Visitor examining the foil-covered walls of the Whitney Museum in New York (Photo: Julien Jourdes)

Since Rudolf Stingel’s sleek midcareer survey opened at the Whitney Museum of American art in June, hundreds of visitors have been allowed to depart radically from traditional museum protocol (hands off) and have a go at the walls in the exhibition’s first gallery, using anything they happen to have with them: pens, money, credit cards, cellphones. To accommodate such graphic urges, the large space was lined with shimmering, foil-covered Celotex insulation board, which is easily punctured with just about anything, even fingernails.

When the show opened, the foil board covering the lower half of the walls was untouched. Over the intervening months New York’s art-viewing public rose to the occasion: The room’s lower half is now equally dense with a kind of populist, manic, talking-in-tongues wallpaper. It makes the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur, incised by a couple of centuries of tourist comments, look positively virginal.

Go to website Whitney Museum
Read full article (New York Times, October 13, 2007)
Read full review (New York Times, June 29, 2007)
Watch multimedia presentation of the exhbition by Roberta Smith of the New York Times

Overview of Rudolf Stingel’s installation at the Whitney Museum (Photo: Sheldon C. Collins )