Whitney Biennial 2019
May 17–Oct 27, 2019
Carolyn Lazard
41
Floor 6
Born 1987 in Upland, CA
Lives in Philadelphia, PA
Carolyn Lazard addresses the politics and sociality embedded in networks of care by and for disabled people and their communities. In Extended Stay, Lazard sourced a television monitor and armature of a sort frequently found in infusion centers where patients receive chemotherapy and other treatments. In making the work the artist asked the Museum to be wired for cable television. The resulting installation encourages visitors to reflect on the simultaneity of live television, bringing them into a shared media experience with hospital patients. Rather than playing a constant live stream, the television has been programmed to surf the channels autonomously. While art is often brought into hospitals as a therapeutic gesture, Extended Stay creates a situation in which the museum visitor’s experience is shaped by and connected to a patient’s perspective, both in their relationship to media and the passing of time.
Extended Stay, 2019
Installation view of the Whitney Biennial 2019 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 17-September 22, 2019). Carolyn Lazard, Extended Stay, 2019. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
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Carolyn Lazard
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Narrator: This sculpture by Carolyn Lazard prominently features a hospital television monitor.
Carolyn Lazard: It's an object that I had encountered many times in my own experiences receiving medications by infusion in infusion suites.
Narrator: Artist Carolyn Lazard.
Carolyn Lazard: It's the kind of monitor that is made to scale for one person. It comes out from the wall behind you while you're sitting in a lounging chair receiving an IV treatment.
I became interested in this object in some ways because of how it united two areas of interest of mine. One being experiences of medicalization, experiences inside the medical industrial complex. And then, also, my interest in video as a medium.
I was really interested in this experience of waiting as an alternative experience of time and time passing, and wanted to find a way to reproduce that in the work.
One of the main components of the work is cable television. Part of the process of getting cable television included as a material of this work was also having to work with the Whitney to get them to have it installed. Getting cable installed is a complicated process when you're a large institution, but cable television is a kind of ubiquitous thing.
The hope is that when you encounter this work in the gallery, which is more of a video sculpture that has a live element to it, whatever is playing on the monitor, whether it's QVC or a daytime soap or “Judge Judy,” that you're watching the exact same thing that somebody who's getting chemotherapy is watching at the exact same time.