2014 Whitney Biennial
Tony Tasset, Artists Monument, 2014. Etched
acrylic mounted on steel and wood. Collection
of the artist; courtesy Kavi Gupta, Chicago.
While Leonard’s piece, cleverly titled
945 Madison Avenue, nods to the Whitney’s past, another work in the show,
Artists Monument by Tony Tasset, looks
to the museum’s future. The monumental sculpture is off-site on West 17th
Street in Hudson River Park, cunningly
placed just steps from the Whitney’s
new home. Like a sculptural hybrid
of Gerard Richter’s 4900 Colors and the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the piece is
a massive color block of tiles engraved
Certainly there are pieces in this
show which would bewilder Gertrude
Vanderbilt Whitney were she roaming
the galleries of her museum today.
104
PEACHY
with the names of 392,486 artists culled
from the past two centuries—those
included range from the obvious to the
obscure. The artist commented that the
piece is about removing hierarchy as
each artist has the same billing on the
piece. A bit ironic, as the work itself was
selected for a curated show, but nonetheless it is refreshing that this rather
democratic piece was chosen as, perhaps, a harbinger of things to come.
945 Madison Avenue and Artists Monument are two of the more successful
pieces in this year’s Whitney Biennial,
a show which, every other year, presents a curated snapshot of the state of
contemporary art in America. When
the Whitney first came up with this
concept in the thirties, the task was
not nearly as fraught as it is today and
the museum boldly hosted a Whitney
Annual. However, the post-Warhol
era witnessed the death of art as it had
been known and its resurrection took
a form which would not be recognizable to former generations. Certainly
there are pieces in this show which
would bewilder Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney were she roaming the galleries of her museum today, including
Peter Schuyff’s carved pencils, Lisa
Auerbach’s knitted sweaters with
political invective trim, and The Bjarne