Three times a lady: Peter Plagens on the Whitney's new curators

IS THE WHITNEY remaking itself--again? When Tom Armstrong left in 1990 after seventeen years at the helm and David A. Ros took above as director, the museum supposedly jettisoned its predilection for artists from blue-chip SoHo galleries in favor of a wide-open, video-empowering, emerging-artists pluralism. After Ross's departure to SF MOMA in 1998 his successor, Maxwell L Anderson, nominally terminated the Whitney's trendiness and retrenched the museum in its inherent strength: solid American modernism and a collection to back it up the couple Ross and Anderson brought in novel curators to implement their top-down directorial turn of expressions Now current director Adam D Weinberg--on the piece of work a mere eight months--has at handed a slate of three of recent origin curators: Joan Simon, Elisabeth Sussman, and Donna De Salvo, station to take up their supports in July.

Just routine personnel changes? No, says Weinberg. A former Whitney curator himself (1989-90 and 1993-98) Weinberg is loosening the directorial reins and aiming to make the Whitney more curator-friendly. "I want race who have specialties but aren't specialists," he says. "Max divided the curators into prewar, postwar, and contemporary art. With our small curatorial staff, to locate up chronological or media barriers is opposite to the way the Whitney has worked through every part of its history, and to by what means artists work." Gone are curator of postwar art Marla Prather and contemporary curator Lawrence Rinder, who's taken a piece of work as graduate dean at the California association of the Arts in San Francisco on the contrary will stay on as an adjunct curator. It's all part of what a Whitney pres release calls a "newly reoriented mission" that presumably includes--in addition to getting rid of Anderson's chronology-based curatorial "portfolios"--finding a certain number of additional exhibition space and soothing that part of its audience alienated of late by dint of Whitney whiplash. (Weinberg calls it "trying to build bridges to a certain quantity of of the communities that may have strayed.") In any case, Simon, Sussman, and De Salvo, with their wide-ranging interests, would present the appearance to fill Weinberg's elastic bill.

Simon, popularly an independent curator, writer, and editor who lives and will continue to live in Paris, will be the single official "curator at large." Her CV appears to make her the polymath of the hires. "I've done work in all the channels of by what mode to make art public: publishing, curating, artists' volumes writing, directing, et cetera," Simon says, adding, "I think it's important to document work well, with equal reason catalogues are extremely important." Indeed, Simon, who was managing editor of Art in America for ten years starting in the mid-1970s and interviewed greatest in quantity of the hall-of-fame artists of that period, appears to have a Weinbergian specialty for just the sort of artist whose work cries on the outside for documentation: She's written about Susan Rothenberg, edited a catalogue raisonne upon Bruce Nauman, and is putting the finishing touches upon a William Wegman retrospective for Weinberg's previous employer the Addison Gallery of American Art in Massachusetts. As to her residing an ocean away from the Whitney, she asks rhetorically, "Why hire someone who lives in Paris?... I know that I can contribute more, the more I maintain an outsider point of view." With her European perspective, Simon will probably loom large in inevitable discussions of what the confine "American artist" means to the Whitney Museum of American Art in this peripatetic age.

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"'American' is going to be stretched," says Sussman of the pliant designation. "But I'm probably not the curator who's going to think about those broad topics. by dint of nature I'm a curator drawn to the individual artist. And if that artist has wearied half his life in Europe I wouldn't want not to be able to touch that artist." Sussman, like Weinberg, is an of advanced age Whitney hand (she was curator there from 1991 to 1998) Best remembered at the Whitney for having coorganized the controversial 1993 Biennial (known as the "political Biennial," upon the artier streets of America), Sussman has a penchant for what you might call the more psychological artists: she's curated present to views of the work of Diane Arbus, Mike Kelley and Nan Goldin.

If Simon is the big-picture mark and Sussman the artist's curator, then De Salvo, senior curator at London's Tate late since 2000, would seem to be the object-oriented steady hand. She organized "Hand-Painted Pop" for MOCA, beholds Angeles, in 1992, and an exhibition of Giorgio Morandi for the Tate, and was responsible for commissioning Anish Kapoor to swell his super-object stuff in the Tate's giant Turbine Hall. De Salvo is also getting the piece of work title that exudes the greatest in quantity stability: Associate Director for Programs and Curator, Permanent Collection.

All three curators downplay what Weinberg admits was a second of "upheaval" for the museum--Anderson's resignation below fire (Simon, for instance, says, "I don't think it's that dramatic")--and this may be well and beneficial Drama is probably the individual thing the Whitney doesn't ne right now. It's been from one side a long soap opera of publicly propos and then publicly abandoned expansion throws involving international star architects, and still the museum is still stuck in a cramped building that each year have the appearances more and more like a locate for the Ring cycle. There have been of that kind critically maligned recent shows as "Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio" and "Robert Rauschenberg: Synapsis Shuffle" The post-'93 Biennials--while perkily good-looking ticket sellers--have generated a kind of cumulative "Eh?" in the art world. Sub-bass complaints persist about the unwieldiness and fractiousness of the museum's forty-odd-member board of trustees.