Whiney Museum is always a fascinating place to visit. It was the third trip I took down to the Meatpacking District to see this beautiful piece of architecture. This is the kind of place where one can expect to spend hours in just one room. I tried to keep myself from doing that, however, there’s been some interesting pieces that just demanded attention for me put together the pieces that make them tick. For this reason, along with the fact that they all collectively serve their purpose the way they’re intended, I can’t pick just one work to place on the top shelf and call it my favorite. I could, however, pick one thing about the museum over the others! Just the sheer amount of young people inside, whether they’d be taking pictures, or sketching an art piece on their notebooks; or a guide asking a bunch of middle school students “What does graphic design mean?” were all endearing. I managed to take pictures of most of those happening, also shoot a few clips and edited them into a piece of timelapse video. I feel like places like Whitney, Guggenheim, and MoMA need to be visited at least once a year.

 

During the class trip to the 2017 Biennial at the Whitney Museum, I saw many fascinating works of art and film. One of the films that stood out to me the most was Tala Madani’s Sex Ed By God. I found this short piece really interesting. Tala Madani is an Iranian artist, who had multiple pieces of art at the Whitney Biennial, mostly focusing on genitalia. Sex Ed By God is a 2 minute animation which features a young looking female who is being projected on a screen while a pair of lips “God” ramble about sex, while two other men in the room look on, one older one seems to be a child. The pair of floating lips speaks in a heavy breathed voice and seems to be speaking about advice of stimulating a woman rather than typical sex ed classes.The men are staring at this woman on a screen, the words coming out of the lips are at times gibberish and not entirely clear

The part I like the best is how these two men and God are looking and talking about this female who is being projected on the screen, but then she reaches out of the screen and smooches the three of them in her hand and put them inside of her vagina. To me it is the moment when the woman takes control and power over the men who have been watching her this whole time. She then erases the screen she is on, taking herself off the screen and no longer an object to watch.

 

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go to the Whitney Museum trip with the class last Friday because of allergies. However, I really wanted to go visit the Whitney Biennial, and just the Museum itself because I heard its a MUST GO place. A lot of my friends know and have been to the Whitney, but I’ve never been there before. So, I decided to go on my own this week and it was a great decision.

First off, the building itself is a work of art. It has all these different dimensions and huge windows that give sneak peeks of the wonderful works inside. Also, it’s a plus that I was able to go in for free with a Student ID. The Whitney Biennial was quite overwhelming. There were floors and floors of arts displayed. They were all unique and beautiful, but I’m not going to lie. I wasn’t a fan of everything.

I love films and visuals with motion, but I’m also a huge sucker for paintings, sculptures, and photographs. Something about still framed arts make me think harder, feel deeper about them. One of the pieces I found capturing was a painting called Elevator. The painter is Dana Schutz. I really love this piece. It’s so detailed with different colors and textures. So many things are going on with so many different people, and yet, they’re all forced to be in this space to get to a specific destination. When I think about elevators, I feel like my time within that space is frozen. It’s a mindless ride. But for the time I’m on the elevator with the many people inside of it, too, I feel like, for that moment in time, everyone in it has the same goal, same feelings, same thoughts about whether the elevator will fall and our lives will end together, and just sharing a specific moment of being there together. Also, elevators are this closed space where anyone in it knows everything going on inside, while everyone outside has no clue. Playing with the use of privacy and being “revealed” to the public, almost like all of today’s hidden government issues, and even metaphorically like our hearts being closed and hidden of its chaos and brokenness. I feel like I’m babbling, but I’m sure I was going somewhere with this. Elevator is “that deep” for me. It just gets me thinking more and more. Just amazing!

As for film, I really enjoyed The Lesser Key of Solomon by Tommy Hartung. The reason why I really like this film was because of all the use stop-motion animations and just the overall color of the film. I read that Hartung created this film to capture this “hallucinatory reflecting themes of racial inequality, power struggles, systemic violence, and religious fervor”. Basically, it has A LOT going on in it. Although, I’m not a fan of dark demonic magic or anything the first part of the film talks about. I solely enjoyed this piece because of the aesthetically aspect of it. Stop-motion was a great touch to really give that distorted, breaky, unsettling feeling, which is something we feeling when we talk about “racial inequality, power struggles, systemic violence, and religious fervor”.

Whitney Biennial was very very interesting and I’ll definitely recommend more people to go before the exhibition ends! Maybe I’ll go again and maybe I’ll see new things I haven’t realized my first time there.

Whitney Museum Trip

Overall, this was my second trip to the Whitney Museum since I went with one of my other classes last year. However, I one hundred percent feel that my second visit was way more interesting than my first time in the Museum. This was because my first time at the Museum, we weren’t allowed to separate from the group and explore different works of art all around the museum, which made the first trip less exciting for me. Since we were able to explore on our own this time around, I was able to see more exhibits and have a much better time.

One of the exhibits that I saw was a small room that had eight walls with baloney slices on them. Each slice had a face of a Jewish person in the center. Overall there are at least 2,755 Jewish faces on these 8 walls of baloney, which according to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal is about twenty five percent of the total amount of Jewish citizens living in New York City to this very day. I found this interesting and fascinating because it was my first time that I saw a unique art exhibit was made based off facts about New York City. After I saw this exhibit, I had left feeling like I learned something new about the city that I grew up in.

Another exhibit that was enamored with was a small screening about a two Filipinos one men and one women leaning on each other in order to survive on an island. The man was seen saving the Filipino women by pulling her out of the water. The screening goes on to show the Filipino man describing some facts and information about the island to the Filipino women, to help her understand more about where she is. I felt that this screening was interesting because it showed how two people are trying everything they can to survive on a remote island away from civilization, with both of them only knowing so much about the island they are on.

One last exhibit that I found very interesting consisted of a small room with four walls that showed gates and fences on each wall which imitated the Mexican border. As you stay in the room, you hear train noises and cars and trucks driving by the Mexican borders through the gates and fences that are displayed on the wall. I felt this exhibit was interesting because I got to see what the Mexican border looks like for those who are trying to get into the United States or whoever is leaving the country.

In conclusion, my trip to the Whitney Museum was a much better experience than my first time at the museum since we were able to see different works of art and learn. I was able to have a much more enjoyable experience and even learned something new about my city that I never knew before. Overall I enjoyed my experience at the Whitney Museum.

In our visit to the Whitney Biennial there was a piece I enjoyed because of the way it was shown. The piece was called A Very Long Line by Postcommodity which is a production team of Raven Chacon, Cristobal, and Kade L. Twist. The piece focuses on the border between the United States and Mexico which has been a big topic in our current political picture. The video was shown in a small room. There were four projectors each pointed at a different wall. It was filmed inside a moving car. All you see is grass and landscape behind bars and railing. The piece made me feel trapped behind all those bars but the sounds also were disorienting. It was so loud in there, all you hear is wind and breeze as the car travels along the rail. You also hear the passing of other cars as you would on a highway. Each projector showed a different video which was a different part of the border. The videos also played at different speeds so if you were looking at the video in front of you per say, it might be moving faster then the two videos to your left and right. This difference of speed affected your peripheral vision and made the video in front of you seem as if it were really moving. You actually for a quick second could feel transplaced into the area. The installation was designed to disorient which I thought it did really well. It also was designed to create a sort of amnesia feeling or condition to evoke this idea of forgetting ones origins. The origins being forgotten mostly by United States citizens the Indigenous status of people from the Western Hemisphere.

This piece got me thinking of the differences between a gallery installation and a piece that is shown in theater. It got me questioning if this piece would work and give the same feeling if it were shown in a theater and to answer my own question it wouldn’t. What makes the piece work in creating this atmosphere is that being surrounded by the four projectors displaying this video creates a disorienting feeling. If displayed only one screen I don’t think the piece would evoke the same feeling.

This is a link to the piece I found on youtube, you get a better sense of what I was describing but the effect is more moving in person.

https://youtu.be/yeXbIPmFTGE

The class trip to The Whitney Museum was the first time I had ever been. I was excited to go because it is one of my friend’s favorite museums. He had already gone to see the biennial and told me many great things. As I explored the museum I saw several pieces that I thought were amazing. My favorite works were from the artist, Tala Madani. The piece I found to be extremely interesting was “Sex Ed by God.” The animated video featured floating lips narrating sex while two other characters watched. At the end of the video, a girl takes everything and puts it into her vagina. I enjoyed this piece because it forced you to use multiple senses to figure out what was happening. You’re required to wear headphones to listen to the piece, which I think results in more concentration from the person watching the piece. I definitely watched the piece more than once in order to make sure I wasn’t missing anything crucial from one of the characters. The other pieces I enjoyed by Madani featured babies. One piece was a painting of a baby reaching for floating breasts. The piece made me think about the way a baby see’s their mother’s breasts as separate from her. They are food not an extension of someone they adore. The other piece featured four babies crawling away with light shining from their butts. In the corner there is a man offering something to the babies as they walk away. I have no idea what this piece means but I thought it was very amusing. I would be interested in finding out Madani’s inspiration for the baby pieces. Another piece that struck me was by the artist Puppies Puppies. I almost walked passed it without realizing it was one of the art works. The piece was called Trigger and consisted of three gun triggers mounted on the wall. It was very minimal but conveyed the message that these small triggers are what is the cause of the damage a gun can do. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip to the Whitney and will definitely be back.