The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  In 1973, one of Jack’s dreams came true: the Whitney opened its first branch museum.

  Bob Friedman helped to find space in a new building at 55 Water Street built by his uncles, the two founders of the development company, Uris Brothers, in the culturally deprived downtown area of the city. Hilton Kramer, always antagonistic, even gave the first exhibition there (of the permanent collection) a rave review in the Times. As head of the Museum’s education department administering the branch, David Hupert said that exhibitions would feature items concerning New York and its environment, experimenting with “things not ordinarily considered art,” as, for example, New York subway mosaics, with and without graffiti.

  One exhibition featured the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, official artist of the New York City Department of Sanitation, who handed out buttons empowering all viewers as collectors of garbage or toilet cleaners or street sweepers, at a time when few artists were addressing sociopolitical issues. It’s easy to understand why many people asked, “But is it art?” In this context, it was, and Mierle, most definitely an artist.

  Contributions from the corporate community downtown paid for this branch; students in the Independent Study Program curated shows. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, the education department also sponsored the Art Resources Center, in a building on Cherry Street almost under the Williamsburg Bridge, where young people had their own studios and interacted with artists and others. These kids were mostly minorities, mostly doing badly in school. During the long teachers’ strike, some would walk all the way across the bridge from Brooklyn to get to Cherry Street. Pleased by their progress, we had an exhibition of their work in the Lobby Gallery of the uptown Whitney.

  Although the audience for most of our exhibitions had never been and still was not large, a record number came the first year, attracted by the Breuer building: 741,408. The following year, 1967, the Andrew Wyeth exhibition drew the largest daily attendance of any show ever at the Museum: 4,787 a day. This crowd overtaxed our building and staff. Admission revenue wasn’t large unless we had “blockbusters,” and they were usually unpredictable. The Museum stepped up its focus on membership as a way not only to make money but to build our audience.

  Meanwhile, a new group of young curators working under Jack created, in the gray granite and slate of our austere, serious building, a series of intellectually challenging, spatially innovative exhibitions, including large-scale work, minimalism, Pop, multimedia, film, music, performance, “happenings,” and more. It was a time for social consciousness, too: such exhibitions as “Human Concern/Personal Torment” responded to the agonizing issues of the Vietnam war and to the civil rights movement. A show of black artists was highly controversial within the black community: some artists dropped out, and one group picketed the Museum, declaring that the very act of segregating black art was discriminatory. Defending the show, I wrote that “the Whitney has chosen its only means of expression … it acted upon its convictions.” Those exhibiting would be looked at seriously, as artists, I insisted, no matter what their color. Perhaps I was wrong and perhaps Jack was wrong, too, to have approved an exhibition that put artists together because of their color; but at that moment it seemed timely, right, and even courageous, since it emphasized the numbers of fine black artists who enjoyed little or no recognition.

  We watched the Breuer building accept forms of art that the curators and Lajko himself couldn’t possibly have foreseen, marveling at how well this new work looked — a great tribute to our curators’ skills at installation, as well as to the architect. Gray might be our color, but seldom now were we the “good gray Whitney,” as critics had described us on Fifty-fourth Street.

  There were, however, ever-decreasing funds available for purchases, while prices for major artists were beginning to soar. The Whitney couldn’t hope to buy these works, unless someone gave or raised a lot of money. No one did until Howard Lipman, an adventuresome collector who had recently joined our board, stepped into that role.

  In 1970 the Museum launched the New American Filmmakers Series, to showcase films of quality that would not be shown commercially. Until 1976, when the Jerome Foundation of Saint Paul, Minnesota, began providing major grants, it was primarily supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts. My cousin Barklie, a film buff and aspiring filmmaker, was responsible for this program, arguing cogently for an experimental film department with a full-time curator, different from MoMA’s emphasis on classic films. He made an analogy with the Biennials,

  where we present, in effect, the thinking of our art department which exists 12 months a year — we don’t just “show painting” — and therefore the show is the most important art show of each year in the USA, however imperfect. It is selected by experts in the field, and is based on their whole year’s gallery and studio visiting. In any historical sense, we will accomplish nothing with film … unless we adopt this point of view.

  And he contrasted the Museum’s performing arts program as just “showing music and dance without there being a real critical intelligence, … a grade B effort at best. Barklie continued, in this 1971 letter, to define his vision of the Museum’s role:

  In order for Jack to get this far, he must change his thinking from the idea that the Museum is really about painting and sculpture — but that we occasionally do other things … the strongest thinkers today no longer do. Let Howard Lipman articulate this. … Hell, he is the most committed collector of contemporary sculpture in the country — (and Gamoo would have grooved on Howard) — but he says and believes that film is the art form of this age — Well, shit, of course he wants any museum he is committed to to have a distinguished film program — like he wants it to be alive —

  This is why I wanted the Whole Earth Catalogue to be sold in the Museum, as it is. This is why I wanted Soleri [an avant-garde architect and philosopher whose show at the Whitney was extremely popular] to be shown, and why I rejoice in our having an architecture and city planning committee. The concept of discrete and separate fine art is no longer where our heads are supposed to be at — God is dead. Our world is a mess. And we are all supposed to be looking for liveable and workable alternatives to past patterns and categories we have become frozen into — and, yes, a museum can be this hip — and must be, Flora — because there are enough of us there who know this is the feeling it should have — and who don’t need the nostalgia or past-patterns trip. The Museum must grow like an organism — and in doing so reflect the growing consciousness all around us that everything else is an organism — that all the parts are related and therefore relatable. If we say this each year about art-in-life and art-of-life — which is like vital to be saying in the midst of the biggest and wildest and sickest and in a sense most beautiful city in the world — we are really saying something, then. WE ARE REALLY TAKING OUR RESPONSIBILITY TO PLAY AN EDUCATIONAL ROLE SERIOUSLY.

  How prescient, this letter. Barklie felt the sensibilities of those times. And yet, the Museum failed to act on his grand vision. Pieces of it, perhaps, but not with his all-encompassing view.

  Through Barklie, I sensed the possibilities. More cautious, insecure, I longed to be as passionate, eloquent, and forceful. It was relatively easy to strongly support the film and video program, and I did. It was much harder for me to criticize existing programs, such as the performing arts program or acquisitions, which also would mean criticizing Jack as director. My unconscious fear of losing love, I now see, was eroding my judgment capability.

  We did raise money from patrons who often didn’t appreciate the somewhat arcane film and video program, but who realized that it was becoming an important part of the creative world. They were wonderfully trusting. I remember, for instance, climbing up about six flights of stairs in Greenwich Village with a tidy uptown group who were intrigued by the Videofreex and their funky, lively videos. And despite Barklie’s prognostications, Jack was entirely supportive, even though funding was difficult and a large audie
nce lacking.

  Barklie was certainly right about the centrality of film to our art world. Today the film and video department has become an integral part of our program. It has increasing visibility in Biennial exhibitions, and occasionally its own floorwide exhibitions. For twenty years, until 1996, John Hanhardt, the leading scholar in that field, was its superb curator. Despite being on the cutting edge, it has seldom drawn adverse press, as our other exhibitions often do. Is this because reviewers of film and video understand their subject better than do reviewers of painting and sculpture? Is it because avant-garde film and video isn’t popular, therefore isn’t controversial? Is only popular art controversial? I’m not sure — but I was glad for the good reviews.

  When I became president in 1977, budget problems were forcing us to take a hard look at programs that did not generate enough support to sustain themselves. Determined to somehow keep the floundering film and video program going, I asked John Hanhardt to let me know when there would be a film appropriate for the board. Surely one or more of the new trustees could be enticed to fund this wonderful program. The film coinciding with our next board meeting had been made by an eighty-year-old Wall Street stockbroker. Perfect! After my enthusiastic introduction, over half the board followed me to the auditorium after the meeting.

  After about a minute, it appeared that the venerable filmmaker with the double career had surprised us with one of the most erotic films I had ever seen. One by one, shocked and embarrassed trustees slunk out of the darkened room. It had not occurred to me to screen the film ahead of the meeting. I learned the hard way from that moment on to screen everything trustees were to see at the Museum. Luckily, I was still in great favor as the new president. No one held this pornographic viewing against me, as far as I know, and so life went on.

  In 1982, the first major one-person video exhibition ever held at the Whitney, or anywhere in the world, took place. Nam June Paik was the best known video artist of the time, and all of us at the Museum were in a state of excitement about the opening. Born in Seoul, Korea, in 1932, Paik had graduated from the University of Tokyo with a degree in aesthetics and a thesis on Arnold Schoenberg, and had then traveled to West Germany to pursue his interest in twentieth-century music. There he met George Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus, which can be defined as “a movement against the perceived tyranny of fixed definitions and categorizations of what constitutes art making and its history,” as John Hanhardt says in the Paik catalogue. “The distinctive features of Paik’s art — influenced by Fluxus attitudes — were the active exploration and incorporation of randomness and chance and the appropriation of found objects into his performances and the making of objects.” In these central aesthetic strategies, he was influenced greatly by John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, whose writings and art he transformed into performance, composition, sculpture, and video sculpture.

  “At 50,” wrote Robert Hughes in his review of the show in Time, “Paik is the sage and antic father of video as an art form — the George Washington of the movement. …”

  Unlike our usual video programs, there was lots of publicity — the exhibition was a real breakthrough, and signaled the Whitney’s commitment to this relatively new art form. Nam June is a charismatic, delightful person, and his friends were gathering to celebrate — John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and many other artists. I went every day to watch the installation and knew right away that it would be a zinger!

  Relations between the actual and the represented jumped out from Video Garden, for example, as I looked down from a platform at dozens of upturned television screens projecting colored images, like summer blossoms, on the sea of lush green plants mingled with them.

  In another part of the exhibition Charlotte Moorman, an accomplished classical cellist, performed her famous TV Cello, 1971 live, topless, alongside TV screens carrying video collages of other cellists and herself playing. As John Hanhardt, the curator, wrote in the catalogue, she is “playing with the form of the sculpture and the video images. Thus the objects and screen images present metaphorical forms — synecdoche, metonymy — and irony which constantly jostle with each other.”

  We invited Kitty Carlisle Hart, chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts, major funder of the exhibition, to visit the show with Paik. We spent a long time with Video Fish. The catalogue summed it up well.

  “The real environment of the fish placed over the recorded one of the television set causes the monitor to become a fish tank and the fish tank to become a monitor — an added dimension to the metaphorical strategy implicit in all of these works. The visual quality and colorful playfulness of Video Fish belie its serious commentary on the nature of video as a representational medium and recording instrument. Here, representation and reality join together as equals.”

  We passed big tanks hanging on the wall, full of bright tropical fish swimming below a sequence of monitors on the ceiling. Beautiful Kitty in her elegant pink suit and high heeled red pumps, ready for any adventure for art’s sake, lay down on her back with us, thin foam cushions between us and the flagstones, and gazed up at the ceiling of the darkened gallery where television screens played a videotape of the fish. A magical moment. All around, couples seemed happily entertained and engrossed. “I think,” said Nam June in his Korean-accented voice, referring to the supine audience, “many babies born this year.” And roared with laughter, as did we.

  Nam June Paik, a visionary, an innovator, was the first artist to see the possibilities of video for artists. I was personally so proud of the Whitney for showing his work.

  The Video Fish installation transported me back to 1958, when Mike and I had gone to Mexico for a week and then to the Caribbean to spend another week with my parents on a big motor yacht. Snorkeling, I’d become enraptured by the variety of brilliant fish, and by the fans, ribbons, and tangles of seaweed and coral formations over pearly white sand in the aquamarine sea. I didn’t want to ever leave this ravishing world. But, as most mothers do, at the same time I worried about our children. We’d left our household in good hands, with kind caretakers, but we never went on such a long trip again.

  Art was increasingly intertwined with my daily life, affecting me in different ways. Walking around New York, I’d really look when my eye lit upon an old door with peeling paint, or a rain-soaked piece of newspaper, or an oily puddle with rainbow colors. And I’d associate the sight with a childhood fear, or recall a tender moment with a friend, or suddenly feel extremely sad or incredibly happy. In Nam June’s show, Video Garden seemed to open up rivers of feeling for my family. The effects of art are so mysterious and powerful. How important they are to us all! And that is what a museum is about, after all the rest is dust.

  By 1970 our two oldest children had become adults. Michelle was married, and although her marriage didn’t last because her husband was a Scientologist who cared only for that cult, she had a beautiful baby, Anthony. Duncan was at Ithaca College, and since it was the time of the Vietnam war, we worried that he’d be drafted. We were opposed to the war and so was he. Luckily, our draft board was headed by a man who announced he’d never allow a genuine conscientious objector to be drafted — and he didn’t. Cully was boarding at Middlesex School in Massachusetts. Fiona was the only one at home. Hard for me to believe. Although everyone came home for vacations, usually with friends, our house now seemed too big. We moved to a Victorian one with enough bedrooms for the whole gang on the main street of the village of Rowayton, a part of the town of Norwalk, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, near where we kept our boat. I decided to pursue a long-term goal: a college education. At Manhattanville College, only a half-hour drive from our home, I soon became immersed in books, homework, papers, and exams. Difficult as it was to awaken my mind to hard study, I found that I could keep up with others half my age as well as with my contemporaries — for about a third of Manhattanville’s student body were, like me, enrolled in “continuing ed” programs.

  “Well, Mom, that’s why you’re supposed
to go to college when you’re eighteen!” the children would tease when I complained about homework. However, the whole family was extraordinarily helpful, quizzing me for exams, editing my papers, cooking meals, and being patient with my moods. I’m as grateful to them today as I was then, remembering the long hours of study and writing when I was away from them in spirit, if not in body. There was even the year when, hoping for a career as a psychologist, I worked in a mental hospital part-time, coming home with horrendous tales of electric shocks and suicide attempts. Yes, my husband and children put up with a lot. In a positive aspect of my new involvement, on the other hand, I didn’t cling to the children as they grew away from their home and developed their own lives. And we had more to talk about, more in common, than ever before. I relished that. Somewhere, too, I expected to banish my age-old feelings of inadequacy, and join the ranks of those who earned respect outside the home.

  Eleven

  In the early ’70s, my life changed again.

  In a college seminar, I was assigned to write a paper on a woman who had influenced me. I asked my mother if she had any material on Gertrude. She sent me to the attic of her house in Long Island, formerly her parents’ house, and there, in boxes, closets, trunks, and scattered about on the floor, I discovered thousands of photographs, letters, journals, writings, and works of art. Even clothes: hats, shoes, feathered fans, beautiful Paris dresses, suits, coats. Gertrude’s wedding dress. Monogrammed footmen’s and coachmen’s uniforms. Antique Chinese robes. A fabulous fantasy of a grandmother’s attic. I had never lived there as a child — and only sporadically as a teenager, when I wouldn’t have been interested.