Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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During the late 1960s, many artists began to use the body—frequently their own—as an expressive medium. They refused conventional forms of painting and sculpture, instead turning themselves into their raw materials through comic play and madcap self-portraiture. Bruce Nauman’s mock-serious efforts to mold his own body and Scott Grieger’s impersonations of sculptures by well-known contemporaries, for example, spoof the role of the artist. Works by Cynthia Maughan and Hannah Wilke, meanwhile, offer feminist parodies of popular representations of women.

Using photography, film, and video in nontraditional ways, the artists whose work is included in this section borrowed the casual immediacy of snapshots, photo booths, and home movies. Art is no longer a realm of lofty values, but rather a forum for spontaneity and improvisation. At the same time, portraiture ceases to be a solemn introspective exercise, becoming instead a springboard for subversive and often humorous creative experiments.

Below is a selection of works from Making Faces.

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Bruce Nauman, Six inches of my knee extended to six feet, 1967

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Narrator: Art historian Janet Kraynak on artist Bruce Nauman.

Janet Kraynak: What's important about this piece is that as a viewer, if you came upon it and just looked at it, it would seem to be not just an abstract sculpture, but you would have no idea what it is.

Narrator: The title, however, is highly descriptive: Six inches of My Knee Extended to Six Feet.

Janet Kraynak: What Naumann starts with is the perspective as if one is looking down from one's body at your knee, and if you imagine making an arced line from the left side across the top of your knee to the right side. And he made it into a six inch piece. Then he just attached many of these together in the drawing, elongating it to the length of six feet.

He starts by making these distorted sculptures of the body and eventually where this leads in his work is he puts the viewer in a position of perhaps not being able to understand your body's relationship to space. What would it mean, for example, if you became estranged from your body, if it didn't quite add up or fit or look like what your body is supposed to feel like or look like?

For Six inches of my knee extended to six feet, Bruce Nauman used his own body as his subject, joining casts of a six-inch section of his knee until it measured nearly six feet (the work actually falls three and a half inches shy). His method is logical and rigorous, echoing the Minimalist artists’ use of repetitive forms and mathematical organization. The resulting work, however, is ambiguous—barely recognizable as a knee—and humorous in its title’s wordplay; Nauman has converted not only inches but also knees into feet.

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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Making Faces

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SIX INCHES OF MY KNEE EXTENDED TO SIX FEET, 1967

Bruce Nauman, Six inches of my knee extended to six feet, 1967

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Making Faces

11

SIX INCHES OF MY KNEE EXTENDED TO SIX FEET, 1967

Bruce Nauman, Six inches of my knee extended to six feet, 1967

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection