Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Institutional Complex

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Whether in the form of passport photographs, ID badges, or mug shots, portraits play a central role in society’s efforts to classify individuals and regulate their behavior. Against the backdrop of the social upheavals of the early 1990s—including the economic downturn, heightened racial tensions, and the culture wars—artists seized on such images to ask pointed questions about how academic, legal, civic, and other institutional structures shape our perceptions of others and ourselves. By drawing on the formulas of the police lineup and the mug shot, for example, Gary Simmons and Glenn Ligon both underscore and bristle against the representational conventions and stereotypes that associate black men with violence. Other artists inject oblique personal statements into indifferent systems of order. Byron Kim transforms the modernist touchstones of the grid and the monochrome from abstractions into veiled portraits, while Andrea Zittel conjures a generic self by distilling the necessities of life into a few basic functions.


Below is a selection of works from Institutional Complex.

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SYNECDOCHE, 1999

Byron Kim, Synecdoche [Whitney Artists], 1999–2001

In Human Interest

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Byron Kim, Synecdoche [Whitney Artists], 1999–2001

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Byron Kim: I remember at the Whitney during the '93 Biennial, I did a lot of things with the education department around the installation of this work. There was a group of school children. They were around kindergarten. First thing I thought to ask them was, "What do you think these are? What do you think this looks like?" It took them a long time. At first they said, "Oh, it looks like bathroom tiles." I think I had to hint around, and finally we got around to it, because these are just flat colors. They have really very little to do with a person. In a way, that was closer to what I probably wanted to say in the beginning.

Synecdoche is an ongoing project in which Byron Kim records the unique skin tones of friends and fellow artists on monochrome painted panels. The panels that belong to the Whitney represent the skin colors of forty artists with work in the Whitney’s permanent collection, including Kim himself, as well as Annette Lemieux and Glenn Ligon, whose works are also included in Human Interest. The polychromatic grid references the formal language of abstract painting, yet Kim rejects the notion of pure abstraction, or paintings without an external reference. Although each panel serves as a sort of portrait, it pointedly neglects to tell us anything meaningful about the subject. The title refers to a classical rhetorical trope by which a part of a thing is made to stand for the whole. This work assesses how that idea may apply to identity— specifically, the essentialist notion that skin color might represent the entirety of an individual.

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On the Hour

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

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