Whatever happened to the American dream? This group exhibition at White Cube wonders at that very question, taking the current political, social and economic unrest in the US as its starting point.
This exhibition is a lively collection of works from a group of impressive and challenging artists, which together tell a powerful story of the social ills affecting the US from the Nixon years to the turn of the century.
The title of this exhibition, borrowing from the evocative slogan painted across Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Peruvian Maid (1985), conjures a society running on empty. Its artists – loosely linked by a network of personal and professional relationships, as between Cady Noland and Steven Parrino, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Christopher Wool – chronicle a dramatic ideological shift. If the prevailing atmosphere is of disillusion, then it is not without hope: with the end of a dream comes a renewed engagement with reality.
In deconstructing the national self-image, these artists brought a combination of physical violence and intellectual wit to bear on the symbols of America − the Stars and Stripes, the cowboy, the dollar bill − that Pop had seemed to celebrate. They adopted humour, appropriation and inauthenticity as strategies by which to challenge the ideologies inscribed within these signs, opening up the space between the authorised narratives of the United States and the darker histories they concealed.
From the Vapor of Gasoline. 20 September 2017 – 21 October 2017. White Cube Mason's Yard.
