Wallace Whitney: Optimistic Opposition

Earlier in 2011, artist and curator Wallace Whitney presented concurrent exhibitions with Galerie Bernard Ceysson in Paris and Luxembourg. Returning from Europe, Whitney described an unexpected connection between his own artistic and curatorial interests and the work produced by French artists associated with the Supports/Surfaces movement in the late 1960s and 1970s.

That connection became particularly relevant with Summer Above, an exhibition Whitney curated at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia from June 3 through June 26, 2011. The exhibition brought together Joanna Malinowska, Matt Connors, Lauren Luloff, and Roger Van Voorhees and offered an opportunity to discuss Whitney's approach to painting, curating, artist-run spaces, and the idea of what he calls "optimistic opposition."

Curating Summer Above in Philadelphia

Whitney described Summer Above as one of several exhibitions he had organized during a particularly active period of his career. Alongside his own painting practice, he was involved in the programming of CANADA Gallery in New York and had recently organized exhibitions in Europe.

The Philadelphia exhibition was deliberately assembled around artists whose practices contained qualities Whitney was interested in exploring within his own work. Lauren Luloff's paintings offered a sense of lightness and lyrical abstraction, while their physical forms suggested bodies, openings, folds, and forces that seemed to influence the paintings from within.

Matt Connors brought another quality to the exhibition. His paintings appeared concise and effortless while retaining a strong physical presence. Joanna Malinowska approached large intellectual ideas through unconventional and humorous means, including a video work involving a group of Polish characters and an improvised telescope made from a toilet paper tube.

Whitney was equally interested in Roger Van Voorhees, a poet and artist whose practice combined language, objects, and architecture. His poetry journals and interventions demonstrated the possibility of turning simple materials into objects that functioned simultaneously as visual art and language.

From Philadelphia to the Supports/Surfaces Movement

Whitney's interest in these artists led to a broader discussion of Supports/Surfaces, a group of French artists who emerged in the late 1960s and challenged established assumptions about painting, materials, and artistic production.

Artists associated with Supports/Surfaces included Claude Viallat, Patrick Saytour, and Daniel Dezeuze. Their work developed during a period of intense political and intellectual activity in France, particularly around the events of 1968 and the student protests in Paris.

For Whitney, the historical distance between these French artists and contemporary American painting did not make the connection less relevant. Instead, it revealed how artists working in different generations could arrive at similar questions about the role of painting and the expectations placed upon artists.

One example particularly interested Whitney: Daniel Dezeuze's Chassis from 1967, an empty stretcher leaning against a wall. The gesture challenged the conventional expectations surrounding what a painting should be while remaining direct, simple, and even humorous.

Painting Against the Expected

The connection between Supports/Surfaces and Whitney's own curatorial practice became clearer through the concept of resistance. The artists of the earlier movement were responding to dominant ideas about painting and artistic purity. Their approach emphasized materiality, the hand of the artist, and the possibility of working outside established hierarchies.

Whitney described this attitude as a form of optimistic opposition. Rather than rejecting the art world entirely, artists could challenge its assumptions while continuing to participate in it.

A similar principle can be found in other postwar movements, including Arte Povera, where artists explored humble materials and physical processes as alternatives to industrial production and technological culture.

For Whitney, the important point was not simply opposition for its own sake. It was the possibility of celebrating marginal or unconventional approaches without turning marginality into an identity of defeat.

The Artist-Run Gallery and Independent Art Spaces

This idea also shaped Whitney's involvement with artist-run and independent art spaces. His work with CANADA Gallery in New York reflected an interest in creating opportunities for artists whose practices could exist outside the most predictable structures of the commercial art world.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid offered a different but related environment. As a small, independently operated exhibition space in Philadelphia, it allowed Whitney to construct an exhibition around experimentation, understatement, and the relationships between different artistic practices.

The scale of the space was important. Rather than attempting to compete through spectacle, Summer Above could focus on material, abstraction, process, and the personality of the artists involved.

Materiality, Simplicity, and the Accidental

One of the recurring ideas throughout the conversation is the value of simple gestures. Whitney was drawn to work that could communicate ambitious ideas through ordinary materials and apparently direct actions.

This relationship between ambition and simplicity appears throughout the artists he discussed. A homemade telescope can become a vehicle for thinking about the solar system. A piece of poetry can become an object inserted into architecture. A painting can deliberately expose its own material structure rather than hiding the process of its construction.

The accidental also becomes important. Whitney's approach leaves room for mistakes, imperfections, humor, and unexpected results. Instead of treating these qualities as failures, they can become evidence of the artist's presence.

Summer Above and the Philadelphia Art Scene

Summer Above also existed within a developing Philadelphia contemporary art scene in which smaller galleries and independent exhibition spaces provided alternatives to larger institutions.

Whitney viewed the exhibition partly in relation to another contemporary exhibition nearby. Both shows explored abstraction and rougher approaches to painting, but Whitney wanted Summer Above to emphasize a different kind of experience: subtlety, humility, and the depth that can emerge from seemingly modest artistic decisions.

The distinction was not necessarily about one exhibition being right and another being wrong. Instead, it reflected Whitney's interest in using an exhibition as a way to establish a particular set of relationships between artists, materials, space, and viewers.

Optimistic Opposition

The phrase "optimistic opposition" ultimately provides a useful way of understanding Whitney's approach to both painting and curating. Opposition does not have to mean complete rejection. It can mean questioning established assumptions while remaining open to possibility.

The artists discussed in the interview demonstrate different versions of this approach. Some challenge traditional painting through material choices. Others introduce humor, poetry, architecture, or improvised objects. Together, they suggest that contemporary art can remain ambitious without becoming monumental or overly dependent on spectacle.

In that sense, Summer Above was more than an exhibition of four artists. It was an experiment in how an independent exhibition space could bring together different generations, artistic histories, and approaches to abstraction.

The conversation between Ash Ferlito and Wallace Whitney ultimately returns to a simple proposition: artistic resistance can be productive when it remains curious, generous, and willing to experiment. A small gesture can contain a large idea, and an unconventional material can open a path toward an entirely different understanding of painting.