The Hammer Museum presents Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology

The Hammer Museum presents Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology

Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology

Show Runs Through: February 9 – May 18, 2014

Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology is the first large-scale exhibition to focus on the intersection of two vitally important genres of contemporary art: appropriation (taking and recasting existing images, forms, and styles from mass-media and fine art sources) and institutional critique (scrutinizing and confronting the structures and practices of our social, cultural, and political institutions). The exhibition brings together works by thirty-six American artists who came to prominence between the late 1970s and the early 1990s.

The majority of the works on view are from the 1980s and 1990s, a groundbreaking period that was shaped by the feminist and civil rights movements of the previous decades. Conscious of the profound impact on society of mass media such as television, newspapers, and film, artists examined critical questions of identity and representation via politically and socially engaged practices. This era witnessed a number of significant events that reverberated in the art world: the AIDS crisis; Ronald Reagan’s “trickle-down” economics and the subsequent recession; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War; among others.

Expanding on the work of earlier conceptual artists, who were committed to exploring the very definition of art, the artists featured in Take It or Leave It believe that art cannot be fully understood or experienced without acknowledging the contexts in which it is produced, viewed, and distributed. They point to the links between art institutions and the other organizations that make up our society, asserting that to separate art from aspects of our daily experience—whether education or medicine, marriage or war, parenting or advertising—is to reinscribe arbitrary and false divisions between art and society, between our aesthetic lives and our everyday lives.

Although Take It or Leave It is a historical show focusing on a period in the recent past, it also includes recent work, arguing for the continued relevance of these artists’ practices and also revealing their sustained commitment to both historically recognizable and emerging strategies of appropriation and institutional critique. The exhibition highlights dynamic practices in notably diverse mediums, including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, text, and performance. The works are by turns subtle and aggressive, poetic and didactic, emotional and intellectual. They are as challenging as they are rewarding, as radical as they are rational. Take It or Leave It seeks to revive and participate in the meaningful debates that the artists have fostered over time and to instill a desire for critique, in its many forms, to remain a cornerstone of American art.

Judith Barry
Gretchen Bender
Dara Birnbaum
Nayland Blake
Tom Burr
Mark Dion
Mark Dion & Jason Simon
Jimmie Durham
Andrea Fraser
Robert Gober
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Renée Green
Jenny Holzer
Mike Kelley
Mary Kelly
Silvia Kolbowski
Barbara Kruger
Louise Lawler
William Leavitt
Zoe Leonard
Sherrie Levine
Glenn Ligon
Paul McCarthy
Allan McCollum
John Miller
Matt Mullican
Cady Noland
Adrian Piper
Stephen Prina
Martha Rosler
Haim Steinbach
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Christopher Williams
Sue Williams
Fred Wilson
David Wojnarowicz

Take It or Leave It is organized by the Hammer Museum and co-curated by Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, and Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum.

Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology is made possible by a major grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous support is also provided by The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, Karyn Kohl, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Support for the Barbara Kruger installation is provided by The Broad Art Foundation.

The Hammer
10899 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90024
(310) 443-7000
Tue – Fri 11am – 8pm
Sat & Sun 11am – 5pm
Map It
Visit Website



PREVIOUS

NEXT