Weakening Bonds

I write this having expected little from this year's Whitney Biennial, and having expected little from the previous ones I'd seen. The last one was really safe and largely forgettable. The previous one was all controversy—the art truly made secondary by Warren Kanders' problematic affiliations and the question of whether artists would pull out or do something in response. The one before that, in 2017, actually looks pretty good in retrospect; the Dana Schutz stuff was a traumatic breach that we have not recovered from in the American art world, but that was actually interesting, and about a work. Works, even, if you think about the others that got drawn into that debate.

Anyway, the 2024 biennial falls pretty flat. One has to acknowledge that it's not the curators' fault that Israel is trying to wipe the Palestians off of the face of the earth, making the Biennial curators' already lukewarm framework look ridiculous. It would have been equally ridiculous to try to pivot to comment upon the genocide, so I'm glad they didn't! I just note this to say that the Whitney Biennial's ritualized attempts at art + politics land worse and worse and these guys simply cannot win.

The curators' statement has a lot of tendrily clauses, none of it really adding up. Maybe the one concrete focus that one can draw out of it is gender. Gender in the age of unreality signaled by AI? And then also, from there, transphobia and abortion rights? Also fragmentation? I dunno. It actually really confused me. There's but one AI-related work in the show, so why even mention that in the wall text? They say that "Artificial Intelligence is complicating our understanding of what is real. . .", but AI seems like only the most recent and popularly legible threat to reality one must consider whether dealing with art or politics or both in 2024. Hate to sound like a total lib but didn't Trump's derealization of the political sphere hurt a whole lot more than Chat GPT writing bad essays for people?

Anyway, beyond the weakly retro-fitted curatorial argument that seems to leave out and even contradict a lot of the work in the Biennial, the overall physical curation of the show is strange in a number of ways. Without going too much into it, there's just too much stuff at times. Why are there five-ish KRM Mooney sculptures squashed up against one another across from two or three times as many B. Ingrid Olsen works in a narrow hallway? Also, why are what could be relatively large scale video installations installed as off-course hidey-hole rooms. Particularly strange in this vein: the Ligia Lewis work, which is truly a hidey-hole. Maybe she wanted it that way, but it made the work feel boring and cast-off. Also, in a number of instances artists had a few works in the show that maybe sort of went together but ultimately didn't do enough for one another, such as Dora Budor's video work alongside her placebo‐pill‐drawings‐which may have been new, but the series has been around for a minute. Nicely installed but, kind of just felt like a "Hereeeee's Dora!" grab bag.

Second in the way of weird curatorial strategies, there was a sort of bottleneck of anti or post-colonial and indigeneity politics work on the 5th floor on the side of the building facing the West Side Highway, like the whole show was tipping over, sliding into anti-colonial futures. Maybe this was the symbolic intention, but it made it feel like I'd wandered into Cost Plus World Market, and it did not do otherwise fine work that engages with indigenous aesthetics justice.

Finally, on the curatorial tip—and this gets into the question of the actual work presented and what "American" "Art" in 2024 is—I was excited to find that the wall texts did not just detail the biographies and identities of the artists, which has been a huge problem in the last decade. (A la: "This sculpture, made by a queer immigrant under the age of 30 with one eye ...," "this painting made by a cis woman deeply embedded in the indigenous community through her work in schools in ... ") However, in place of identity markers, I noticed a trend toward the intense detailing of materials and their significance to the artist and, I guess, the significance we should find in them. For instance Carolyn Lazard's sculptures, which look quite nice, kind of a post-minimalist arrangement of mirrored-box-things from which I was getting whiffs of Smithson, are apparently medicine cabinets with vaseline caked inside of them. The wall text tells us that vaseline is "an industrial byproduct, lubricant, and occlusive ointment widely used in Black homes—alluding to the ways that the hospital and pharmacy have entered the private domain of the household for the past century . . ." This is a very powerful weak allusion. Elsewhere, Budor's drawings are interesting because they are made with "placebo tablets," Dala Nasser's installation, because the rubbings are from the Adonis Cave?

All of these seem involved in this thing I've been noticing a lot lately where materials are forced into participating in a symbolic system in an artwork that is largely rooted in the artist saying that the material means xyz, is significant for xyz reason. Like the amber work by Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio—sure, that artist has cooked up a symbology of amber related to the ecological function of resin, the use of amber in decorative objects in Central America, and amber as a metaphor for an "archive." But in the end the work is cool because a huge amber block collapsed in the museum. In these cases, the curators—and artists too, who are in an awkward spot by virtue of having to have approve something for the wall text, and one can only fight so much—speak with a strange and unearned authority that reneges on the exhibition's very assumption that what we know to be real is in fact "complicated." Much like identity tags in wall texts, this pseudo-materialism approaches the audience with a controlling disposition that ultimately shuts down their experience of the work.

Time and time again the biennial shows us how "complicated" things are. But this biennial ups the ante and shows us that it's a type of complicated that we are all tiring of. It's fucking boring. The curators know it, and decide to say "well, here's some stuff." The artists know it, and are happy to present an array of their recent or most popular stuff (see: Ser Serpas' installation for an example of stuff par excellence). But I don't blame anyone for not breaking through, out, up, down, or for trying and failing (if in their mind they did give it a shot). It's simply not the time, nor the place; and what's scarier to all is that maybe art itself is simply not the time or the place to revolutionize culture or whatever the task may be for the more rigorous, politically, aesthetically imaginative thinkers and artists among us.

During my visit I overheard some girls talking about what one of them termed "the problem with representing God." This caused me to ponder whether God was represented, or even present in this Biennial. That is to say, whether the artists and their works and the show's curators have any disposition toward truth or faith whether it is centralized or not. There are so many private systems of meaning posed as true, real and culturally-stable ways of engaging the world presented here that each becomes totally incoherent in proximity to the next. And almost paradoxically, it is couched in an overarching evangelism for the power of art in general. This general evangelism is so fervent here and most other places art is shown institutionally, that it loops back around and becomes violently atheistic. Art does not necessarily need God, nor does it necessarily need a center, but it does need something to keep us in the pews.