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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