Images and technological media now pervade every minute of our lives so thoroughly that much of what passes for reality is indistinguishable from its representation. The urban environment is a cloaca of hypnotic, animated signage, sounds and image streams that follow us into taxicabs and hospital waiting rooms, and in turn, any banality, from a misspelled street sign to a funny advertisement, is considered suitable to become an image on social media.
This didn’t happen overnight. One of the least helpful clichés of recent years has been the declaration that some phenomenon or person is “on the wrong side of history”; the presumption that history is headed, with occasional setbacks, toward a much-improved, even utopian state of things could only be endorsed by someone unfamiliar with history. Mistaking the perfection of our devices for the perfection of ourselves relieves us of responsibility for what happens to the world: It will just naturally turn out O.K., sooner or later. But technology can easily outrun our comprehension of what it does to us, even while it incarnates our wishes, fears and pathologies. (What could be more pathological than a nuclear weapon?)
Our present bedazzlement-by-pixels was anticipated by a loosely affiliated group of artists who emerged in New York in the mid-1970s and early ’80s — before iPhones, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. “The Pictures Generation” has become a ubiquitous, awkward catchall term, probably abrasive to the artists themselves, for something that was less an organized movement than a heterogeneous expression of a zeitgeist. Their art was connected by an interest in examining power and identity in a media-saturated, politically uncertain age. The name derives from a 1977 show at Artists Space curated by Douglas Crimp, simply called “Pictures,” where five of these artists — Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith — were featured. A survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum a few years ago folded in another 25.
Some of the artists that carry the Pictures Generation label are well-known to the general public, such as Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, David Salle and Cindy Sherman; many have achieved canonical status in the art world, with their work featured at multiple venues throughout any given year, all over the world. A few, such as Walter Robinson and Troy Brauntuch, are only now starting to get long-overdue recognition. A number of them, like Louise Lawler, the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this spring, have re-entered public consciousness at a moment that is oddly similar to the one in which they first appeared. The questions they all first addressed in a faraway, predigital period may be even more relevant today than they were then.
The Pictures artists, so-called, were born in Cold War America, during the schizoid cultural meshing of unparalleled national prosperity with the daily threat of looming nuclear annihilation. They grew up with Hollywood movies, low-def network television and ad-heavy pictorial magazines like Look and Life as the audiovisual wallpaper of their childhoods, mostly in American suburbs.