From the Vapor of Gasoline

In the years after the Second World War, a golden age of economic growth seemed set to fulfil the historian James Truslow Adams’ celebrated description of the American Dream ‘of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability’. By the end of the 1960s, a flurry of political assassinations, civil unrest and the escalation of the Cold War precipitated a national crisis of confidence that reached its apogee with the 1973 oil embargo. 

The title of this exhibition, borrowing from the evocative slogan painted across Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Peruvian Maid (1985), conjures a society running on empty. Its artists – loosely linked by a network of personal and professional relationships, as between Cady Noland and Steven Parrino, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Christopher Wool – chronicle a dramatic ideological shift. If the prevailing atmosphere is of disillusion, then it is not without hope: with the end of a dream comes a renewed engagement with reality. 

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