THE POWER OF THE CITY / THE CITY OF POWER, Whitney ISP Papers No. 1, 1992

Softcover, 15 × 23 cm, 75 pp, offset printed throughout in black-and-white. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992. ISP Papers, No. 1. Organized by Christel Hollevoet, Karen Jones and Timothy Nye as Helena Rubinstein Fellows in the 1991–92 Whitney Independent Study Program. $5 retail sticker retained to front wrapper.

An unusually dense publication from one of the Whitney Independent Study Program’s strongest early-1990s moments. The Power of the City / The City of Power was the first issue of ISP Papers, preceding a sequence that would shortly include Dirt and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine and the now much better-known Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art (ISP Papers No. 3, 1993).

The exhibition treats the city less as scenery than as an operating system: streets, advertising, homelessness, commodities, architecture, graffiti and public space become structures through which power is exercised and resisted. Three essays anchor the argument — Timothy Nye’s “Conceptual Art: A Spatial Perspective,” Christel Hollevoet’s “Wandering in the City, ‘Flânerie’ to ‘Dérive’ and After: The Cognitive Mapping of Urban Space,” and Karen Jones’s “The Urban Event: Spectacle, Resistance, and Hegemony.”

The cast assembled around that proposition is extraordinary: Vito Acconci, Dennis Adams, Michael Banicki, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, André Cadere, Sophie Calle, Henry Chalfant, Guy Debord, Öyvind Fahlström, Théodore Fraenkel, Spider, Kies, Rammellzee, Joey, TDS Crew, Lady Pink, Ilona Granet, Hans Haacke, David Hammons, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Tehching Hsieh, Douglas Huebler, Candy Jernigan, Allan Kaprow, Marta Minjuín, Wolf Vostell, On Kawara, Barbara Kruger, George Maciunas, Lois Nesbitt, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Alain Paiement, Benjamin Patterson, RepoHistory, Aldo Rossi, Edward Ruscha, Gary Simmons, Francesc Torres, Andy Warhol, Dan Wiley, Krzysztof Wodiczko, David Wojnarowicz, Tony Cokes and Matt Mullican.

That full roster is part of the point. Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Situationism, institutional critique, graffiti, activist practice, performance and downtown New York culture are placed within the same argument about who gets to occupy, image, regulate and rewrite the city.

One spread places Dennis Adams’s Bus Shelter II opposite David Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale: one artist inserting an image into the machinery of street advertising, the other setting up on a Manhattan pavement to sell carefully arranged snowballs as commodities. Elsewhere, Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York is read through alienation, homelessness, memory and the Situationist dérive. The catalogue continually shifts between the city seen from above — as map, property and system — and the individual body moving through it.

The exhibition was presented not at the Whitney’s main museum but at its Downtown branch at Federal Reserve Plaza in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. The Whitney archive dates that branch 1988–1992, placing this exhibition in its final year of operation. A show concerned with capital, public space, commodification, homelessness and resistance was therefore staged inside a museum satellite embedded in the city’s financial infrastructure.

The exhibition ended. The branch ended. ISP Papers No. 1 remained.

There is something particularly good about the surviving $5.00 sticker sitting on the aerial photograph of Manhattan. Seventy-five pages of Hammons, Debord, Kruger, Haacke, Basquiat, Wojnarowicz and Warhol, at some point reduced again to a five-dollar retail object. The sticker stays.

Condition: Good to very good. Rubbing and light edge and corner wear to wrappers, with minor handling consistent with age. $5 retail sticker retained to front cover. Internally clean from inspection.