Alas, first Michael and now Whitney. They represented two strains in 1980s pop culture: Houston, a child of the gospel tradition, and Jackson, the alien artist who took the music in directions nobody’d imagined. Not incidentally, that’s a tension that runs through the Museum of Contemporary Art’s powerful new “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s.” Curated by Helen Molesworth of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the show presents artists at a crossroads between the classical and the radical—between political complacency and impatience.
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“This Will Have Been” is divided into four sections: Democracy, Gender Trouble, Desire and Longing, and The End Is Near. The concerns that run through it are what might be expected inasmuch as the 80s gave us AIDS and Ronald Reagan. But nothing here weighs as heavily as time itself. That’s suggested by the future-perfect conjugation of the show’s title, which hints at some eventual revelation—what, exactly, will this have been? The phrase calls to mind Diane Arbus’s application for a 1963 Guggenheim fellowship. She wanted to make pictures, she said, “like somebody’s grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.”
That mournful memory, so fierce and deliberate, pervades the show. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) features two battery-powered wall clocks hung side by side. Initially set to the same time, they come to tick asynchronously as the weaker battery dies. The clocks, the artist said, represent him and his lover, who died of AIDS in 1991. Gonzalez-Torres died of the same disease in 1996. “The piece I made with the two clocks,” he remarked, “was the scariest thing I have ever done.”
Through 6/3: Tue 10 AM-8 PM, Wed-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org, $12, $7 students and seniors, Tuesdays free for Illinois residents.
