Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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During the late 1960s, many artists began to use the body—frequently their own—as an expressive medium. They refused conventional forms of painting and sculpture, instead turning themselves into their raw materials through comic play and madcap self-portraiture. Bruce Nauman’s mock-serious efforts to mold his own body and Scott Grieger’s impersonations of sculptures by well-known contemporaries, for example, spoof the role of the artist. Works by Cynthia Maughan and Hannah Wilke, meanwhile, offer feminist parodies of popular representations of women.

Using photography, film, and video in nontraditional ways, the artists whose work is included in this section borrowed the casual immediacy of snapshots, photo booths, and home movies. Art is no longer a realm of lofty values, but rather a forum for spontaneity and improvisation. At the same time, portraiture ceases to be a solemn introspective exercise, becoming instead a springboard for subversive and often humorous creative experiments.

Below is a selection of works from Making Faces.

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Douglas Huebler’s 330 / Variable Piece #70 includes images of the German photographer Bernd Becher, a close friend of Huebler’s, as well as Richard Nixon, and a wanted criminal. Yet the work is not a portrait of any one of them. Rather, it is part of a series in which the artist set out to “photographically document . . . the existence of everyone alive in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled in that manner.” The “obvious impossibility” was part of the point and Huebler underscored the absurdity of the project by grouping selections of images with tongue-in-cheek characterizations such as in the case of this work: “AT LEAST ONE PERSONWHO WOULD CUT OFF HIS NOSETO SPITE HIS FACE.” Huebler continued making works in this series until his death in 1997.

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Making Faces

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330 / VARIABLE PIECE #70: 1971 GLOBAL, 1974

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Explore works from this exhibition
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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Making Faces

11

330 / VARIABLE PIECE #70: 1971 GLOBAL, 1974

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection