Only in New York?

What is it about New York? Or, rather: what was it? Specifically, what was it about New York, in the middle of the twentieth century, specifically in the 1960s, more specifically in the early 1960s, that seems to have sparked so much art, so much writing, so much music and theater and dance? Why was it that apparently all of a sudden, in this particular place and this time, everyone was making things? There was a certain creative energy, maybe, hard to pinpoint but contagious and unbounded; there was the propulsive force of big global shifts and cultural upheavals; there was the chaotic, exciting urban environment itself, which was rapidly changing because of “urban renewal” and the city’s growth. There was just something about New York, a mysterious alchemic interchange between it and its artists.

An exhibition at the Jewish Museum sought to examine this place and time, specifically at New York: 1962–1964. At the time, Alan Solomon, then president of the Jewish Museum, organized influential exhibitions of what he called “the new art,” spotlighting a generation of New York artists who were inspired by and drew from, Solomon said, “television commercials, comic strips, hot dog stands, billboards, junk yards, hamburger joints, used car lots, jukeboxes, slot machines and supermarkets” that made up “the visual environment and probably most of the aesthetic experience for 99 percent of Americans.” The list of artists and writers associated with this loosely defined movement reads, sixty years on, like an art history survey-course syllabus: Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, Frank O’Hara. (Like a syllabus: heavy on white men.) New York: 1962–1964 featured their work heavily across its two floors, where it combined sculpture, painting, and photographs with objects, curios, film footage, and archival material. There were even re-created domestic spaces—an imagined 1960s living room and a kitchen, complete with a bowl of glass fruit—and a jukebox near the exhibition entrance playing music.

Almost immediately on entering New York: 1962–1964, I was struck by the sheer volume of iconic, literally speaking, images and objects this time period produced. Received through television shows, films, photographs, and history textbooks, the relics of this time have such an outsize role in our cultural imagination that I was surprised by my own familiarity with the stuff of this era. Objects don’t need their wall text to be recognized: that is a Warhol, of course, and that is a Jasper Johns. That is an Eames chair, and that is JFK’s voice traveling over the loudspeakers, and that toaster with a retro feel has been copied a thousand times on Etsy. The images and objects of the 1960s precede our actual encounters with them, legible already from the way they have filtered down through history books and even contemporary popular culture. These years were a real hinge moment—the end of the postwar boom years, on the edge of the Civil Rights Movement and feminism. The Cold War was escalating; the invasion of Vietnam was imminent. No matter who you were, you might have found yourself suddenly engaged with or swept up in change. It was a time to remember, for those who lived through it, for outsized events and a fast-feeling sense of change—all of this makes it something we can refer to decades after the fact.

I was especially struck by Warhol’s Jackie Frieze, located on the second floor of the exhibition in a gallery that adjoined the show’s small, evocative kitchen. He made the work, composed of eight images of Jackie Kennedy silk-screened into a long horizontal strip reminiscent of a film negative, in 1964, just a year after John F. Kennedy’s death. The images, in which we see Jackie smiling, face downturned, looking solemn by a man in military uniform, evoke personal grief and its intersection with mass media—several were taken after her husband’s assassination, at his funeral, and during LBJ’s swearing in—and they were part of Warhol’s larger project of repurposing widely disseminated images. I was struck, looking at it, by the fact that I have now seen Warhol’s images of Jackie many more times than the originals he used. There is another layer that emerges here, maybe an irony, in the way Pop art has itself become iconic and reproducible. There is a strange doubleness to looking at Jackie Frieze, which I have seen replicated over and over, its images losing and gaining meaning as it passes through the decades. So it strikes me that this exhibition got something right about the long shadow of influence of this time period in arts and culture, even if what it got right is just that it’s worth pointing out that shadow and clarifying its contours.

But there was also a too-muchness to its organization: even in its tight focus on two years, the show bobbed and weaved so broadly that it seemed to lose focus on its purported subject of New York. Alongside the art and objects, the exhibition provided broad historical and archival context about the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Venice Biennale that spotlighted artists like Johns and Rauschenberg. And yet many of these events happened, well, not in New York (Alabama, Texas, and Italy, respectively). There was a vague randomness that made it hard to wrap my head around what brought all these works together besides simple chronology. As I wandered through the show, I found myself wondering: Was it really New York after all that was so influential, or was New York just the largest city in America, where there was a lot happening? It felt like a missed opportunity for the exhibition to pinpoint something specific, instead of putting things side by side, asking us to try to draw inferences about influence and interchange. Rather than highlighting the very real, particular connections between some of the New York–based artists featured, the show’s own repeated insistence on the “iconic” nature of the time and place meant that it moved toward the general instead. Built-in mythology replaced potential specificity.

I found myself most compelled by pieces that engaged the city directly. Two in particular stayed with me, making me think hard about the political, socioeconomic, and social forces that shaped the production of culture in this place and time. On the ground floor, there was Louise Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral’s Presence I. Nevelson was evicted from her brownstone in Kips Bay in 1958 when it was being demolished as part of a Robert Moses–led development campaign. She moved downtown and began foraging through the neighborhood for furniture, scraps, crates, and detritus, which she recomposed into astounding abstract sculptures. This one, painted black, has an architectural scale. It is stacked, packed, segmented like a grid or an apartment block that we can peer into. It is composed of fragments of the ordinary—one can make out the silhouette of an AC unit, and the legs of what might have been a dining room table— but the piece’s effect comes from the whole rather than the parts. The color makes it appear uniform and cohesive, even as it is broken into clear parts. Sky Cathedral feels like an interconnected but segmented organism, not unlike the city itself.

And then there was George Maciunas’s Photographic Ballet, which is really a photographic record of a performance that happened in 1963. In nine photographs, we see dancers performing a wild dance on the fire escape of a building downtown where Maciunas and some fellow avant-garde performance artists lived. On the metal stairs above a storefront, next to a pizza luncheonette, they strike strange poses while suspended above a New York street. The images are remarkable, a little nostalgic, and they have a magical quality— the cityscape becomes a set. It’s the kind of thing that you might pass by on a walk around town and react to by shaking your head and saying, maybe half ironically: only in New York!