Julian Schnabel was one of these artists and was
promoted by both the Mary Boone and Leo Castelli
Galleries. Schnabel used broken crockery and prim-
itive images on a large canvas. Robert Longo was
another neoexpressionist favorite of the SoHo art
world during this period. Longo painted large scenes
in which monuments and figures had ambiguous re-
lationships with one another and with the surround-
ing space. Artist David Salle promoted choice over
invention. As he stated in 1984, “the originality is in
what you choose.” This attitude was exemplified in
his juxtaposition of patterns of rectangles with a
seemingly unrelated woman wearing paper cones
on her head and breasts. Of these neoexpressionist
works, Eric Fischl’s portrayal of the human figure
is the most traditional subject matter, evincing in-
fluences from Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and
Winslow Homer. Fischl depicted nudes to create
narratives of an emotionally bankrupt middle-class
America.
Neo-Geo was an art movement that propagated
the idea of the death of modernism. Peter Halley’s
paintings exemplify this movement, presenting a
few squares of day-glow rectangles in multiple pan-
els. Drawing on the post-structuralist theory of Jean
Baudrillard, Halley stated that artists can no longer
make art but only refer to it. Art can only be a copy
without an original, a reference to Baudrillard’s no-
tion of the simulacrum. Halley’s abstractions signi-
fied confinement and interconnection in the media-
controlled postindustrialized world. Other artists
who attempted to copy or imitate art included
Sherrie Levine, Ross Bleckner, and Philip Taeffe,
who reduplicated Op art in the vein of 1960’s artist
Bridget Riley.
New York’s East Village art scene was purposefully
less commercial than were the SoHo galleries, with
smaller galleries opening to show art. Developing in
this environment were artists that incorporated the
style of graffiti into their art. Probably one of the best
known of these artists was Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Basquiat’s graffiti style incorporated vivid colors and
images of black heroes. His art communicated the
anguish of a black artist in a white world. After being
discovered by the commercial art scene, Basquiat be-
gan to show in SoHo until his death of a drug over-
dose in 1988. Keith Haring was another artist who
utilized graffiti by first creating white chalk line
drawings on covered-up black panels of subway ads
from 1981 to 1985. His art progressed to colorful im-
ages of radiant babies, barking dogs, and androgy-
nous figures that were joyful and life-affirming and
that became icons of mass culture to which many
could relate. Contrasting with Haring, David Wojna-
rowicz made art that called attention to the ethical
state of emergency he found to exist in America in
the 1980’s. His paintings were a complex layering of
impressions from nature and culture in collage-like
forms, which critiqued a consumer culture whose su-
perficial surface masked violence and contradic-
tion.Photography Art photography in the 1980’s sub-
verted the traditional styles of portrait and land-
scape photography and invented new ones. Photog-
raphy was no longer a medium for description but
for invention. Photographers merged fact and fic-
tion, as in the work of Cindy Sherman. Sherman’s
series of photographs entitledUntitled Film Stillswas
a string of self-portraits. In this series, Sherman
dressed in many different guises, assuming the roles
of different characters in nonexistent motion pic-
tures. She challenged the idea of fixed identity and
created open-ended narratives by appropriating
representations of prefabricated roles of women
from movies and the media. Sherman continued
her exploration of the idea of the feminine by wear-
ing false breasts and other prosthetics, thus turning
herself into a monstrous grotesque.
Feminist issues became the subject of many
photographers’ works in the 1980’s. Photographer
Barbara Krueger overtly critiqued and questioned
the representation of women in American society.
Through the union of the word-based with the photo-
based in her photography, Krueger parodied adver-
tisements by undermining the disembodied voice of
patriarchal authority and revealing the invisibility
of women. By undermining the images and words
in magazines, newspapers, and television, Krueger
deconstructed the dominant masculine discourse
and reframed images within a feminist perspective.
Photographer Hannah Wilke also brought feminist
issues to the fore in her work, when she utilized
chewing gum to symbolize the psychological scars
of the struggles of women. Another photographer
who challenged the dominant discourse of white
male culture was Carrie Mae Weems. Through her
photography, Weems critiqued racism in the United
States and tried to recover a genuine “black expe-
rience.”The Eighties in America Art movements 69