An exceprt from MCA Chicago's brochure on This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s:
1980s art has often been regarded as a blight or blemish on art history as it is, in the words of former Artforum editor Jack Bankowsky, "an open woud." When the National Portrait Gallery removed David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly (1986-87) from its 2010 exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture in response to pressure from religious and conservative groups, we saw just how little this wound has healed, if at all.
This Will Have Been is organized around two phenomena that frame the 1980s: feminism and the AIDS crisis. Within these parameters, the exhibition finds not cynicism or irony but desire--not just the desire for bodies and objects but the desire for a break with the past, for a principled and just government, for the greater acceptance of difference.
Word.
