Cultural Passport View: Whitney Museum of Art

I recently went to the Whitney Museum of Art. It wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. I had visited two exhibitions. The first was Collecting Biennials, and the second was Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective. The only down part from my visit to the Whitney was that no picture taking was allowed. So sadly, I cannot show you guys what I personally witnessed through the artworks I had seen.

I saw the weirdest possible things. As soon as I stepped on the fifth floor, I walked into the first room I saw. There was something popping out of the wall. I had no idea what it was. As I looked into it, I saw holes, rivets, teeth, rope, and so much more. It was a bit frightening imagining what it was, and what it was possibly used for, or trying to represent.

I moved onto something even weirder. Made by Bruce Conner, I viewed Portrait of Allen Ginsberg. I was expecting a portrait of someone (a painting of sort) that was on the wall. I even looked around and my friend asked the security guard nearby if this description was meant to fit with what we saw. We basically saw a wooden surface holding nylon stockings, and bottles of some sort, with wax all over the place.

I went on and went to this huge figure that had one whole room to itself. Made by David Hammons, Untitled (1992), shows a bunch of stones, with huge rods of hair sticking out. I was frightened when I saw this because I thought I had seen a huge spider.

I saw a bunch of other awesome but awkward things in this exhibit (which I’ll explain another time, perhaps within my scrapbook.)

I went on to the fourth floor to view Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective. I hadn’t really done any research on this, so all I expected to see was a bunch of images or figures having to do with water. However, I was in for a surprise. After entering the first room, all I saw was pieces of meat. I saw fingers, arms, bugs, and the insides of a person. All were fake, but still, it was ridiculously nasty. Look below, isn’t that just atrocious?

There were about seven or eight parts to this exhibit, each part showing different types of artwork throughout Thek’s life. However, they were too different, as most of them had one thing in common: they all showed meat. The meat would either be in the work of art, and if it wasn’t, the exhibit had single pieces of meat hanging from the roof. It really was a nasty (but fun) exhibit to see.