A Face in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life
Whitechapel Art Gallery
3 Dec 2004 - 6 March 2005
The Deeper Queue
Drawing from one hundred years of packed tubes and tight quarters, A Face In The Crowd explores the social and cultural stigmas of
city living
The city, despite producing the effect of a microcosm continually on the cusp of chaos, is overwhelmingly alienating and isolating. It is all too easy to forget that the silence in tube carriages enforced by social protocol is extraordinarily fragile; by one of the many absurdities of city life, one is trained not to react to a stranger's breath on the back of their neck or the physical intimacy necessitated by a close queue. The many absurdities of city life often obscure the fact that human beings are still very capable of savagery and empathy and, above all, humanness.
These themes are explored through a selection of twentieth century works that span modernism, surrealism, cubism and postmodernism as well as a wide array of mediums in the Whitechapel Gallery's Faces in the Crowd. The exhibit is arranged in loose chronological order, beginning with more traditional paintings occupied with the ideas of watching and being watched, including a sooty depiction of underground boxing by Jack Butler Yeats, as well as a Toulouse-Lautrec piece in which a haughtily bourgeoisie couple watches an opera. Walker Evans's Subway Portraits perhaps best illustrates the motif of the ironic physical closeness necessitated by city living - the 1950s photographic series shows businessmen huddled next to elderly women and workers in scenes contemporarily resonant.
In Adrian Piper's Mythical Being, the artist wanders through a crowd in a series of successive photographs, dressed as a white male replete with highway trooper shades and a white suit, distinguished from the rest of the herd populating the city sidewalk by an ethereal halo. The piece illustrates another odd distortion of reality caused by immersion in city crowds. Piper's self in relation to the rest of the world is inflated into narcissistic grandiosity - a perversion of self-importance of Freudian proportions. Although Piper's piece also makes a profound racial comment - while masquerading as a white male she boldly navigates the crowd, with captions include "I am the locus of all activity" and end with the terse "out of my way, asshole" - in the context of the exhibit it is more telling as a portrayal of how the self harbours delusions that insulate it from the utter alienation caused by city life.
Bruce Nauman's Clown Torture is included in the procession of videos displayed in the exhibit, and consists of two televisions sitting on either side of a stark white room, both broadcasting close-up shots of grotesquely made-up faces of clowns grinning and laughing maniacally. It's extraordinarily disturbing, but also prompts the viewer to ask why it is so unsettling - the commonplace image of laughing clowns becomes menacing as their leering maws and cackles seem to fill the entire room.
Nauman's seemingly incongruous piece actually epitomises a key theme of the exhibit, as does its placement as segue between rooms with non-media pieces. It shows that although city life is supremely stultifying and can leave one achingly lonely and disenchanted, re-entry into intimacy - here, in the form of Clown Torture - is jarring and alarming. In the deadening landscape of a modern city, real experience is entirely too real - inflated sense of self-importance aside, Faces in the Crowd suggests that at the end of the day most of us would rather just dissolve into the throng.
- Ashley Brown
