Invitation to the Other: The reframing of 'American' art and national identity and the 1993 Whitney Biennial in New York and Seoul

A major objective of this dissertation is to examine the treatment of questions concerning difference and identity in contemporary American art and criticism as presented in several art exhibitions from the 1960s to the Whitney Biennial in 1993. I trace the exclusion and marginalization of artists as Others in the earlier period in order to understand the way in which "American" in American art had been conceived and practiced. Then, I examine the historical circumstances surrounding the sudden rise of the issue of identity in art exhibitions and art works between 1989 and 1993.;In examining specific exhibitions, topics include: the erasure of Asian, Native Indian, and African-American contexts in Abstract Expressionism as defined by Clement Greenberg and MoMA; the attack on modernist discourse by black artists and feminists and their token inclusion in major art museums during the Civil Rights movement; women artists' entrance into major museum shows in the 1980s that provided the theoretical bases for the concept of "difference"; a few art exhibitions that brought charges of essentialism for representing cultures as "Other"; and the issue of culture wars at the end of the 1980s.;My major case study concerns the 1993 Whitney Biennial exhibition where I explore the historical turn towards "multiculturalism" in American art in the early 1990s. I define the 1993 Whitney Biennial as a "cultural moment," in which I argue that artists, curators, and critics aimed to engage the issue of "cultural diversity" and embrace questions of identity and difference. My primary aim is to analyze the ways in which the identity of American art has been produced, controlled, and disseminated, and the process by which national identities have been defined through art exhibitions, criticism, and cultural exchange. I argue that the question of cultural and national identities in art cannot be separated from the broader context of major political, economic, and cultural changes.;In examining the 1993 Whitney Biennial, I therefore focus primarily on politics surrounding the exhibition. However, I will also examine the emergence of new dominant modes in art forms---the autobiographical images and the new media---as means to record or question artist's personal or group identity. My analysis of the meaning of art work in the exhibition and the ways in which the meanings were constructed and circulated reveals the framing effect of the exhibition, that is, the means of controlling and constructing new subjectivities. Despite several critiques to deconstruct the notion of "identity" and "diversity," the actual acceptance of the art works and the exhibition was, however, contingent on the new discourse of "multiculturalism" whose practices often resulted in the new categorization of American people into hyphenated American names.;The issue of "American" cultural identity comes to the fore when the exportation of the Whitney Biennial to Korea is examined. What can be analyzed in this international cultural exchange are the ways "nationality" is defined through art by a process of differentiation from the Other. National identity is not given, but is always a representation structured through the contingency of difference. I analyze the attempt to fix nationality, translation, and mistranslation of the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Furthermore, I contextualize this exportation and importation within the process of so-called globalization that now cannot be separated from the commodification of cultural identities in the economy of art.