Extraordinary. The Whitney is burning down the Independent Study Program to save the Independent Study Program. Scott Rothkopf issued a statement suspending the ISP. He fired the new associate director, who had named him in her criticism of the censorship by senior museum administration of a pro-Palestinian capstone exhibition and performance last month by ISP participants. And he cited the absence of an ISP director as a reason to rethink the ISP altogether, without acknowledging that he had eliminated the ISP director’s job in February, before all this censorship started. Or became public.
Brian Boucher’s report on artnet has details, quotes, and links to previous incidents, including protests and callouts of trustees last week. The trustees’ involvement in arming Israel and supporting its settler-led ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is not a non-issue, but I think Rothkopf is no puppet; he is fully in control of this situation, and accountable for it. Pushing the timeline back, Dorothy Lichtenstein only died last year, and the Lichtenstein Foundation’s gift of their home and studio to the Whitney as a home for the ISP only took effect last year. We don’t have enough information yet to tell if we’re seeing the realization of the Lichtensteins’ vision for the ISP, or its betrayal.
Rothkopf’s statement crossed media paths with an open letter of support for the censored artists and curators, signed by more than 300 ISP alumni. On the top of their website, ispalumni.org, is Forbidden Colors, the 1988 work by ISP alumnus Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and an excerpt from his statement about the work as a sign of privileged solidarity with Palestinian life and freedom:
“This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in Soho, will not precipitate a similar reaction.”
As we’ve seen over the last year and a half, that fact has changed.
Get a Gonzalez-Torres Forbidden Colors (2021— ) whenever you need one