NY Trip: Whitney Biennial
Jonathon Berger, _An Introduction to Nameless Love_, details in comment below.
I appreciated that they were limiting it to three people in this exhibit at a time (without actually timing how long you were in there). It wouldn’t have worked nearly as well without a sense of space around you.
Jonathan Berger
Floor 6
Born 1980 in New York, NY
Lives in New York, NY, and Glover, VT
Jonathan Berger’s An Introduction to Nameless Love explores profoundly transformative experiences of non-romantic love. The full work consists of six text-based sculptures; the three on view here focus on the photographer Margaret Morton and Maria A. Prado, a former resident of the New York underground unhoused community known as the Tunnel; former turtle conservationist Richard Ogust and the first turtle he rescued; and autistic writer and philosopher Mark Utter and his communication supporter and collaborator Emily Anderson. The texts emerged from dialogue between Berger and these subjects that sometimes took place over years. The final distilled texts were generated collaboratively by Berger, the individual subjects, and a guest editor of specific significance to each story, including journalist Esther Kaplan and radio and podcast producer Erica Heilman.
Inspired by historical forms of embodied language such as illuminated manuscripts, Berger created a font with designer Julian Bittiner, which he then used to cut letters from tin. A team of associates hammered and soldered each letter by hand to make the final sculptures. The floor of charcoal tiles serves to contextualize the texts’ eclectic contents as unified within the larger idea of An Introduction to Nameless Love.
From the Whitney’s website