By Dan Fox
A view of the new Whitney Museum of American Art from the Hudson River (Photo: Karin Jobst)
It may look like a state-of-the-art sanitation plant from the outside – or, with its gun-metal paint job, the bridge of a aircraft carrier – but inside, Renzo Piano’s new building for The Whitney Museum of American Art is a winner. From the light and airy lobby, surrounded by glass, to the Richard Artschwager-designed elevators and from the spacious galleries with extensive views across the Hudson River to the ‘All Gender’ bathrooms, ‘the new Whitney’, as everyone’s calling it, is a museum that works hard for the art it contains, and - fingers crossed - for the visitors who will come to see it.
The building opens to the public on 1 May, but in the final weeks of April it’s halls have seen a whirl of press viewings and fancy shindigs. Word on the museum has so far been, for the most part, overwhelmingly positive. Located at the southernmost point of the wildly popular High Line public park, and surrounded by the top-flight boutiques, hotels and restaurants of the terminally gentrified Meatpacking District, the institution has moved away from the old-money-and-museums zone of the Upper East Side to the centre of New York’s consumer tourism industry. In an era when art institutions seem to be playing out their identity crises through ever more gigantic building projects and confused programming this move might signal a number of shifts both pragmatic and symbolic (see Jerry Saltz’s recent in-depth report in New York magazine on the museums arms-race), and yet the Whitney also appears to have gone back to first principles, albeit on a grand scale, placing front and centre both the needs of its collection and the need to be flexible to what artists might want. Two entire floors are now set aside for the museum’s permanent collection, throwing into relief how cramped and inadequate the old Marcel Breuer building uptown was for this purpose. There are 5,000 square feet now dedicated to the museum’s library, archives, works on paper study centre, and conservation department. (A huge improvement on the conservation team’s tiny working space back at the Breuer building.) A 170-seat theatre, which can be opened up to dramatic views across the Hudson, now gives the Whitney a purpose-built space in which to show performance. This theatre sits next door to a dedicated education centre. A total of 18,000 square feet are given over to the museum’s special exhibition galleries – ‘the largest column-free museum gallery’ in the city, according to the Whitney’s press blurb. The museum also now has approximately 13,000 square feet of outdoor exhibition space. Whilst all this increased space to play with must be welcome for the Whitney’s curators, the museum has not gone so far as to create pointlessly vast aircraft hangars in which only gigantic Paul McCarthy inflatables and torqued steel Richard Serra sculptures can hold their own.
Anticipating more of the kind of extreme weather that flooded the west side of Manhattan during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the museum has installed a flood mitigation system to protect the building and its contents. (Running up to the inauguration of the museum, campaign groups have tried to highlight another environmental threat to the Whitney from it’s proximity to a Spectra natural gas pipeline vault, which runs adjacent to the building. Protestors have also argued that this represents a missed opportunity for the museum to address broader problems surrounding the fossil fuel industry and climate change.) At both ends of each floor of exhibition spaces are huge windows, looking over the Hudson River on the west side of the museum, and across Manhattan to the east. Not only do these bring light inside the museum, the views speak to the Whitney’s relationship to the city that nurtured so many artists in its collections, and to the ghosts of the pre-gentrification Meatpacking District and riverside piers. (The museum looks out over the old site of Pier 52, at the very end of Gansevoort Street where the Department of Sanitation now has a parking lot. It was here, 40 years ago, in 1975, that Gordon Matta-Clark made his monumental architectural intervention ‘Day’s End’.) Furthermore, the view across the river to another state, New Jersey, is a subtle reminder that, despite its command of the historical narrative, New York is not the only place in the US where art gets made.
‘America is Hard to See’, installation view, 2015. (Photo: Nic Lehoux)
For all the nostalgic laments about the Whitney vacating the brutalist Breuer building, the fact that the museum functioned for so long in that dark, heavy upper east side art cave seems a little surprising. That nostalgia will soon fade; the Breuer had been the museum’s home for almost 50 years, but people forget that it was already the institution’s third location since it began life in 1914. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open a branch there in March 2016.) Press, art professionals and visitors alike will soon stop swooning over these new premises, and the hard work of following up on the whizz-bang fun of inauguration with thoughtful programming and community-mindedness (to the local art scene, to the neighbourhood, to the city) will begin in earnest. But first-flush excitement over Piano’s Whitney makes MoMA’s current building look all the more depressing, with its overcrowded and bland halls, which have all the charm of a large international bank or airport terminal. MoMA’s own expansion plans might turn out to be, by comparison, a whole load of effort for little gain. The Guggenheim, meanwhile, seems increasingly like an eccentric aunt who has some great outfits and stories to tell, but whom you can’t always understand.
‘America is Hard to See’, installation view, 2015. (Photo: Nic Lehoux)
How the Whitney’s inhabitants will make use of their new house remains to be seen. But the inaugural show of work from the collection, poignantly titled ‘America is Hard to See’ after Robert Frost’s 1951 poem, and a documentary made in 1970 by Emile de Antonio, is impressive. Organized by the museum’s chief curator Donna De Salvo, with a team including Carter E. Foster, Dana Miller and Scott Rothkopf (and assistance from Jane Panetta, Catherine Taft and Mia Curran) ‘America is Hard to See’ features approximately 600 works by just over 400 artists, and runs the history of US art from 1900 to the present, showing the country’s art to be innovative and diverse, angry and political, at times eccentric and funny, at other moments quiet and contemplative. It certainly includes the big hitters – you name them, they’ve got one on the wall – but puts dominant historical figures in minimalism, pop and conceptual art in perspective alongside lesser known artists from across the country. Chicago’s Hairy Who artists sit near New York pop legends; collage and assemblage by Bay Area Beats hang out round the corner from paintings by famous Ab Exers. The show makes a concerted effort to address identity politics, including amongst others works by David Hammons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Donald Moffett, Lorna Simpson, Fred Wilson and David Wojnarowicz. That said, old institutional problems die hard; the number of women artists included in the show only amounts to just over 30 percent, and as Holland Cotter observed in The New York Times, the only America this exhibition strives to see is the United States. Even in that regard, the show includes the work of just two artists of Native American descent; Jimmie Durham and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet. We do well to remember that the Whitney is a museum of art for only one country in the Americas. It is not an institution for Latin American, Caribbean, or Canadian art, and it is a pity the Whitney has not taken this new phase as a way to consider what the United States means in relation to its geographical neighbours, and histories of migration across North and South America. (A small but iconic photograph taken in the 1970s by the Los Angeles-based group Asco, for example, is one of the few nods to Latino art that I could find in the exhibition.)
Robert Henri, ‘Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’, 1916 (Courtesy: Whitney Museum, New York)
In the ground floor gallery is a small section of ‘America is Hard to See’ devoted to the origins of the Whitney in early 20th century New York. At the entrance to this room is a portrait of its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, painted in 1916 by Robert Henri. Henri was one of the foremost artists of the ‘Ashcan School’, who became famous for their pictures of ordinary life in New York, often depicting run-down and poor areas of the city. In this portrait of Whitney, his patron reclines on a chaise longue, dressed in a chic Chinese-style jacket and green silk trousers cinched at the ankle with red bows. (Her husband was reportedly outraged by the fact she was painted wearing trousers, and refused to have the painting in their home.) With economic disparity one of the most urgent crises in the US today, it felt poignant – and politically pointed – that the first work many visitors will see on entering the new Whitney is a portrait of a vastly wealthy woman, who held progressive views about the role of women in society, painted by a male artist who did not flinch from dirt and depredation in his work. Let’s hope that the new era Whitney will manage to hold within its walls the kind of contrasting, often contradictory perspectives that characterize the US.
An in-depth look at Renzo Piano’s architecture for the new Whitney Museum will appear in the summer issue of frieze.