A history of the Whitney Independent Study Program - In Theory & Practice

ArtForum, Feb, 2004 by Howard Singerman

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The ISP is more international and ethnically diverse than it was in its early years, and as Foster notes, it has "expanded in the academic world as well." But there is a sense in which the program's environs are far more tightly bound. Many of its visiting artists have been coming for decades, since the program's first years: Rainer, Vito Acconci, and Haacke. A number are the program's own graduates: Bordowitz, Green, Holzer, Mark Dion, and Andrea Fraser (all of whom make work that foregrounds the situation of language in the pedagogical scene and that looks skeptically on the voices and texts of authority). The program has arguably grown more insular, more insistent in its focus on what Bordowitz describes as the "general problem of an engaged, socially relevant practice."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In its current incarnation, the ISP's closest ties in the city are not to Chelsea but to Columbia, Cooper Union, NYU, and the Graduate Center. "What gives the Whitney its strength is the way that it addresses the idea of an intellectual community," says Kelly, and "it has shaped an intellectual community" that draws its members from those campuses: Jonathan Crary, Rosalyn Deutsche, David Harvey, Chantal Mouffe, Andrew Ross, Gayatri Spivak, and Anthony Vidler are all regular visitors. Former participants Kwon, Alexander Alberro, and Jennifer Gonzalez are also regular seminar leaders, and one could argue that in the past decade or so it has been critical-studies alumni such as these, along with Baker, Pamela M. Lee, Molesworth, Frazer Ward, and others, who have been the program's most important representatives, and the most characteristic. The New York the ISP situates itself in now is a city mapped and theorized on its syllabi by post-colonial and globalization studies. And the art world and the questions of recent art history that Clark and Foster debate are the objects of an exceptionally well-articulated body of theory on the effectivity of cultural practice. It's not at all coincidental that Alberro, Kwon, Lee, and other ISP historians have been among the most important voices in the project of historicizing and problematizing--or as Clark puts it, honoring and representing--the art of the '60s and '70s, and setting at a distance the moment in which the program emerged.

1. Thomas Crow, "Marx to Sharks: The Art-Historical '80s," Artforum, April 2003, 47-48.

2. Hal Foster, telephone interview with author, May 21, 2003. All of the direct quotations from ISP faculty and participants are taken from telephone conversations or e-mail exchanges between mid-May and July of 2003. Over that period, I spoke with a number of ISP alumni and current and former members of its regular faculty, all of whom were exceedingly generous with their time and their memories. It seems, as Renee Green has written, that "for most people who have ever experienced being a participant in the program, the year of participation marks them indelibly." My thanks to Richard Armstrong, Peter Ballantine, Power Boothe, Gregg Bordowitz, Gary Bower, Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, Lisa Cartwright, Ron Clark, David Diao, Hal Foster, Dana Friis-Hansen, Brian Goldfarb, Renee Green, Nora Halpern, Gareth James, Mary Kelly, Jon Kessler, Grant Kester, Miwon Kwon, Simon Leung, John Miller, Yvonne Rainer, Walter Robinson, Bennett Simpson, and Roberta Smith. Whether I have quoted them directly or not, their recollections and opinions have all helped to shape this piece, and I am indebted to them.