken during Berlin’s visit to Germany for a solo exhibition in 1970, preserving the original photograph’s slight blur and muted tones. He sought to capture both her vibrant personality and the immediacy and intimacy of the snapshot. As he explained in 1972, “I don’t want to imitate a photograph; I want to make one.”
By enlarging a tabloid page, Cady Noland highlights the speed with which the public consumes celebrities and their private lives.
© Richard HuangEnquirer Page with Eyes Cut Out, Cady Noland, 1990
Elizabeth Peyton and Jess use widely circulated photographs of pop stars to capture the aura of celebrity culture.
© Richard HuangLiam and Noel, Elizabeth Peyton, 1997
© Richard HuangFig. 4—Far and Few…: Translation #15, Jess, 1967. This painting belongs to Jess’s “Translation” series. Fascinated by popular culture, he collected magazine clippings, greeting cards, and objects such as the bubble-gum card used here. Although the original image was tiny, Jess enlarged and altered it to create this painting. He reproduced every detail of his source—a Beatles bubble-gum card—from the minute ripples in the water to John Lennon’s facsimile signature. Intriguingly, Jess refused to use color naturalistically. Here, the Beatles resemble fantastical creatures or otherworldly beings. In the upper-right corner, he refers to Edward Lear’s nineteenth-century nonsense poem “The Jumblies,” choosing his colors to echo its lines.
Through live reinterpretations of classic films and popular songs, Pierre Huyghe and Nam June Paik reimagined our relationship with cinema and television.
Short film: The Korean artist Nam June Paik is known as the “father of video art.” He studied music history in Germany, where he met the avant-garde composer John Cage and, through him, Marcel Duchamp—encounters that profoundly influenced his later work. Fascinated by technology, Paik published an essay titled “Expanded Education for the Paperless Society.” Long before the internet, he predicted that technology would enable people to communicate instantaneously. He pioneered the use of television and video in art, and television technology and the transmission of information became recurring themes in his work.
Marilyn Minter’s photorealistic oil paintings deftly expose both the pleasures and the dangers of glamour. Taken together, these works reimagine the conventions that shape our contemporary visual landscape.
Short film featuring an interview with Marilyn Minter
Media and Conflict
The Vietnam War became known as the “living-room war” because it was the first overseas conflict to be televised, bringing the battlefield into millions of homes each night. Media coverage therefore played an unprecedented role in shaping public perceptions of the war. During the 1960s, many artists who had lived through the Second World War and the Cold War began exploring the increasingly visible presence of military conflict and its effects on everyday life. Later artists have continued to examine how wartime images are produced and consumed, and how the consequences of these histories persist today.
This gallery brings together artists who employ traditional symbols of military power, mass-media representations of war, and the physical remnants of these histories. A comic-book image of an American G.I. under fire provided the inspiration for Roy Lichtenstein.
Short film about Roy Lichtenstein
Vija Celmins, meanwhile, based a painting on a found photograph of a Second World War bomber—an image laden with memories of her childhood.
© Richard HuangSuspended Plane, Vija Celmins, 1966. Celmins grew up in a German family. Displaced as refugees during the Second World War, they lived first in Latvia before eventually settling in the American Midwest. She painted this aircraft after completing graduate school in the mid-1960s. Although made many years after the events it evokes, the work clearly reflects memories that remained deeply personal and haunting.
Timothy Washington and Danh Vo transformed historically significant objects—Washington’s draft card and a chair from the Kennedy White House—to tell personal stories about the effects of war.
© Richard HuangLot 20. Two Kennedy Administration Cabinet Room Chairs, Danh Vo, 2013. In a practice centered on appropriation, dismantling, and reconstruction, Vo treats everyday objects as witnesses to stories of both personal and global significance. Drawing on the tradition of the readymade, he recontextualizes these objects in relation to his own history as a Vietnamese immigrant and to the transnational legacies of colonialism, capitalism, displacement, and migration.
In this work, Vo presents fragments of two chairs that furnished the White House Cabinet Room during the Kennedy administration. They had belonged to former US secretary of defense Robert McNamara and were acquired by Vo at an auction of McNamara’s estate. McNamara served under Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and played a decisive role in the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. Vo stripped away the chairs’ leather upholstery and padding, rendering them unusable and nearly unrecognizable. Deprived of any readily identifiable meaning, the remaining fragments raise questions about the subjectivity of historical truth and the erosion of collective memory.
Responding to a later conflict, Richard Hamilton extended his earlier exploration of Pop strategies by altering televised images of the Gulf War. He exaggerated the medium’s effects, widening the distance between viewers at home and the subjects being shown.
© Richard HuangWar Games, Richard Hamilton, 1992
Loss and Remembrance
News coverage during the 1960s was filled with images of the decade’s tragedies. From the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to the mounting casualties of the Vietnam War, these images inscribed a profound sense of loss upon the public imagination. In the decades since, artists have confronted the ways popular culture commemorates and mourns deaths both public and private, emphasizing the importance of whom we choose to remember and how. The works in this gallery revisit particular events as well as the forms and objects through which remembrance is expressed, showing how memorial practices shape history and our experiences of personal and collective grief.
Some works explore moments embedded deep within the American consciousness, such as Andy Warhol’s triptych of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, derived from media coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination.
© Richard HuangJacqueline Triptych, Andy Warhol, 1964. In the weeks after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Warhol began collecting news coverage of the event and its aftermath, focusing on images of the president’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy. Cropping tightly around her face, he produced a series of screenprints that turned successive moments of her emotional response into a historical narrative. In this triptych, we see her on the morning she arrived in Dallas at right; aboard Air Force One at left, as Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in only hours after the assassination; and veiled at the president’s funeral in the center.
Kerry James Marshall commemorates Black cultural figures through imagery that evokes the memorial keepsakes of the 1960s.
© Richard HuangSouvenir III, Kerry James Marshall, 1998. This painting belongs to a series honoring African American cultural and political figures who helped lay the foundations of the civil rights movement. Its gray palette, glittering ornament, and silver trim recall the ubiquitous commemorative objects—banners, photographs, and kitschy household goods—that memorialized John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. Inspired by Marshall’s memories of relatives’ and friends’ living rooms, the composition expands this domestic shrine to include the names of artists and writers such as Bob Thompson and Langston Hughes, the actress Dorothy Dandridge, and the religious leader Reverend Baker, all of whom died during the 1960s.
Other works confront the private grief created by global crises. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s sculpture commemorates some of his first friends to die of AIDS through a collective portrait made of light bulbs—bulbs that will eventually go dark.
© Richard Huang“Untitled” (America #1), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1992. Light bulbs, porcelain light sockets, and extension cords.
Tony Feher’s assemblages reflect on his HIV-positive diagnosis by transforming personal belongings and found objects into memorials.
Short film in which Tony Feher discusses his work
Similarly, works by Gerhard Richter and Lutz Bacher use symbolically charged objects to meditate on life’s brevity and transience.
© Richard HuangTwo Candles, Gerhard Richter, 1982
Ideology and Expression
The profound cultural and political changes of the 1960s renewed demands for broader representation, accountability, and legal and social reform. Many of these issues remain contested today. The works in this gallery engage with such questions by challenging social conventions and revealing the often-overlooked ways in which cultural ideologies and structures of power operate.
Some artists used familiar forms of public communication. In the late 1970s, for example, Jenny Holzer distributed posters bearing anti-authoritarian texts throughout New York City.
© Richard HuangTruisms, Jenny Holzer, 1983. Conceptual artist Jenny Holzer uses provocative, incisive language to spark discussion of social-justice issues including misogyny, corruption, and war. For decades, she has displayed her subversive messages through large-scale projections, LED signs, and other technologies commonly associated with commerce and advertising.
© Richard HuangSurvival Series: Men Don’t Protect You Anymore…, Jenny Holzer, 1989. Holzer has also printed her brief, unsettling phrases on T-shirts, posters, billboards, plaques, and benches. Perhaps her best-known body of work is the “Truisms” series, begun in 1977, which presents hundreds of statements such as “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “Romantic love was invented to manipulate women.”
Since the 1960s, Bruce Nauman has transformed wordplay and philosophical reflections into neon signs.
The original video was not included in the local archive and has not yet been migrated.
Life, Death/Knows, Doesn’t Know, Bruce Nauman, 1983 — video
More recently, Park McArthur has appropriated blank federal highway signs and cultural symbols to consider both what they communicate and how they do so.
Short film about Park McArthur
Other artists challenged modes of representation and histories of colonial violence, among them Jimmie Durham, with his totemic sculpture made from wood and cotton.
© Richard HuangWould and Cotton, Jimmie Durham, 1991
Adrian Piper, whose Minimalist structures confront viewers with images of atrocities from around the world.
Short film about Adrian Piper
Several works respond to the culture wars and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. That crisis claimed the life of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose band-like self-portrait juxtaposes personal memories with public events.
Short film about Felix Gonzalez-Torres
David Wojnarowicz’s raw, impassioned vision unsettled the symbols of American society.
© Richard HuangDeath of American Spirituality, David Wojnarowicz, 1987
The Power of Minimalism
During the 1960s, many artists began rejecting the idea of art as a vehicle for personal expression. Instead, they adopted approaches centered on form, concept, and unconventional materials. The resulting works included spare geometric shapes and modular or serial structures that emphasized immediate physical reality while exploring the visual, social, or political force such choices might carry. Artists including Frank Stella, Rakuko Naito, Anne Truitt, and Tadaaki Kuwayama created paintings and sculptures offering pure experiences of color and shape, free of expressive gesture or any visible trace of the maker.
© Richard HuangUntitled, Rakuko Naito, 1964. Naito’s work has long explored the visual effects produced by bringing forms and colors together. Her paintings of the 1960s use vivid complementary colors and rigorous geometry to create dynamic, often flickering compositions. By isolating the central circle within a field of stripes and rotating it 180 degrees to arrive at this arrangement, Naito demonstrates how a relatively simple intervention in a geometric pattern can generate visual movement and intensity.
Others sought to challenge traditional art forms and disrupt a contemporary art market that was becoming increasingly elitist and restrictive of creativity. They chose unusual materials or created works that could not be owned in conventional ways, as seen here in works by Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt.
© Richard HuangWall Drawing 1, Sol LeWitt, 1968. In 1968, LeWitt became convinced that the only way to create a strictly two-dimensional artwork was to draw directly on the wall. His first wall drawing, Wall Drawing 1, grew out of an earlier series that systematically explored every possible combination of horizontal, vertical, and two diagonal lines. Emphasizing the value of the idea over the finished object, LeWitt’s wall drawings are recreated each time they are exhibited and painted over when the exhibition ends.
Later artists such as Theaster Gates and Jac Leirner developed these strategies further, drawing fully on the cultural associations of their materials and on the implications of serial or assembled forms. Together, the works in this gallery demonstrate the capacity of art made by simple means to question tradition and established systems of value at their foundations.
© Richard HuangCivil Tapestry 3, Theaster Gates, 2010. Composed of vertically arranged lengths of reclaimed fire hose, this work adopts the linear, repetitive forms commonly associated with Minimalism. Yet Gates’s choice of material and title infuses it with forceful social commentary, directly invoking the fire hoses used by law enforcement against peaceful civil rights demonstrators during the 1960s. The dense repetition of hose lengths points to the persistence of racial and social injustice and police violence.
The Force of Gravity
By the late 1960s, some artists were pushing back against the rigid, carefully predetermined forms favored by their Minimalist peers. Although they continued to use industrial materials, Post-Minimalists such as Robert Morris, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse gave priority to process and to the inherent properties of their chosen media.
Morris’s piled lengths of felt cascade downward in a chance arrangement, revealing the effect of gravity on a pliant material.
© Richard HuangUntitled, Robert Morris, 1967. In a 1968 issue of Artforum, Morris published an essay titled “Anti Form,” proposing an approach to art that valued process and materials over a fixed formal outcome. He regarded this sculpture as an example of the conceptual shift he described and reproduced it as an illustration. The work is made from industrial-grade felt, ordinarily used for insulation or shock absorption in commercial settings. It is intended to be arranged at random, with chance playing a central role in its composition. The cascading felt strips come into direct contact with the wall and floor, reflecting Morris’s interest in sculpture for which “considerations of gravity become as important as those of space.”
Similarly, Serra’s Ground Prop heightens our awareness of the surrounding space and of physical forces by activating both the gallery floor and the wall.
© Richard HuangGround Prop, Richard Serra, 1969
© Richard HuangUntitled or Not Yet, Eva Hesse, 1966. Hesse’s sculptures often mimic Minimalist forms, yet their imperfect sequences and structures contradict geometric logic. They unmistakably evoke living organisms and suggest life’s inherent unpredictability. Here, nine netted pouches create a matrix of lines that stretches around their mysterious contents. The work shifts between heaviness and lightness: the glinting sheets of plastic seem as though they should be lighter than the taut cords stretched by gravity into a linear matrix. The swollen forms feel undeniably visceral and sensuous, though the work’s bodily effect is tempered by the objective, industrial character of its materials.
Such considerations of weight, balance, gravity, and space have inspired many more recent investigations of physical laws. Ranjani Shettar and Gabriel Kuri both refer formally to their Post-Minimalist predecessors, but their materials carry personal associations. The dynamic tension shared by these works can be felt as their suspended, leaning, and sagging forms enter the viewer’s space and reveal the essential nature of their materials.
© Richard HuangSelf-Portrait as a Fixed Concave/Convex Suspension, Gabriel Kuri, 2014. This is one of Kuri’s “flexible metal sculptures,” made by folding or bonding insulating material in different configurations. Emphasizing the pliability of the metallic medium, its natural curve echoes the spiral of a conch shell, while the doorstop at the top recalls the material’s industrial uses. Kuri is concerned not only with formal questions of weight and balance but also with social, economic, and political structures. By calling the sculpture a self-portrait, he relates the equilibrium of its disparate elements to the balancing of selfhood and identity.
Organic Minimalism
The artists in this gallery employ devices associated with Minimalism—the repetition of serial forms and the formal structure of the grid—but subvert its sleek industrial surfaces through materials marked by use or tied to particular contexts and experiences. The resulting works offer an organic counterpoint to the machined finishes most closely associated with Minimalist art.
Maren Hassinger and Richard Long use found materials that retain a connection to the objects or environments from which they came.
© Richard HuangCornish Slate Circle, Richard Long, 1987
Short film about Richard Long
Other artists rely on labor-intensive methods, whether through prolonged engagement with a medium, as in the work of Sopheap Pich, or through the reproduction of particular objects, as in works by Richard Serra and Zarina. These pieces embrace the natural materials and environmental concerns of Land art, as in Michelle Stuart’s composition, as well as the experiential emphasis of installation art, demonstrating the permeability of art-historical categories. Though Minimalist in form, they offer new perspectives on site specificity, labor, value, and memory.
© Richard HuangLuminous Waterfall No. 2, Sopheap Pich, 2013. This work by the Cambodian artist consists of a netlike structure supported by a rectangular frame and made from finely woven rice paper and plastic cord. The mesh forms a succession of hanging shapes, like a waterfall descending from above. They appear at once animate and like an abstract image from nature. Pich’s work often concerns the relationship between the body and the environment; here, he explores the flow and materiality of water. Reflected light and cast shadows lend the piece a subtle luminosity and a quiet, affecting beauty.
© Richard HuangTasbih, Zarina. The Indian-born artist Zarina made prints and sculptures from natural materials such as wood, paper, and cloth, in a practice shaped by her experience of exile from India. The work’s form and title derive from prayer beads traditionally used to count the names of Allah during Muslim meditation. Here, the beads are greatly enlarged, stained, and gilded with twenty-two-karat gold leaf. The leaf bears traces of its application, evoking fingers rubbing across each bead in prayer, while the tension between darkness and light expresses a contrast between conceptions of humanity and God.
Short film: Twenty-Five of the Most Important Minimalist Artists
Reflections
The exhibition offers a systematic overview of the defining characteristics of art in the 1960s:
- Rejecting tradition and pursuing emerging art forms: Artists turned away from traditional forms such as painting and sculpture and pursued newer modes including Conceptual art, performance, and installation.
- Emphasizing ideas and intellectual content: Rather than focusing solely on aesthetic value, artists placed greater emphasis on concepts and ideas, using their work to articulate their own ways of thinking.
- Engaging with social realities and political issues: The 1960s were marked by social upheaval and political movements, and artists increasingly sought to address these realities through their work. American Pop artists, for example, deliberately drew on elements of mass culture to reflect the consumerism of their society.
- Encouraging multicultural exchange and synthesis: Artists began paying closer attention to exchange and interaction among cultures, attempting to incorporate diverse cultural elements into their work.
- Exploring new artistic media: Artists began experimenting with film, video, television, and other new media, which opened up new means of expression and methods of creation.
I was also left with another impression: that the art world has been deeply permeated by radical ideologies, governed by political correctness, and made increasingly bizarre. Is there such a thing as a natural art, pure and beyond ideology? In viewing these works, we should recognize—with a historical eye—their contributions to art history and social development, while also approaching the works themselves in a critical spirit.
© Richard Huang