Brandon Truett

At the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York City––a show attuned to the intense political divisions and racial tensions in the United States today––one artist stood out for her reuse of images of resistance from various moments in the history of modernity, marked by figures such as Marx and Engels, Muhammad Ali, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s Veterans Day (2016), a large oil painting on linen, stages these images in a domestic interior space with yellow wallpaper speckled with flowers and a vintage stereo emanating visual notes that unfurl throughout the room (fig. 1). The most salient image for understanding how Veterans Day represents the transnational scale of civil war is the small reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which is dwarfed by the much larger photographic depiction of American brigadiers who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War (fig. 2). On close examination, one can see, through her signature style of cartoonish wit, that Dupuy-Spencer portrays Guernica as kitsch––a small poster that has been ripped in half and torn from the top, stopping at the horrific screams of the horse and obscuring the lightbulb (fig. 3). The poster seems to have undergone a life of movement, having been stuck and unstuck from other walls, affectionately moved from other spaces. Guernica endures as an object in exile—unmoored from its own historical context and adrift among other contexts. For Dupuy-Spencer, Guernica enables her to register an historical relation between the legacies of the Spanish Civil War and the United States’ own Civil War and to cite and revise the aesthetic practice of modernism.

For their final writing assignment in a course on contemporary art, my students were required to analyze a single artwork from the last sixty or so years. The point was to encourage them to apply the theories of visuality that we’d studied throughout the quarter, and the assignment had one nonnegotiable stipulation: the artwork must be accessible somewhere in Chicago, where our class was held.