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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A TO Z 1993 LIVING UNIT, 1993

Andrea Zittel, _A to Z 1993 Living Unit_, 1993. Steel, wood, mirror, four hangers, sweater, towel, soap container, calendar, filing cabinet, pencils, two notepads, folding seat, folding bed, four glass jars, two ceramics cups, two glasses, two ceramic bowls, digital clock, electric lighting system, hot plate, pot, and toaster oven, (open): 62 3/8 × 131 1/8 × 76 1/8 in. (158.4 × 333.1 × 193.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee and partial gift of Jay Jopling 2014.293a-e © Andrea Zittel

Andrea Zittel’s A to Z 1993 Living Unitis a modular, portable living environment that includes a place to sleep, a modest kitchen, and storage—the essentials of daily life. Inspired by the limitations of her two hundred-square foot Brooklyn studio, Zittel began work on a series of functional living units that could be customized to meet individual needs and shape behavior according to different ideals. Interested in what she describes as the “fine line between freedom and control, and how people often feel liberated by parameters,” Zittel’s living units can be viewed as simultaneously constraining in their austerity and freeing in their utopian rejection of materialism.

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

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