The Guggenheim’s Off the Record Exhibition Lacks Cohesion and Purpose

There is much good work in the show, but it needed a ruthless dose of focus.

O ff the Record is the new exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York. It doesn’t dare contend that fake news rules the airwaves and printing presses. That would confirm a central part of Trumpism. Surely the chatterati would cry “verboten,” as they’re trained to look the other way, as Labs know to catch the Frisbee and bring it back, no thinking asked. Rather, the show, at its best, is a subtle, unintended tip of the hat to said fake news. The show rejects the very concept of objectivity and neutrality in the documents we consider the essence of truth, and among these are newspapers and TV news, as well as officialdom’s records. The people we trust, it says, are cooking the narrative.

It is a collection of about 30 objects by 13 artists and beautifully arranged in airy, generous galleries by the Thannhauser collection of French Post-Impressionists. Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Adrian Piper, and Sarah Charlesworth are some of the artists. It isn’t the worst show I’ve seen by any means. It’s banal, but it’s keeping big and copious company these days. I enjoyed it inasmuch as I like many of the “something to think about” shows I’m seeing. These exhibitions make good but not original points. They skate over considerable territory, a flip here, a lutz there, but never a triple salchow — that’s too daring, too hard.

So, new media and even official government documents, we’re told, are thought to “represent an absolute truth and have been constructed from a place of detachment and no bias.” This is wrong.

It’s a fine enough show, done by a new curator who has a Ph.D. in English, African-American Studies, and Women’s Studies. That’s part of the problem. Off the Record focuses on artists of color and women artists and spans about 50 years starting from the early 1970s. “People of color have been obscured, erased, or violated at the site of official history,” the introduction reads. Objectivity becomes objectification. All well and good, but I’m wondering why the Guggenheim has a new curator with a specialty in fields that don’t involve art.

Sarah Charlesworth’s Herald Tribune, November 1977 is a great introduction to Off the Record. Charlesworth (1947–2013) collected the front pages of the newspaper over the course of the month, deleted the printed words, and left the front-page photography to emphasize the prominence, at the exclusion of almost everything else, of war but also of men. The news, in effect, is men’s sports by another name.

Charlesworth is a very good artist. She’s part of the Pictures Generation. That’s the loose late 1970s and early 1980s collection of artists such as Barbara Kruger, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman who reworked commonly seen images into tropes that express exploitation, disillusionment, and dynamics between men and women.

It’s a clever idea, and visually the assemblage rattles. Charlesworth’s spread of sheets are wordless except for the “Herald Tribune” masthead and include the date of the paper, the issue number, and a list of the latest currency values vis-à-vis the dollar. Below it are nothing but that day’s photographs.

Hers is a good idea but, like the exhibition, doesn’t face inquiry well. I have a mind like a steel trap and remember November 1977 distinctly. That the pictures show “a dominance of war and politics” isn’t like the discovery of electricity. War has plagued humanity since the start of time. That almost all of the photographs depict men isn’t a revelation, either, now or then. In the 1970s, politics, diplomacy, and business were the province of men. This isn’t an original point. It never was.

It’s a walk down memory lane but says nothing to me about the erasure or objectification of anyone. That month had one big anchor event — Sadat’s visit to Israel and his speech before the Knesset — and pregnant events such as the Shah of Iran’s visit that month to Washington for a state visit, before all hell broke loose. The Red Brigades were busy in Italy, and the IRA was busy in Belfast.

What, in Charlesworth’s view, or the curator’s view, is missing? Conceivably, the election of Harvey Milk as the first openly gay man elected to public office in America or Ernest Morial’s election as the first African-American mayor of New Orleans. Those happened in November 1977. And herein lies a flub. The Herald Tribune then, and now, is an international paper. It appeals to Americans living abroad and foreigners who want to know the headline news Americans are seeing. It’s by nature an outlier. Charlesworth might have made her point more effectively by using papers in Boston, Detroit, or Los Angeles. These never had international pretensions. They reflect the authentic American element.

My take in looking at these photographs is plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. We don’t need reminding these days, but Jimmy Carter’s very image tells us the damage incompetent leaders can do. Whose reputations stand the test of time? Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, much reviled and much applauded in their day, look good and heroic. They were people of substance who took enormous risks that are still positively transformative. Carter, a tiny, cringeworthy, naïve man, made a big mess.

Sadie Barnette, a very good artist, takes pages from the 500-page FBI file on her father, the Black Panther Rodney Barnette, annotates them in pink, and frames them as an installation piece. In 2017, Rodney made a FOIA request for his file, so the subject is timely even though the spying and snitching occurred years ago.

I’ve seen Barnette’s work before. Reading the salacious but meaningless bits gathered by a snoop on the taxpayer’s dime is upsetting, as it should be. That law enforcement harasses people isn’t new. We’ve known for years that the FBI is deeply political and today is weaponized. Today, we live at the beginning of what will be a menacing surveillance culture. As aesthetic objects, though, where art begins, they’re unremarkable. The passages of pink are nice. Is this art? Not really. Surveillance of this kind is awful, but these documents are rightly fodder for a biography or a news story. They are artifacts, and Barnette’s spray-paint intervention doesn’t make them art.

Sable Elyse Smith’s Coloring Book 18 from 2018 considers “the less examined record that is the child’s coloring book, particularly one that takes as its subject details concerning the judicial system.” Why is this in the show? A children’s coloring book isn’t official or media documentation. Mine, granted from another age, concerned pastoral landscapes, farm animals, rainbows, stories from the Bible, and dinosaurs. Do children’s coloring books depicting judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and criminal suspects exist? If so, our society is sicker than I think.

I like Hank Willis Thomas’s work a lot, but Something to Believe In doesn’t belong in the show, either. Yes, he makes a good point about how misleading and manipulative these images of African-American celebrities are. He takes advertisements aimed at middle-class African Americans and strips away the corporate logos and words, leaving smarmy photos of celebrities such as Billy Dee Williams exposing “the cynicism and simplification of black culture in the corporate eye.” This object is based on advertising. No sensate person expects advertising to be objective or authoritative. By its very nature, it’s manipulative. It’s not an official government document like an FBI file. It’s not a story in the newspaper.

Why is it there? I know the curator was probably limited to what’s in the Guggenheim’s own permanent collection, but if a curator has the best thesis in the world, and the art is not available, the curator shouldn’t do the show. And, while I’m beating this barely breathing horse, the art needs to tell the story. The story can’t be dragged from it if it’s just not there.

I’ve had lots of English majors as students, so I’ve graded a big pile of their term papers. My experience is that each sentence they write is a work of art, with bouncy cadence and a canny choice of words. The problem is that too often, though not universally, each sentence bears a tangential relationship with the sentence before and the sentence after. Paragraphs are puddings with too many themes. Likewise, this exhibition suffers from diffusion, an absence of linearity and case building, and an abundance of objects that seem irrelevant or tangential.

There is much good work in the show. It looks great, and the topic is great, too. It needed a ruthless dose of focus, of the 100-pushups-before-breakfast kind. The people we trust to get things right — reporters, scientists, statisticians, cops, record keepers — fail too often, and too often by design.

As a historian, and art historians are no less historians than people who write about kings and wars, I know objectivity is a standard we learn. It’s part of the job. It’s not a utopian goal. Do I need to tell the holder of a Ph.D. in English from Yale how to tell a story? Apparently, I do. In my time at Yale, the art history department and the English department were across the street from each other. I see my suggestions as hands-across-the-sea ideas. The show is a great idea, but the chronological span needs to be compressed to ten or, at most, 20 years, not 50.

The chronology is so vast that it invites cherry-picking. Over a 50-year period, American art can be found to make any point in the world, but is the point incisive? The temptation to wander and ramble is great. I think the curator started with a theme or a preconceived notion, bits of received wisdom, a foundational theory at the African-American Studies Department at Yale — and I expect elsewhere — and then shopped around.

I’d exclude art with George H. W. Bush or Ronald Reagan as characters. They are historical figures. Artists recycle them because it’s safe. Carlos Motta’s Brief History of US Interventions in Latin America since 1946 concerns “the country’s imperial and colonial military campaigns in Latin America since 1946” and describes this subject as “underreported.” I chuckled when I read this, since this theme is thoroughly reported and is a staple of any news coverage of America’s Latin American and South American policy and any political debate surrounding it. Motta’s offset lithograph of a bloody handprint on an otherwise empty white field is there. That is now a cliché. It’s that ubiquitous. It’s nothing new.

Are there more artists today like Barnette, who has a very good idea in using an FBI file as raw material, however flawed her execution? Are there young, brave artists dealing with, say, heavily redacted official documents? I think the look of an official document with a mile of black magic marker has an aesthetic spark. Or heavily edited news video? Where are the Daumiers, Nasts, and Rowlandsons of today?

Lisa Oppenheim’s 2015 Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans has a great premise. She looks at the negatives Evans decided “not” to develop and publish in his famous WPA books of photography. Her work is in Off the Record. Alas, Evans’s project is from the 1930s. That’s water over the dam.

Fake news is fascinating. Stale news really isn’t. Off the Record is a back-to-the-drawing-board exhibition with plenty of merit. I hope the Guggenheim tackles it again, throwing the net out beyond its permanent collection and focusing the ideas on current events.

The Guggenheim’s Thannhauser Collection is sometimes overlooked by visitors drawn to the museum by its exhibitions. Justin Thannhauser (1892–1976) and his father were German art dealers who showed Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art as well as cutting-edge German art. Their gallery in Munich hosted the first big show of the Blue Rider movement in 1912, so they nurtured German Expressionism in its infancy. They also were the leading dealer in Picasso’s work in Germany until the 1930s, when Justin got out of Dodge and came to the U.S. He and his wife gave their collection to the Guggenheim throughout the 1960s and into the early 1990s.

The Thannhauser gallery is on the second floor, off of the space where Off the Record is displayed. Van Gogh’s Mountains at Saint-Rémy, from 1889, and Degas’s big, late pastel, Dancers in Green and Yellow, from 1903, are there. Beautiful Cézannes and early Picassos are there, too. I always visit these things because they are of the very highest quality, of course, but looking at them at the Guggenheim has fewer distractions than at the Met or at MoMA. They shine on their own. There’s rarely any other painting from that period at the Guggenheim. I love the Guggenheim and consider this gallery one of the best art spaces in New York.