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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LINEUP, 1993

Gary Simmons, Lineup, 1993

In Human Interest

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Gary Simmons, Lineup, 1993

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Kerry Nolan: The gold plating of the sneakers in Gary Simmons’s Lineup makes them look almost like giant bronzed baby shoes or trophies. Despite the plating, you might still be able to recognize the different brands. Nike, Adidas, Puma. The sneakers stand in a row before a police lineup, the height chart painted against the wall of the Museum itself. But where are the suspects, the people who would occupy these shoes? The artist, Gary Simmons.

Gary Simmons: That’s what the piece hinges on, is what these people might be. And, you know what our assumptions are, or what potentially our assumptions are of the identities of these people. That’s why I really wanted to remove the actual identity and place that question in the viewer’s mind, of who you would think would be in this lineup.

Kerry Nolan: Simmons refers here to law enforcement’s tendency to view young African-American men, particularly those whose style of dress might include shoes like these, as perpetrators of crime, making them potential victims themselves at the hands of the police or even of their peers.

Gary Simmons:  A lot of kids were shooting each other over their sneakers. In a way, it was not so much a carjacking, but it was more of a sneaker jacking. So I was really looking at that kind of violence and how was that structured and who was supporting that, and who was driving that kind of market, that economy.

Artists

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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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