ARTFORUM

2016-02-02

A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION presupposes an identifiable individual as the author of its contents. The philosopher Mark Johnston, however, cautions that we may place too much weight on this commonsense apperception where the issue of selfhood in any profound sense is concerned: “We do not find much evidence that in tracking objects and persons through time we are actually deploying knowledge of sufficient conditions for cross-time identity.” What permits us to assume on the basis of intermittent exposure to any physical person, he asks, that there is in fact a continuing self that coherently links all the disconnected samplings we experience over time? Such have been the dramatic transformations and reinventions over Frank Stella’s long career—and likewise the critical dismay at enough of them—that the Whitney Museum of American Art’s retrospective in New York asks the viewer to consider where the artist’s consistent self might be discovered. Traversing the exhibition also prompts the question of whether we can or want to discover any such thing.