Doug Aitken Electric Earth, 1999. Film still, eight laserdisc installation and architecturalenvironment. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2000.145 © Doug Aitken.
Withney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum presents Sites, an exhibition exploring the notion of site or place in Art
From February 19, 2009 to May 3, 2009, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents Sites, an exhibition exploring the various ways that artists have expanded and dealt with the notion of site or place
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Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition comprises approximately 50 works madebetween 1969 and 2005, including selected drawings, sculptures, prints, photographs,film and video. The exhibition is curated by Whitney curator Carter E. Foster and seniorcuratorial assistant Gary Carrion-Murayari.
Instead of attempting to realistically depict physical places—interiors, landscapes, or cityviews—artists have pushed the boundaries of sculpture and adopted time-based media toforge a connection between viewers and their surroundings. This resulted in works thatnot only represent sites but also serve as locations for a new kind of physical experienceor imaginative contemplation.
The exhibit includes works by artists such as David Smith who, throughout his career,created complex photographic compositions of sculptures and the places that inspiredthem. This expanded the relationship between the work and the site of its creation andultimately served as a precedent for artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, includingRobert Morris, Barry Le Va, and Michael Heizer. These featured artists conceived theirsculptural work with a particular place in mind and used drawing to delineate their artisticactions before execution. A group of prints by Robert Morris, for example, propose anumber of dramatic interventions into the landscape while the work of Agnes Denestransforms familiar images of the natural environment to suggest utopian relationshipsbetween us and our surroundings.
Artists have more recently moved fluidly between the site-specific and thevisionary—often using drawing and video to combine these two positions. Works byDoug Aitken and Gary Simmons reveal this shift; Simmons’ wall drawing registers thetrace of the artist’s presence in chalk, while Doug Aitken’s multi-screen videoinstallationoffers an experience of time and space between the real and the imaginary.
Other artists include Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock, Robert Gober, Bruce Nauman, RichardSerra, and James Turrell, among others.
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