W ednesday, I visited the Whitney Biennial for the second time. I hoped to like it more, and since seeing it last month, I’ve read the catalogue. The Whitney is a fine, essential place. It’s less of a museum of heritage worth preserving than a contemporary art gallery. Life, like love, is a many-splendored thing. It follows that life, love, and art of any given era will sometimes stink, too, and we take the bad with the good.
Even Better Than the Real Thing, this year’s Biennial, doesn’t have much of either, which might be the reason it seems more coherent. Or, to be more precise, the curators deserve praise for making so much incoherence flow. The show is smaller, covering only 44 artists in the galleries and a few more who performed in one-off productions or made films shown in a separate film series. Even Better is attractively, rhythmically arranged. Most of it fills two floors. There’s a harmonious balance among video spaces, sculpture galleries, terraces with art, and paintings.
What’s sad is that the Whitney seems to have decided that the Biennial, which is supposed to reflect the state of American art, doesn’t have much art I’d call American. Call me persnickety, but I think artists in the Biennial ought to be American citizens. Of the 69 artists selected by the curators, 19 don’t live here. Some artists live in multiples places. Many more weren’t born here, which is and isn’t fine. Nikita Gale “lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva and Gabriolena lands.”
The two Biennial curators, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, must believe that we’re all citizens of the world and that borders mean nothing, both of which are false values, but, aside from that, the Whitney’s a museum of American art, and an artist ought, even in our imperfect world, to be an American citizen to have his or her work in the collection. I’m never too worried about rules — I’m a pusher of envelopes — but “what’s American about American art” is the Biennial’s central question. To salvage a kernel from diversity dogma that’s not rotten to the core, “belonging” means an instinctive, in-your-heart embrace of core ideals in a country like ours where race, ethnicity, tribes, and religions don’t govern citizenship.
Probably the Whitney’s curators — and a more bubble-bound class is hard to find — don’t know what these ideals are, or “what’s American about American art,” and don’t want to know, or they don’t think it’s a valid question. That makes the Biennial useless, or at least something very different. Siku Allooloo’s eight-minute video, “Spirit Emulsion,” combines poetry with brown and gray alternating with color footage of wildflowers and ocean. It’s earnest and, since it’s a salute to Allooloo’s late mother, archaicized and deferential. I have nothing against ancestor worship but Allooloo is Canadian and calls herself Inuit/Haitian/Taino. She lives in Canada. Seba Calfuqueo’s video, “Tray Tray Ko,” is pretentious and weepy — no law against either — but he’s Chilean. Over six inscrutable minutes, he pulls an electric-blue tarp through a jungle and a river into a waterfall. His handcuff-size earrings ring like chimes. Chimes or no chimes, he’s a Mapuche artist who lives in Chile. He can pull that blue tarp from Chile to St. Louis. It’s still not a good work of art. And, as a word of warning, we have snapping turtles here.
The Biennial is one big ideological weasel in this respect. Iles writes in her catalogue essay — and I always read the catalogues for shows I review — that she believes in borders but only psychic ones, or what she calls “archipelagic space.” We’re not a land-bound country but an oceanic nation-state, “as primed for war and profit now as it was in the 1980s . . . a rhizomatic structure of relation, with interlapping layers of connectivity, untranslatability, and interdependence.” American power and identity make for a cultural response “to this increasingly unviable hegemonic condition of precarious, excess, and impending ecological collapse,” a collapse of archipelagic dimensions.
Yadda, yadda, yadda. No wonder young people aren’t having kids.
All of this is a point of view, and at least Iles smokes herself out. Two of the artists, though, are from Mongolia. Two live in Finland. How long is this here archipelago?
For all the curators’ babble about listening and traveling, presumably island-hopping, and talking to artists, it seems they wrote the bulk of their essays before they saw any art and filled in the blanks with work that made their core points. I’ve made this point in every story I’ve written about Whitney Biennials over the years, but it bears repeating: It’s easy to flee Manhattan, except at the start of long weekends, but extraordinarily difficult to flee the Manhattan mindset. It’s not a bubble. It’s a bunker. It’s also very provincial, and it’s weirdly pan-urban given that social X-rays now in London, Los Angeles, and Berlin look the same. I don’t know Iles. I’m not surprised to learn she’s British. Onli is a new hire, having spent years at the ICA in Philadelphia. Her focus is on the intricacies of race in America.
How does this operate in the Biennial? Decolonialism is YUGE, as a recent casualty of Manhattan’s kangaroo courts would say. The trauma of the colonial/capitalist enterprise is the toxic thread linking the archipelago together. Its legacy, aside from ecological collapse, is “the psychic schemas of crip, neurodivergent, queer, and trans embodiment.” Black subjectivity’s big, as is Indigenous autonomy. AI and trans and queer identity raise questions of what’s real and fake. All of this is predictable, even rote. There’s a lot of dogma and jargon to be found in this hardened pellet of intersectional grievance. The show’s central failure is in seeking security and comfort in this bubble.
Every year, I see the work of hundreds of living artists. Among curators and critics and faddish chatterer-collectors, these issues figure. Some artists make and market their work to these audiences. These artists and their dealers lobby, and lobby intensely. To most artists, though, these are fringe concerns. This is why I always look for diversity in where artists live and work, and I’m talking about Des Moines, Nashville, and Bangor, not Brooklyn, Brooklyn, more Brooklyn, and a dash of Ulaanbaatar.
The show’s title, Even Better Than the Real Thing, is a puzzlement. It “acknowledges that Artificial Intelligence is complicating our understanding of what is real, and rhetoric around gender and authenticity is being used politically and legally to perpetuate transphobia and to restrict bodily autonomy.” There’s not much about AI in the exhibition. I wish the Biennial focused on this one issue — technology’s archipelagic boon or disaster. There’s too much about trans identity.
I’ve been looking for art by transgendered artists out of curiosity to see what they add to the mix. Gbenga Komolafe (b. 2000) and Tee Park (b. 1999) made the short film “Winter Insect, Summer Flower” in 2021. It’s a beautiful, touching, and sentimental treatment of an awakening amid lush green and yellow vegetation.
P. Staff’s Afferent Nerves and À Travers le Mal, from 2023, is right off the exhibition’s introductory gallery. It’s a mostly empty gallery with glaring yellow lights bouncing off vinyl wallpaper. A net we’re told is electrified covers the ceiling. It’s both scary and enervating. Staff (b. 1987), I read in the label, “addresses the trans body’s precarious visibility, the waywardness of queer materialisms, and the institutional powers that be, all while laboring to index the inverse of the perceptible.”
I labored to understand this label but feared electrocution and decided the gallery was a waste of space.
Steps away was Carmen Winant’s wall-length, floor-to-ceiling montage of 2,500 small photographs showing everyday life in abortion clinics. The photos were taken more than 50 years before the end of Roe v. Wade. I hate montage art with so many tiny objects that the viewer can’t conceive of the work in its entirety. Why not simply give a gallery over to a real, functioning abortion clinic? Don’t reduce it to lots of busy bees pushing paper and trite slogans about self-determination.
Mavis Pusey’s a very good artist, but she died in 2019. Edward Owens, a pioneer in what the show calls black queer cinema, died in 2010. Why is their work in the show? Eamon Ore-Giron (b. 1973) and Takeo Yamaguchi (b. 1952) make attractive, large-format zigzag paintings, Ore-Giron drawing from Mayan design, Yamaguchi abstracting Japanese seascapes. They’re both a little Art Deco, a dash of The Jetsons and, ultimately, home décor. Why is their work there, aside from its good looks? Their paintings aren’t peas-in-a-pod, but they’re not far from it. I’m not sure either curator has a feeling for painting. There are next to no prints, photographs, or ceramics in the exhibition.
More and more, each Biennial is weighted down from too much video art and film screenings and performances that have to be seen separately. Some of the films, such as Diane Severin Nguyen’s In Her Time, are straight, though strange, narrative films. Here, we follow a young actress as she prepares for a role in a movie about the Rape of Nanjing. I don’t doubt it’s art, but why not show Barbie, too, or Dune: Part Two, or everything nominated for Best Picture? Videos in the gallery of more than, say, 15 minutes are seen in snippets or skipped. Very few gallery-goers return for screenings.
What is supposed to be a communal event, or a show meant to be seen in its entirety, each work reinforcing others, turns haphazard. It’s like mounting an exhibition spread over multiple venues. Few aside from devotees of insider baseball get the entirety.
The Biennial is herculean. I admire the two curators and wish they’d freed themselves from so much of the dogma, sterile and blinkered, that fuels the intellectual life of their stratum. Still, I like to focus on the positive. I didn’t know Jes Fan’s work. He’s a glassblower by training. Contrapposto, from 2023, is a life-size sculpture of an amorphous human figure made from filaments, resin, glass, and metal, some parts cast from molds from his own body. As a work of art, it’s very good, a bit of three-dimensional Cubism a hundred years after the fact, though.
Pippa Garner (b. 1942) identifies as a trans artist but is more of an old cuss hurt by Agent Orange during the Vietnam War who subverts consumer culture through the art of satire. Everything’s fair game, an attitude I love. Inventor’s Office, from 2021–24, is a group of drawings transforming obsolete manufactured goods into living things, or different things, giving them second lives. A stovetop hat, still worn on someone’s head, becomes a birdhouse, for example. Garner’s drawings are on the third floor of the Biennial, so, alas, most people miss them. Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944) starts her ceiling-suspended paintings not with canvas but with shredded paper, dryer lint, even leaves, and she paints so many layers on them that they grow dense. They’re vibrant.
I always enjoy visiting the Whitney and, having seen 20 or so Biennials, I look forward to the next. Hope springs eternal. I suggested a few years ago that the Whitney ditch curatorial hegemony for a jury of artists. Overall, Even Better Than the Real Thing isn’t boring. It springs from a cultural zeitgeist that’s in a rut. For all the ruckus over decolonizing, transphobia, exploitation, hate, equity, and oppression, these marketing terms disguise and distort the country’s rich and eclectic visual culture and much else. Most of these topics are retreads. It’s hard to get a dog to surrender a bone, however dry.