Gray: The Whitney is Hard to See

America

"Backpack," John St John, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The beams. The columns. The stairwells. The flooring. The steps to the street. The handrails. The restroom tiles. The cladding. The metal terraces. The mullions. Everywhere gray. Fifty shades of it, surely, maybe more. There are grays in the world that have depth, warmth—grays that you can lose yourself in. Indeed, gray—à la the Grays—has stood metonymically for architectural richness and complexity, combining both intellectualism and play. These grays are not those. These are cool, flat grays that sit on the surface, resisting penetration. These are grays that instantly ask you to forget them, grays meant not to draw the eye but to deflect it away to something else, deferring to something more important.

Indeed, this is an architecture that rebuffs the eye, a self-effacing architecture that privileges its surroundings and its contents altruistically over itself. And, some would ask, why not? The Renzo Piano-designed Whitney sits in one of the most energized quarters of Manhattan. Feeding off of the constant flow of humanity spilling out of the High Line, the Whitney practices a clever form of self-interested Good Samaritanism, transforming the sidewalk into a terraced public landscape, suffused with sociality and neon green chairs. The glass membrane separating lobby from terrace is stretched taut, willing in the crowds only to confront them with a ticket queue ten registers wide and four roped rows deep.

The recommendation is issued by rote: “Start at the top!”—the top being the location of a closed special exhibitions gallery, a closing café, and the clear destination: an outdoor terrace in galvanized gray that is not much more than a perch facilitating a spectacular photogenic panoramic view of lower Manhattan, bathed in the golden light of late afternoon. When does the spectacular become gratuitous spectacle? Perhaps when it is served up on every floor.

The experience of art at the Whitney—a wide ranging collection of American art, whose disparate threads are skillfully woven together by the very notion of plurality and difference in its inaugural show, America is Hard to See—is a thoroughly Postmodern form of disinterested contemplation in a state of distraction. One emerges onto each exhibition floor from the central core, then directed through galleries in a centrifugal trajectory. The rhythm of painting—painting—painting—self-important guy taking a selfie in front of a painting—painting—is interrupted by an expanse of glass, the discovery of an operable door, and the sudden heat and noise of the city. Admire the waterfront, turn and admire the skyline, admire oneself through the Apple looking glass and document that you’ve been there—now back into in the hushed white box, chatter dutifully swallowed, painting—painting—painting. This cycle, repeated on every floor, surreptitiously subverts one’s original purpose for showing up in the first place. Rather than absorbing oneself in the art, one is absorbed by the spectacle of the city, a surreal and lush experience of urbanity undulating outward and upward in slow motion. America (40.7732° N, 73.9641° W) turns out to be rather stiff competition for America.

Theperch

"Water Tower," John St John, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Whitney is a place to see from, at times it is a prism to look through, and it is certainly a place to be seen—but it is never an object to gaze at. On the contrary, its smooth glass and painted metal exterior rebuffs all but the most determined onlookers, its image all but impossible to fix in one’s mind. A building (almost) without qualities, like a coquette who has grown suddenly shy, it masterfully redirects attentions outward and away to its surroundings, surely more worthy of the gaze.

Architectural discourse has long dispensed with utility as a mandatory criterion for its constituent objects. In Greenbergian fashion, the effort to find the minimum fundamental conditions for architecture, as opposed to building, has chipped away a great many historical barnacles. A building may proudly announce its lack of program (La Villette), it may determinedly thwart its occupants (House VI), it may ceaselessly leak (Villa Savoye), it may present itself as an utter banality (Guild House), and it may even be reduced to its most ephemeral (Environment Bubble). So what must a building be, what must it do, to qualify as architecture? Of late, the answer seems to be: a measure of participation in one of the many circulating debates that make up contemporary discourse. Proffering more than just innovation or novelty, a work of architecture should tender a proposition in response to one of the discipline’s numerous problematics. Deftly evading such obligations, the Whitney can only productively be read as a work of conceptual art that challenges deeply-held notions about architectural visuality—asking whether it might be possible for a work of architecture to have no visual character whatsoever, and remain a work of architecture.

Must an architectural experience be rooted in the experience of looking at architecture? A curt no, the Whitney seems to reply. Instead, it argues that a building can still be architecture when it exists solely as a scaffold to behold its contents or its surroundings—but never itself. The Whitney’s grayness, its intentional inconspicuity, works to circumvent our expectation that architecture say something about architecture, or even that it hold our interest as architecture. The Whitney may be staking an ontological claim, but is it also a discursive proposition dressed up as a rejection of such engagement? The Whitney’s ostensible discursive uselessness, even as it engenders a magnanimous surplus of utility for the institution and its visitors, suggests that we might do well to think about the lingering demands we place on architecture. Appreciating the building for what it does rather than what it is, for the pleasurable experiences it stages rather than the pleasure of experiencing it, is certainly prompt enough to consider whether contemporary views of architecture’s fundamental obligations are worth releasing or preserving.