Lee Friedlander: America By Car

Driving across most of the country’s fifty states in an ordinary rental car, master photographer Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) applied the brilliantly simple conceit of deploying the sideview mirror, rearview mirror, the windshield, and the side windows as picture frames within which to record reflections of this country’s eccentricities and obsessions at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Friedlander’s method allows for fascinating effects in foreshortening, and wonderfully telling juxtapositions in which steering wheels, dashboards, and leatherette bump up against roadside bars, motels, churches, monuments, suspension bridges, essential American landscapes, and often Friedlander’s own image. Presented in the square crop format that has dominated his work in recent series, and taken over the past decade, the images in America by Car are among Friedlander’s finest, full of virtuoso freshness and clarity, while also revisiting themes from older bodies of work.

Lee Friedlander: America By Car is organized by Elisabeth Sussman, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography.

Whitney on site: Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger designs the third Whitney site-specific installation at 820 Washington Street on the corner of Washington and Gansevoort Streets. Kruger produces a dramatic intervention that addresses the viewer with powerful and enigmatic textual statements and engages with the social history of the site. The artist has described her motivation for her installation as follows: “Because I’ve spent so many years in lower Manhattan, the streets are rife with remembrance. So I’ve tried to mark the site with a gathering of words about history, value, and the pleasures and pains of social life.” The installation uses bold text to respond to the viewer’s visual and temporal experience of the site and its surroundings. Some of the statements are drawn from Kruger’s catalog of signature phrases like “YOU BELONG HERE” and “BELIEF + DOUBT = SANITY.” Other statements respond to the neighborhood’s shifting identity and address the changing industries that have inhabited it from meatpacking to fashion to art. Texts printed on vinyl are attached to surfaces around the site and are visible from the street and the High Line. Kruger’s installation elegantly and provocatively writes itself into the activity and history of the museum’s future downtown building.

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990), Marker Cones, 1982. Silver dye bleach print. Courtesy the Jimmy DeSana Trust

The first installation in a two-part exhibition, Off the Wall: Part 1—Thirty Performative Actions, focuses on actions using the body in live performance, in front of the camera, or in relation to a photographic or printed surface, or drawing. Each action displaces the site of the artwork from an object to the body, acting in relation to, or directly onto, the physical space of the gallery. The wall and floor become the stage for these actions: walking on the wall, slamming doors, slapping hands against the wall, gathering sawdust up from the studio floor, walking on a painting, striding and crawling around a small cylindrical space, writing or drawing on the wall and floor, or performing a striptease behind the transparent plane of Duchamp’s Large Glass. The exhibition also includes a number of works that reveal the underlying theatricality of the performative action and the ways in which artists stage the self in images that question conventions of identity, gender, and the body.

The exhibition includes the re-performance of iconic early works by John Baldessari and Yoko Ono, as well as recent works by young artists. It includes work by Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Jonathan Borofsky, John Coplans, Jimmy DeSana, Trisha Donnelly, Simone Forti, Dara Friedman, David Hammons, Lyle Ashton Harris, Jenny Holzer, Peter Hujar, Joan Jonas, Kalup Linzy, Robert Longo, Nate Lowman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Paul McCarthy, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler, David Salle, Lucas Samaras, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Andy Warhol, Hannah Wilke, Jordan Wolfson, and Francesca Woodman.

Off the Wall: Part 2—Seven Works by Trisha Brown, features the Trisha Brown Dance Company, on the occasion of the company’s fortieth anniversary, performing iconic works from the 1970s, including the spectacular Walking on the Wall, originally performed at the Whitney in 1971; performance films and a sound installation, Skymap, will also be on view. Works will be performed daily from September 30 through October 3, 2010, in the Second Floor Galleries, Sculpture Court, and outside the Whitney Museum of American Art on East 75th Street. Planned performances include Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Falling Duet I, Leaning Duets I and II, Spanish Dance, Floor of the Forest, and the sound installation Skymap.

Part 1 is curated by Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator. Part 2 is curated by Limor Tomer, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of performing arts.

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
General Information: (212) 570-3600
info@whitney.org

MONDAY CLOSED
TUESDAY CLOSED
WEDNESDAY 11 am–6 pm
THURSDAY 11 am–6 pm
FRIDAY 1 pm–9 pm
SATURDAY 11 am–6 pm
SUNDAY 11 am–6 pm
Admission is pay-what-you-wish on Fridays, 6–9 pm.

General admission $18
Ages 19–25 $12
Ages 62 and over $12
Full-time students $12
Ages 18 and under FREE
Members FREE
One-day pass to the Kaufman Astoria Film & Video Gallery only $6
Admission is pay-what-you-wish on Fridays, 6–9 pm

How to get there:
Subway: 6 Train to 77th Street
Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4 to 74th Street
Car: There are several parking garages nearby the Museum.

http://whitney.org