National Gallery Of Art | Audio

Alex Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan For the public symposium held on November 19, 2016, in conjunction with the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971 at the National Gallery of Art, Alex Potts explains how new exhibition spaces and the experimental staging of work at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and Virginia Dwan’s bicoastal galleries gave Edward Kienholz an opportunity in the early and mid-1960s to realize his large-scale tableaux. The powerful effect these works had on the viewer was not just formal, as in minimalist art, or simply a result of their often-provocative, in-your-face presentation, but was also related to deep undercurrents of socially and politically charged content. Eventually this set the tableaux at odds with the prevailing climate of the American art world and its increasingly systematic bracketing of a politics of content in favor of a politics of form. Virginia Dwan’s active promotion of some of Kienholz’s more ambitious, highly