Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
Jonathan Berger
7
Floor 6
Born 1980 in New York, NY
Lives in New York, NY, and Glover, VT
Jonathan Berger’s An Introduction to Nameless Love explores profoundly transformative experiences of non-romantic love. The full work consists of six text-based sculptures; the three on view here focus on the photographer Margaret Morton and Maria A. Prado, a former resident of the New York underground unhoused community known as the Tunnel; former turtle conservationist Richard Ogust and the first turtle he rescued; and autistic writer and philosopher Mark Utter and his communication supporter and collaborator Emily Anderson. The texts emerged from dialogue between Berger and these subjects that sometimes took place over years. The final distilled texts were generated collaboratively by Berger, the individual subjects, and a guest editor of specific significance to each story, including journalist Esther Kaplan and radio and podcast producer Erica Heilman.
Inspired by historical forms of embodied language such as illuminated manuscripts, Berger created a font with designer Julian Bittiner, which he then used to cut letters from tin. A team of associates hammered and soldered each letter by hand to make the final sculptures. The floor of charcoal tiles serves to contextualize the texts’ eclectic contents as unified within the larger idea of An Introduction to Nameless Love.
Untitled (Maria A. Prado and Margaret Morton, with Esther Kaplan), 2019
Jonathan Berger, An Introduction to Nameless Love including selected elements Untitled (Emily Anderson and Mark Utter, with Erica Heilman); Untitled (Richard Ogust); and Untitled (Margaret Morton and Maria A. Prado, with Esther Kaplan), 2019 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Tin, nickel, and charcoal. Collection of the artist; courtesy Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, MA; Participant Inc., New York; VEDA, Florence; and Luhring Augustine, New York. Photograph by Sandenwolff
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Jonathan Berger, An Introduction to Nameless Love
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Narrator: Jonathan Berger was inspired to make Introduction to Nameless Love by his friendship with the artist Ellen Cantor. They became close friends in 2008, and she passed away in 2013. Reflecting on their relationship, he came to be very compelled by his feeling that it had had the depth and intensity of true love, which is typically reserved for romantic relationships.
Jonathan Berger: I got interested in making a show that really sort of tried to crack that open in some way, and make a platform for relationships that are remarkable in some way, but also that really validate people, like viewers, and allow people to sort of celebrate the relationships in their own lives that are profound, and life changing, and transformative, but that don’t fit into like a sort of conventionally romantic, societally hierarchical thing.
Plenty of people are like, “I love my dog more than I’ll ever love my husband.” People get that. People have that phenomena or that transformative, ecstatic, depth thing, with relationships that aren’t romantic all the time.
Narrator: Over the course of six years, Berger had ongoing dialogues with those engaged in six different profound non-romantic relationships, and distilled the transcripts into short form narrative, each of which takes the final form of a text-based sculpture. The three sections of the larger project on view here center the photographer Margaret Morton and Maria A. Prado, former resident of the New York City underground houseless community known as The Tunnel; turtle conservationist Richard Ogust; and Autistic writer/philosopher Mark Utter with his communication supporter and collaborator Emily Anderson.