At 3:30 p.m. on March 28, a small group of individuals wearing white hard hats stood at the intersection of Tenth Avenue and Gansevoort Street outside the gate to the construction site of the future Whitney Museum. For days after Hurricane Sandy, the excavation had been a lake spilling over the surrounding streets, while tank trucks endlessly pumped water from the neighboring buildings. One of the hard-hatted bystanders turned out to be the Whitney’s director, Adam Weinberg, who confidently pointed out the post-Sandy addition of a sloping concrete berm at the base of the building that now has reached its full height, five stories above the river.
The new building is not scheduled to open until 2015, but one of the works in the current Biennial exhibition at the Whitney on Madison Avenue involved the removal of a section of wall (actually a temporary partition), its transportation to the Gansevoort site, and its incorporation in a performance choreographed by Biennial exhibitor Yve Laris Cohen. A wall label next to an incision in the sheetrock wall indicated that the performance would take place in the unfinished new building on five dates between March 28 and May 3. Although the small participating audience was largely selected by the artist, the wall label held out the possibility that an invitation could be elicited by emailing the museum’s performance office.
Once the waiting audience members had checked in and signed waivers of liability, they moved on through the gates and squeezed into two construction elevators that ran up the outside of the building. Taking up a good deal of elevator space was a wrapped box about 5 x 5 feet x 6 inches. Passengers were deposited on the third floor where they made their way over pipes, wires, and construction debris to a vast space, reportedly the largest in the museum, a future theater.
High in the wall at one end was a horizontal opening for a control booth, while the opposite wall was made up mainly of windows overlooking the river and a stretch of New Jersey. A row of propane heaters stood in the center of the room. In silence, the audience lined up along one wall as instructed by the artist, a brisk young man in a white T-shirt and black pants. He then slung himself, head down, over one shoulder of a tall well-built art handler. Minutes went by, then he slipped off one shoulder and hoisted himself onto the other; this was repeated about five times. He then removed the covering from the package, revealing the slab that had been extracted from the Whitney’s wall. The art handler, Tom, moved over to a corner near the windows. The artist/choreographer appeared in the control booth opening and announced that the heaters could not be moved because regulations required two movers. Instead, Tom would describe the hypothetical moving and placement of the heaters at timed intervals as directed by the artist’s hand signals.
After the imaginary ballet of the propane heaters had been completed, the artist began shoving the section of wall, which was revealed to have “transsexual” printed on one side, into the elevator, then out of the building and down a ramp toward a waiting van. For about 20 minutes, Yve Laris Cohen, assisted by curator Stuart Comer and two young women in hard hats, struggled to fit the wall slab into the obviously too small opening at the back of the van. Finally Yve Laris Cohen got into the van and drove away, abandoning the orphan section of wall.
Three days later, a return visit to the Whitney Biennial verified that indeed a large section of a temporary partition on the third floor had been removed. So also had the wall label. For the 2014 Biennial, three curators were each given a floor of the Museum so at each level, there was a different thematic focus and a well orchestrated dynamic to the installation. An interview with Stuart Comer, the guest curator who selected Cohen’s project, revealed that, having recently returned after 15 years in London, he is now the curator of film and video at MoMA. The Biennial exhibition continues through May 25.
