Jessica Diamond, 66, is the most recent counterculture star from this text-based post-post-war period to grace the partitions of the Hirshhorn. Her work, if that’s the phrase for them, evoke poetry with lengthy spans of verse or quick cryptic phrases. For “Wheel of Life,” a solo exhibition occupying the whole interior ring of the second ground on the doughnut-shaped museum constructing, her presentation typically includes little greater than the choice about what font to make use of.
For a sure technology of artists — amongst them Jenny Holzer, Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman — that call is greater than sufficient.
This showcase of Diamond’s work could be extra illuminating — or, alternatively, extra vexing — if the museum weren’t concurrently exhibiting work by two of her closest New York friends. Barbara Kruger’s “Perception+Doubt,” on view within the museum’s reformatted decrease degree since 2012, is a fan-favorite immersive set up of the 78-year-old artist’s all-caps slogans. Laurie Anderson’s “4 Talks” (2021) is one other allover textual content set up, this yet one more mystical than slick, designed specifically for the 76-year-old artist’s current retrospective, “The Climate.”
Each Kruger’s and Anderson’s site-specific installations are right here for the foreseeable future, and at their scale, there’s not a lot probability of holiday makers lacking them. If this lineup weren’t sufficient, in 2018 the Hirshhorn additionally mounted “Model New: Artwork and Commodity within the Nineteen Eighties,” an announcement present by curators Gianni Jetzer and Sandy Guttman on artists responding to consumerism and mass media — about as near a boomer thesis as there could possibly be.
Certainly, museum-goers would possibly bear in mind Diamond’s “T.V. Telepathy” (1989), a wall-size portray of the phrases “Eat Sugar Spend Cash” that loved delight of place within the “Model New” survey. Not one of the works in “Wheel of Life” are fairly as iconic as that excellent saccharine commandment, which makes this present a doubly odd alternative as a follow-up.
In contrast with another artists who work with textual content, Diamond favors an method that makes it look as if she’s barely making an attempt. The textual content for “The Legislation Of Standing* and a Nonpareil Cat (*Thorstein Veblen 1899),” an acrylic and latex portray from 2018, spells out a phrase which may have been dashed out on a sticky observe. Beneath this handwritten aphorism — “The legislation of standing is the dominant function within the scheme of life” — is a crude drawing of an orange home cat that resembles Andy Warhol. Taken along with the title’s reference to Veblen — a turn-of-the-century American economist who coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” — this piece exhibits Diamond wrestling with one of many central preoccupations of the boomer technology, even when Diamond’s take appears to be like half-cocked.
Diamond’s work is extra informal than Kruger’s billboard blitzes or Anderson’s sketchbook daydreams, however it’s no much less refined. At instances, Diamond embraces textual content as an easy narrative gadget: For instance, she delivers six stanzas of verse towards a blue background for “Phrases at Play: A Circle Factor (Thoreau, Thoreau, Thoreau …) #2” (2018/2023). But different items counsel a extra conceptual bent. A textbook minimalist portray, “Ellipsis (3 Circles)” (2021/2023) could be each learn and seen. Like one other text-based nice, Lawrence Weiner, Diamond likes mining the hole between utilizing textual content as image and utilizing textual content as kind.
A lot of the works on view register on the identical temperature: a aircraft of daring colour with a passage of textual content in considered one of a handful of fonts. “M3 (In Life, Cash)” (2019/2023), nonetheless, is a straight-up summary portray, misplaced amid a lot handwriting. The gold wall portray appears to be like like a collection of logos chopped up and reassembled into one thing simply in need of legible. The piece provides up the sport: If it wasn’t clear already, Diamond is portray, not writing.
“Goodbye Edward Hopper” (2019/2023) exhibits the artist at her finest. The piece includes a breezy phrase painted close to the museum’s ceiling. The phrases are slanted to the purpose of being animated, as in the event that they had been blowing away. The textual content reads as braggadocio, the phrases of an artist dismissing a contemporary grasp as a bygone. But the letters spelling out the declare are skinny and frail, which suggests a ruefulness about the entire enterprise. It’s an irreverent gesture, a snort of a portray, however one which carries with it maybe a wistfulness a couple of extra harmless time in artwork historical past.
“Wheel of Life” comes after so many comparable exhibits which have put an exclamation level on themes of media saturation and industrial consumerism, nonetheless, that the Hirshhorn dangers conducting the very phenomenon that it’s exploring. There may be such a factor as an excessive amount of work about mass consumption, and this newest present suggestions into overindulgence.
Jessica Diamond: Wheel of Life
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Backyard, Independence Avenue and Seventh Avenue SW. hirshhorn.si.edu.
