Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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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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An installation view of a diorama in a glass case.

Educational Complex is a compilation of architectural models that represent all of the schools where Mike Kelley studied: his one-room kindergarten, Catholic elementary school, junior high school, high school, and undergraduate and graduate art schools, as well as his childhood home. Kelley initially set out to build each model from memory; predictably, he could not recall the buildings’ precise spatial configurations. To address these lapses, he turned to the psychological theory of repressed memory, which suggests that any void in a remembrance indicates an unconsciously blocked traumatic event. By leaving the forgotten spaces blank in each model, Kelley locates sites where hypothetical traumas might have transpired. Playing with the fact that the complex in the title could refer either to an architectural configuration or to a psychological fixation, the work raises questions about the effects, damaging or generative, of institutional spaces and academic authority on individuals’ psyches.

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Institutional Complex

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EDUCATIONAL COMPLEX, 1995

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Institutional Complex

14

EDUCATIONAL COMPLEX, 1995

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection