America, real and imagined: the Whitney Museum of American Art reaches outside its normal purview to see how the U.S. is viewed abroad - The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Eleanor Heartney

In other works, the myth of the Wild West has been sublimated and redressed in modern garb. However, the lure of its essential message of freedom and individuality remains powerful. Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi provides a fantasy image of the ideal old age with a photograph of a Japanese woman of a certain age with flaming-red dyed hair racing across the Golden Gate Bridge in the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by a handsome young man. Freedom slides into anarchy in a mesmerizing computer animation by Dutch artist Arno Coenen titled The Last Road Trip. Based on a reworked Monopoly game, it careens from figures and places on the board itself to hallucinogenic scenes that conjure the blinking lights and false facades of Las Vegas and Hollywood, punctuated by mutating roadside signs with messages like "anyone can kill" and stretches of stylized desert. Each place on the board has its own demonic character--in one sequence a bloodlike ooze settles over a Monopoly-inspired suburban development, in another the Masonic emblem on the dollar bill becomes three-dimensional and begins to spin out of contrel. The overall effect is to render the American West as a place where the most extreme human impulses are exaggerated and emancipated.

Other myths prove equally potent. "The American Effect" suggests that the aura of Kennedy's Camelot, somewhat tarnished in this country by revelations about J.F.K's indiscretions and by a general disillusionment with all politicians, lives on outside our borders. Serbian artist Zoran Naskovski has created a video titled Death in Dallas that pairs an audio recording of a '60s vintage Balkan ballad about Kennedy's assassination with a montage of images from his life and death. Along with familiar archival footage of Kennedy's early life, courtship, wedding, family, life before and after his election to the presidency, and his funeral, Naskovski has incorporated little-seen sequences of the assassination and the subsequent unsuccessful operation to save Kennedy's life, which he obtained from a television station in Belgrade. To an American audience for whom the other images have become part of a collective memory, images of Kennedy's bleeding head and bloodsoaked body on a hospital gurney are freshly shocking. In those moments, real death invades the myth. Meanwhile, the shilling emotions of nostalgia, horror and mounting are tied together by an elegiac voice. The singer's words, translated into clumsy English couplets in running subtitles, are full of pathos and sincerity.

Kennedy reappears in The Golden Age, a video installation by American artist Patricia Clark and Cuban artists Jose Angel Toirac and Meira Marrero Diaz. This is a fractured retelling of the Elian Gonzalez story, which held the American public enthralled in the simpler days before the 2000 election. Playing over three screens, the work juxtaposes references to a popular Cuban children's book by the poet and political activist Jose Marti, with images of the Gonzalez saga. Soundless clips depict the boy's rescue from the raft. on which his mother and others perished, his adoption by his American relatives, the battle over his custody that inflamed the Cuban expatriate community in Florida, and his eventual return, under the auspices of the American government, to his together in Cuba. Interpersed are archival images touching on Cuba's troubled relationship with the United States. At one point on different screens we see troops marching and Kennedy and Castro squaring off over the Cuban missile crisis. The issue here seems to be the way that history, embodied by the machinations of figures like Castro and Kennedy, ends up in an international tug-of-war over a farightened little boy.