LOST IN SPACE

The Whitney Museum reopened two months ago in new expanded digs in the Meatpacking District, a colossus designed by Renzo Piano on Gansevoort Street that spans Tenth and Ninth Avenues. It has huge column-free galleries on its fifth through eighth floors, picture windows on its west facade with views to the Hudson River, staggered balconies on its east facade with views to the Highline, and an open glass-walled lobby that doubles as a public plaza.

It’s hard, from outside, to get a clear sense of the building. From Fourteenth Street its decks and railings gives it it the feeling of an approaching luxury liner. From Tenth Avenue it looks like a postmodern playhouse, a precarious stack of seven smaller volumes finished in different materials. The Gansevoort Street facade, where one enters, is dominated by the sloping hull of the gallery spaces that’s cantilevered above. This immense, inert mass is wrapped in blank green-grey metal panels that give no scale or sense of the interior.

And it’s hard, from inside, to get a clear sense of the building. The visitors’ pamphlet shows a building cross section rather than floor plans, suggesting that, like the old Whitney, it’s a vertical museum, experienced floor-by-floor. But there’s no hierarchy or variety in the gallery floors – they’re all the same. And there’s no element tying them together, like the iconic concrete stair in the old building. The ceremonial stair at the new building reaches from the ground floor to the fifth and then, abruptly, stops.

The new Whitney is a super-large building that feels as if it’s been conceived in small moments, without any central organizing principle. Many of its details are exuberant and exquisite: the staggered patio decks and runs of railings, the high glass curtain wall at the sidewalk cafe, the attenuated steel posts that support the cantilevered gallery floors, the punched ship windows at third floor study rooms. But the building has no heart. One walks through it searching for the vantage point from which all its operations make sense, and just can’t find it.

Photograph by Ed Lederman, courtesy of the Whitney Museum.

July 05, 2015 by Nalina Moses

AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

The Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney is splendid art world spectacle. The lines are long, the crowds are lively, and the artist’s sculptures and paintings, particularly the monumentally-scaled works on the higher floors, spring to life inside the museum’s cavernous white-walled, stone-floored galleries.

The art varies tremendously in terms of materials, but it’s all of a piece: bright, synthetic, energetic, and relentlessly positive. Rather than beauty or pleasure, it goes after happiness. In his work from the 80’s Koon was focused, more intellectually, on consumer culture and advertising, and their promises of satisfaction. In later work, to get at the same, he crafts his own iconography of happiness. He shows us candy, toys, cartoon figures, pop culture heroes, romantic love and (very literally) sex. Embedded in all of this is a notion – sweet, uncomplicated, contemporary, and profoundly American – of what happiness is.

The most powerful pieces are from the 1994 Celebration series, massive sculptures and paintings based on popular imagery. The series includes the iconic sculpture Yellow Dog, a 10-foot high yellow stainless steel rendition of the kind of balloon animal distributed at childrens’ birthday parties. (It’s an elegant piece, and the most popular spot in the exhibit for selfies.) Also on display, from the same series, is a monumental, multi-colored aluminum sculpture of a pile of Play Dough, and paintings of toys: action figurines, plastic horses, stuffed animals, and building blocks.

My favorite painting shows of slice of birthday cake wrapped in pink mylar. It’s gigantic, about the size of a double door, and rendered in vivid, baroque perspective, as if it’s about to be shoved into the viewer’s mouth, in a palette of bracingly artificial colors. The cake is no longer food – a form of nourishment – but a symbol of bliss. The painting is set in a futuristic, hyper-real style, yet remains a literal, innocent image. There are no hidden depths here, no irony and no commentary. The dazzle is, for Koons, what happiness is all about.

Image courtesy of Jeff Koons. Jeff Koons. Cake, 1995–97. Oil on canvas; 125 3⁄8 x 116 3⁄8 in. (318.5 × 295.6 cm). Private collection. © Jeff Koons.

October 18, 2014 by Nalina Moses

The most vivid element of anthropologist Mick Taussig’s multi-media happening Berlin Sun Theater, performed at the Whitney Museum last month, were the dances by Kyle Bukhari. Taussig’s goal was "the re-enchantment of nature in the age of global meltdown.“ Specifically, he examined ways our diminished experience of the sun has ruptured elemental physical and mythological connections. The piece unfolded around a personal, poetic text that Taussig read out loud on stage. Enriching the narrative were musical passages, film clips, project images from Taussig’s notebooks, and Bukhari’s dances. Cutting through the shadowy, ground-floor atrium of the Museum, Bukhari enacted routes, rotations and repetitions that recalled planetary motion. At certain moments, moments explosive with feeling, the dancer illustrated specific details from Taussig’s stories. He became, fleetingly, a tree wrestling upwards from the ground, a cloud of fireflies interrupting the darkness, and, in a big bubble-headed mask, the moon.

I had always thought that dance was inevitably tied to human stories because of its dependence on the body, that it was, essentially, about a person moving through the world. But Bukhari’s remarkable transformations showed otherwise. The ease with which he made himself a moon, spooking and enchanting audience members as he emerged among them, got at the majesty of that celestial body. It made clear that a dancer isn’t limited to human actions – he can be anything he imagines.

March 25, 2013 by Nalina Moses

If last year belonged to Damien Hirst and his spots, then this year belongs to Yayoi Kusama and her spots. The Tokyo-based artist helped Louis Vuitton roll out spotted accessories, clothing and window displays, installed spotted earth art at Pier 45, and is being feted with a retrospective at the Whitney that highlights her spot performances and paintings. But while Hirst’s spots radiated happiness, and stripped painting to its syntactic, pleasure-giving essentials, Kusama’s spots are testimony to an obsessional, repetitive personality. They’re strange.

The introductory wall text at the Whitney describes Kusama as an outsider artist rather than a conceptualist, which is what I think she is. The fact that she voluntarily checked herself into an insane asylum in 1973, where she remains, is offered as irrefutable evidence. This description seemed insulting to me at first, but after seeing the exhibit I might agree. The work’s single-mindedness – its disregard for proportion and balance – make it hard to understand as art. This is particularly true of Kusama’s sculptures, conglomerations of stuffed biomorphic forms that resemble protozoa, sperm and phalluses. As we passed a particularly exuberant piece my companion, a strong and sophisticated lady, covered her eyes and said, “I just can’t take this." Kusama’s work is powerful and also unsettling. It reminds me that art always comes from a person, and that that person might have no choice about who she is.

August 14, 2012 by Nalina Moses