Recap This Will Have Been: Art, Love, And Politics In The 1980s at the MCA

This Will Have Been: Art, Love, And Politics In The 1980s, the Museum Of Contemporary Art’s new exhibit, aims to capture a decade of art and emotion in eight rooms. It’s a lofty goal, for sure, but one the exhibit’s curators might just have achieved. Either way, it’s an interesting exhibit for non-art fans and aficionados alike. The A.V. Club walked through This Will Have Been last week, and here are three of our highlights.

This is what democracy looks like.
Depending on which end of the exhibit viewers start with, the whole show can take quite a different turn. We started with the rooms called “Democracy,” which kick things off with a gigantic installation piece featuring an oil painting of Ronald Reagan, a red carpet, and a wall-sized photo of an anti-nuclear march in New York City. Basically, like much of the exhibit, this piece by Hans Haacke seeks to redefine what the idea of public space meant in the ’80s. Whereas before art was paintings and photographs, in more recent decades art became what was reflected in the mass media. In essence, the public wasn’t just looking at art, but rather participating in it all the time. The piece is also an interesting representation of who holds the power these days, politicians or people—or maybe a bit of both.

Kissing doesn’t kill.
A large portion of the exhibit deals with the way the public and the art world handled the ’80s AIDS crisis. Artists collective Gran Fury’s bus poster “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” showed up on the CTA in 1989, immediately inciting public annoyance and outrage. People weren’t mad at the idea that AIDS wasn’t something you could catch off a toilet seat, but rather at the images on the poster of men kissing, women kissing, and an interracial couple kissing. Now it might seem a little like a Benetton ad, but it’s interesting to see how our city reacted to something 20-odd years ago and wonder if that reaction would be any different today.

Found objects can have something to say.
“Found Dope: Part II” by Candy Jernigan is a collection of plastic plugs from 308 crack vials found near her apartment in the early ’80s. It’s a look at Lower Manhattan drug culture at the time, for sure, but it’s also an interesting catalog of what was around her. Jernigan collects objects as a way of saying, “I was there.” This piece speaks to the artist’s life, but also to a very distinct problem that was going on in her neighborhood—and this country—at the time, and even now.