Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Self-Conscious

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Since the 1970s, artists have increasingly used self-portraiture to explore multiple invented personas as well as darker psychological states. Searching for their own place in a society that prizes youth, fame, and self-exposure, many have adopted strategies from popular culture but often with a twist. Kalup Linzy stars in an imaginary soap opera about the art world, while Jean-Michel Basquiat places himself and his friends along the troubled continuum of African American performers in Hollywood. Other artists confound the air of heroism traditionally associated with the artist’s image, casting themselves as antiheroes shrouded in anxiety and self-doubt. Charles Ray turns himself into the diminutive prisoner of his own art, and Rudolf Stingel depicts himself on a grand scale overcome by melancholy and inertia. In a culture in which the fashion industry, cosmetic surgery, and digital editing have made physical appearance more malleable, the artists whose work is featured in this section testify to a widespread sense of uncertainty in the self and how it might be portrayed.


Below is a selection of works from Self-Conscious.

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POSITION SERIES #20, 2009

K8 Hardy, Position Series #20, 2009

In Human Interest

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K8 Hardy, Position Series #20, 2009

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Narrator: This work comes from a series of photographs that K8 Hardy made using herself as a model. Some of the images in the series are deliberately ordinary, even banal. But here, Hardy’s makeup and costume are fantastical. She’s also used a technique developed in the early twentieth century to manipulate the print, covering part of the photo paper during the exposure to make it look like she was wearing a cartoonish bow. The resulting type of print is known as a photogram.

K8 Hardy: In the darkroom I use the photogram to take you a little bit out of the photo.

Narrator: K8 Hardy.

K8 Hardy: Sometimes the photo is too slippery and too real, so I would just do something in the darkroom to pop the viewer out of the belief in the photo and into the construction.

In the beginning I was so resistant to calling them self-portraits, because that implies that my story's in there somewhere or that I'm describing myself. But I wasn't really thinking about myself when I was taking them. It's a feminist tactic to use your own body and also to approach this subject matter of the female body and of objectification. I just wanted to keep that simple and use myself.

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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