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

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

Institutional Complex

Glenn Ligon, Self–Portrait, 1996. Silkscreen ink and gesso on canvas, 48 × 40 in. (121.9 × 101.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; promised gift of Beth Rudin DeWoody P.2013.5. © Glenn Ligon

Institutional Complex

Floor 6

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.

For the series Cost of Living, Josh Kline interviewed janitors and then used a digital camera to photograph the body parts and supplies used to complete their tasks. He edited the images in a computer-aided design program, and the resulting assemblage elements were created on a 3-D printer. In this case he spoke with Aleyda, a housekeeper at the Hotel on Rivington, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Kline’s sculptures call attention to an often invisible labor force and remind us that workers’ humanity is sometimes valued less than the tools used to complete their jobs. They reflect, in his words, “the relentless push to squeeze more productivity out of workers—turning people into reliable, always-on office appliances.”

Robert Beck’s Thirteen Shooterspresents portraits of thirteen adolescent boys, all of whom carried out mass shootings at schools between 1996 and 2001. The thirteen images on view in the exhibition comprise professional headshots, yearbook portraits, snapshots of an arrest, mug shots, and courtroom photographs—all taken from the mass media and bearing the copyright of the journalistic source. In re-presenting these images, the artist critiques the conventional narrative constructed and uniformly applied by the media in reporting such stories—the transformation from innocent child to social outcast to violent criminal. The shooters referenced in the portfolio’s title could apply to the photographers as well as to their subjects. Beck’s selection of thirteen portraits ties the work directly to Andy Warhol’s 13 Most Wanted Men, a mural made for the 1964 World’s Fair, which depicted the mug shots of New York’s most wanted criminals of 1962.

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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.

Annette Lemieux’s Left Right Left Rightconsists of thirty photographs of raised fists—ten different images, each printed three times—nailed to wooden poles like poster placards. Some of the fists belong to famous political and cultural figures, including Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon, and Jane Fonda. Others are anonymous: the fist of a sailor, a preacher, a concertgoer at Woodstock. Together they suggest the united front of a political demonstration whose cause remains unspecified. Taken out of context, the individual fists could be raised in celebration, anger, or solidarity.

Following the recent presidential election, Lemieux requested that Left Right Left Right be reinstalled upside down. Lemieux’s gesture suggests a commitment to individual agency, the continuing power of protest, and a feeling, in her words, that the “world has turned upside down.”

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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Glenn Ligon, Self-Portraits, 1996

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Narrator: In these self-portraits, Ligon refuses to look directly out at us. The images, silk-screened onto canvas with thick enamel ink, are dark and grainy. Curator Scott Rothkopf.

Scott Rothkopf: He's both inhabiting the mug shot but then sort of undoing it by turning his head away from us and showing us only the back. It wouldn't be very useful in a police lineup or a criminal suspect picture. And I think that that tension, and that kind of resistance, is a real part of the work and its political interest.

And, you know, this is part of systems for law enforcement in this country, which black men are certainly more obviously made the target of than any other population. And I think Glenn is, in a way, responding to and resisting that.

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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.

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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View 382 works

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

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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

Exhibition works

Institutional Complex

COST OF LIVING (ALEYDA), 2014

T.J. SOLOMON, JR., 2001

SYNECDOCHE, 1999

LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT, 1995

A TO Z 1993 LIVING UNIT, 1993

SELF-PORTRAIT, 1996

A TO Z 1993 LIVING UNIT, 1993

LINEUP, 1993

EDUCATIONAL COMPLEX, 1995

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

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

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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

Exhibition works

Institutional Complex

COST OF LIVING (ALEYDA), 2014

T.J. SOLOMON, JR., 2001

SYNECDOCHE, 1999

LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT, 1995

A TO Z 1993 LIVING UNIT, 1993

SELF-PORTRAIT, 1996

A TO Z 1993 LIVING UNIT, 1993

LINEUP, 1993

EDUCATIONAL COMPLEX, 1995

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection