Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

Exhibition works

15 total
Making Faces
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Making Faces

Floor 6
Making Faces
Floor 6

During the late 1960s, many artists began to use the body—frequently their own—as an expressive medium. They refused conventional forms of painting and sculpture, instead turning themselves into their raw materials through comic play and madcap self-portraiture. Bruce Nauman’s mock-serious efforts to mold his own body and Scott Grieger’s impersonations of sculptures by well-known contemporaries, for example, spoof the role of the artist. Works by Cynthia Maughan and Hannah Wilke, meanwhile, offer feminist parodies of popular representations of women.

Using photography, film, and video in nontraditional ways, the artists whose work is included in this section borrowed the casual immediacy of snapshots, photo booths, and home movies. Art is no longer a realm of lofty values, but rather a forum for spontaneity and improvisation. At the same time, portraiture ceases to be a solemn introspective exercise, becoming instead a springboard for subversive and often humorous creative experiments.

Below is a selection of works from Making Faces.

Scott Grieger (b. 1946), Robert Grosvenor, 1970, from the portfolio Impersonations. Offset lithograph, sheet: 10 1/4 × 7 3/8 in. (26 × 18.7 cm); image: 8 3/16 × 5 3/8 in. (20.8 × 13.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Marcia Tucker 71.203.3

ROBERT GROSVENOR, 1970

Scott Grieger’s Impersonations are self-portraits that playfully reference acclaimed artists by mimicking their iconic works or signature formats. Grieger uses his own body to suggest the illuminated disc of a Robert Irwin painting, a protruding geometric sculpture by Robert Grosvenor, and the size contrast between the viewer and a colossal Claes Oldenburg sculpture of an everyday object. With this portfolio, Grieger demonstrates that even the most abstract artworks can be related to the human form.

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Bruce Nauman, Six inches of my knee extended to six feet, 1967

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Narrator: Art historian Janet Kraynak on artist Bruce Nauman.

Janet Kraynak: What's important about this piece is that as a viewer, if you came upon it and just looked at it, it would seem to be not just an abstract sculpture, but you would have no idea what it is.

Narrator: The title, however, is highly descriptive: Six inches of My Knee Extended to Six Feet.

Janet Kraynak: What Naumann starts with is the perspective as if one is looking down from one's body at your knee, and if you imagine making an arced line from the left side across the top of your knee to the right side. And he made it into a six inch piece. Then he just attached many of these together in the drawing, elongating it to the length of six feet.

He starts by making these distorted sculptures of the body and eventually where this leads in his work is he puts the viewer in a position of perhaps not being able to understand your body's relationship to space. What would it mean, for example, if you became estranged from your body, if it didn't quite add up or fit or look like what your body is supposed to feel like or look like?

Bruce Nauman, Six inches of my knee extended to six feet, 1967

In Human Interest

SIX INCHES OF MY KNEE EXTENDED TO SIX FEET, 1967

For Six inches of my knee extended to six feet, Bruce Nauman used his own body as his subject, joining casts of a six-inch section of his knee until it measured nearly six feet (the work actually falls three and a half inches shy). His method is logical and rigorous, echoing the Minimalist artists’ use of repetitive forms and mathematical organization. The resulting work, however, is ambiguous—barely recognizable as a knee—and humorous in its title’s wordplay; Nauman has converted not only inches but also knees into feet.

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937), Swollen Eye, 1973. Gelatin silver print, mount: 12 × 16 1/2 in. (30.5 × 41.9 cm); sheet: 7 15/16 × 9 15/16 in. (20.2 × 25.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein 2007.80 © Ed Ruscha

SWOLLEN EYE, 1973

Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934), Hand Movie, 1966, from Five Easy Pieces, 1966–69. 8mm film transferred to video, black-and-white, silent; 5 min. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo in honor of Ron Clark and the Independent Study Program 2011.91 © Yvonne Rainer, courtesy of Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org

HAND MOVIE, 1966

Paul McCarthy (b. 1945) Sailor’s Meat and Sailor’s Meat, Europe Raw and Sailor’s Meat and Tubbing, 1975, from Combination Photographs, 1970-80. Fifteen gelatin silver and chromogenic prints; three gelatin silver prints with manila folder, fiber tipped pen, tape, ink, and paint; and four gelatin silver prints, Dimensions variable. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and Norah Sharpe Stone 2001.138.5a–c © Paul McCarthy; courtesy the artist and Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Los Angeles

SAILOR’S MEAT AND SAILOR’S MEAT, EUROPE RAW AND SAILOR’S MEAT AND TUBBING, 1975, FROM COMBINATION PHOTOGRAPHS, 1970-80

These photographs document moments from two of Paul McCarthy’s early performances, Sailor’s Meat and Tubbing. The artist, wearing a wig and lingerie, smeared his body with ketchup and simulated copulation on a soiled bed and in a bathtub. Employing raw meat, skin cream, and bodily fluids, among other props, McCarthy delivered a pointed attack on mainstream entertainment, consumption, and convention. Although such body-based actions characterized much video and performance work of the 1970s, the spectacular and often grotesque ways in which he extended these gestures distinguished McCarthy from his contemporaries and still challenge viewers today.

Douglas Huebler (1924–1997), 330 / Variable Piece #70: 1971 Global, 1974. Three gelatin silver prints, newsprint, typewriter ink on paper, and offset lithograph on board, 32 × 52 in. (81.3 × 132.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, Jodi and Michael Moreno, Renee Preisler, Barasch, Elizabeth Fensterstock, Elizabeth Kabler, and Michèle Gerber Klein and partial gift of Dana Huebler Hinrichs, Darcy Huebler, and Dorne Huebler 2014.259 © 2016 Estate of Douglas Huebler/Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York

330 / VARIABLE PIECE #70: 1971 GLOBAL, 1974

Douglas Huebler’s 330 / Variable Piece #70 includes images of the German photographer Bernd Becher, a close friend of Huebler’s, as well as Richard Nixon, and a wanted criminal. Yet the work is not a portrait of any one of them. Rather, it is part of a series in which the artist set out to “photographically document . . . the existence of everyone alive in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled in that manner.” The “obvious impossibility” was part of the point and Huebler underscored the absurdity of the project by grouping selections of images with tongue-in-cheek characterizations such as in the case of this work: “AT LEAST ONE PERSONWHO WOULD CUT OFF HIS NOSETO SPITE HIS FACE.” Huebler continued making works in this series until his death in 1997.

Hannah Wilke (1940-1993), S.O.S. Starification Object Series (Curlers), 1974. Gelatin silver print: sheet, 40 × 27 in. (101.6 × 68.6 cm); image, 40 × 27 in. (101.6 × 68.6 cm); mount (board), 40 × 27 × 1/16 in. (101.6 × 68.6 × 0.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee and partial gift of Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt 2005.33 Photograph ©Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles, Licensed by VAGA, New York

S.O.S. STARIFICATION OBJECT SERIES (CURLERS), 1974

Artists

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Frank WANG Yefeng, The Levitating Perils #2

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