Living at The Whitney
Joan Mitchell isn’t the only major exhibit at The Whitney – there’s also Michel Rovner’s “The Space Between,” a photography exhibit, a grouping of Oldenburg drawings, and of course the permanent collection of the museum (which is about to expand to previously unthinkable dimensions according to the The New York Times).
Lightning unfortunately did not strike (with the writing illumination) until after I had swept through the “Visions from America: Photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art 1940-2001” and the “Claus Oldenburg Drawings” exhibits. Consequently, I don’t have much to say on these exhibits (insert sigh of relief from audience). The Oldenburg exhibit – so who knew the guy could actually draw those giant hamburgers and safety pins? In “Visions,” the photographs are sketchy – some are exquisite, others humdrum. Many of the earlier photographs seem less staged and more interested in catching emotion or the sudden perfection of light hitting New York City street puddles. I must warn the next visitor to this exhibit – there is a shockingly realistic photo of a decapitated obese man. The image has not left me, no matter how many times I’ve requested its speedy departure (particularly during meals).
I won’t spoil the newly available tour de force on audio (free!) with ruminations on the permanent collection. But I’d like to relay some of the quotes I heard related to a few of the paintings (with just an iota of my own commentary):
“Early Sunday Morning” by Edward Hopper – a critic says that the work displays the “desolate inner landscape of America.” And again of Hopper (The Whitney is Hopper’s designated repository), another artist said, “Hopper could create mood through color and shape alone.” I suppose this factored heavily in his usual omissions of human faces and bodies in what are ultimately very human settings. For Hopper, I think, absence speaks volumes.
Color must “stir up an exquisite sensation,” said Oscar Bluemner, in describing what he did with heavy black lines dominated by stark yellow, white and red in “A Situation in Yellow.” His red skies are both ominous and darkly luxurious; his screaming yellows imply tantalizing fear; his thudding outlines play like the cymbal crash in Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” He seems to be creating, at least in the Whitney’s abbreviated collection of his work, a space in which passion and cruelty, abyss and typhoon commingle.
The last exhibit I encountered at The Whitney was by far not the least. Michel Rovnerin, in “The Space Between,” clearly has risen above her many peers who use multimedia without craft or concept. She oscillates between film and stills, harnessing the power of technological form to create provocative content, rather than relying on the innovation of form only.
She filmed many of her subjects in the vast expanses of dusty surfaces in Israel and Eastern Europe, then extracted stills from the scenes and altered the stills with chromographic plates, inkjet, or screening. In “Untitled” 2002 (looped footage of people walking in a line, tiled vertically – like a view of of ten moving sidewalks, one atop the other), she projects animation as the kind of hopelessness, futility and perhaps even resignation that mark post-modern culture.
The Whitney’s commentary says of Rovner’s work, as displayed in “Force,” "Red Field,” and “Blur,” that her isolated figures against hazy, empty backdrops indicate a kind “primal behavior” where everyone is “struggling against wind and sand.” Her fantastic piece titled “Mutual Interest” finds the same desert behaviors in modern warfare. In this work, two screens converge in the corner of a small dark room and a short film plays with a soundtrack alternating between sounds of bombing and birds chirping. The black-and-white film splices together footage of silhouettes of migratory birds falling and flapping furiously with clips of old B-52’s. The effect was mesmerizing.
The Whitney’s Introduction to “Space Between” reads, “Michal Rovner has spent the past two decades making art that probes the boundaries between different levels of reality – between presence and absence, ambiguity and fact.” For me, her work, in carrying such an exploration, is both jarring and meditative. Too bad they didn’t give me her book instead of Joan Mitchell’s.
Lightning unfortunately did not strike (with the writing illumination) until after I had swept through the “Visions from America: Photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art 1940-2001” and the “Claus Oldenburg Drawings” exhibits. Consequently, I don’t have much to say on these exhibits (insert sigh of relief from audience). The Oldenburg exhibit – so who knew the guy could actually draw those giant hamburgers and safety pins? In “Visions,” the photographs are sketchy – some are exquisite, others humdrum. Many of the earlier photographs seem less staged and more interested in catching emotion or the sudden perfection of light hitting New York City street puddles. I must warn the next visitor to this exhibit – there is a shockingly realistic photo of a decapitated obese man. The image has not left me, no matter how many times I’ve requested its speedy departure (particularly during meals).
I won’t spoil the newly available tour de force on audio (free!) with ruminations on the permanent collection. But I’d like to relay some of the quotes I heard related to a few of the paintings (with just an iota of my own commentary):
“Early Sunday Morning” by Edward Hopper – a critic says that the work displays the “desolate inner landscape of America.” And again of Hopper (The Whitney is Hopper’s designated repository), another artist said, “Hopper could create mood through color and shape alone.” I suppose this factored heavily in his usual omissions of human faces and bodies in what are ultimately very human settings. For Hopper, I think, absence speaks volumes.
Color must “stir up an exquisite sensation,” said Oscar Bluemner, in describing what he did with heavy black lines dominated by stark yellow, white and red in “A Situation in Yellow.” His red skies are both ominous and darkly luxurious; his screaming yellows imply tantalizing fear; his thudding outlines play like the cymbal crash in Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” He seems to be creating, at least in the Whitney’s abbreviated collection of his work, a space in which passion and cruelty, abyss and typhoon commingle.
The last exhibit I encountered at The Whitney was by far not the least. Michel Rovnerin, in “The Space Between,” clearly has risen above her many peers who use multimedia without craft or concept. She oscillates between film and stills, harnessing the power of technological form to create provocative content, rather than relying on the innovation of form only.
She filmed many of her subjects in the vast expanses of dusty surfaces in Israel and Eastern Europe, then extracted stills from the scenes and altered the stills with chromographic plates, inkjet, or screening. In “Untitled” 2002 (looped footage of people walking in a line, tiled vertically – like a view of of ten moving sidewalks, one atop the other), she projects animation as the kind of hopelessness, futility and perhaps even resignation that mark post-modern culture.
The Whitney’s commentary says of Rovner’s work, as displayed in “Force,” "Red Field,” and “Blur,” that her isolated figures against hazy, empty backdrops indicate a kind “primal behavior” where everyone is “struggling against wind and sand.” Her fantastic piece titled “Mutual Interest” finds the same desert behaviors in modern warfare. In this work, two screens converge in the corner of a small dark room and a short film plays with a soundtrack alternating between sounds of bombing and birds chirping. The black-and-white film splices together footage of silhouettes of migratory birds falling and flapping furiously with clips of old B-52’s. The effect was mesmerizing.
The Whitney’s Introduction to “Space Between” reads, “Michal Rovner has spent the past two decades making art that probes the boundaries between different levels of reality – between presence and absence, ambiguity and fact.” For me, her work, in carrying such an exploration, is both jarring and meditative. Too bad they didn’t give me her book instead of Joan Mitchell’s.
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