Hermitic Symbolism and Disengagement
(Bored at the Biennial)
Going to the Whitney feels like work. The biennial opened a while back, and any glimmer of excitement that there might once have been has long since waned, leaving the show to languish through the increasingly oppressive languor of summer in the city. Then again, there wasn't ever much hype for this one. Compared to the past few editions, each of which was notable less for the art it contained, than for the political snafus they provoked, the 2024 Biennial essentially came and went. No one really talked about it, and when they did, there wasn't much of anything to say. As a testament perhaps to the need to generate content, that very fact—its whateverness—somehow became its selling point. Indistinction becomes a point of distinction.
Going judo mode is the obvious play here, finding some way to make the mundane matter. The absolute lack of a point of view is, after all, in some ways remarkable. Now, when I mentioned this to M, he asked why an exhibition needs a point of view. It was a good question. I hesitated before slightly sidestepping: the curators were paid to put it on, the least they could do is take a stand. Yet, after spending so much time and effort on it (presumably) they came out with something completely banal. On the flip side, they might only be guilty of doing their job too well. It felt exactly like seeing any other large museum show. A true survey of contemporary art in the United States (which, not to sound too pro-American here, makes it a proxy for the state of art throughout the world) shouldn't be surprising.
I have a feeling though, that if you congratulated the curators on their pristine genericness they would be offended. As trained professional curators, they adhere to the contemporary view on exhibitions, which is that they should gather artworks to illustrate a theme or organizing principle, supplemented by wall texts and decontextualized quotations from the hot theory du jour. The role of the critic is then to identify this theme and assess how well the exhibition illustrates it, probably while citing other theory in an incoherent, yet unfortunately often effective, intellectual appeal for authority. Input, output, art, content: it starts with the wrong suppositions, is carried out with the wrong means, and leads nowhere. The whole thing is so boring that I really can't go into it. The good news is that if you really must see how this plays out, you don't need to go to the show, or even read any articles. Spoiler alert: it's exactly as you expect.
But, I went to the Whitney. After being aggressively marketed an annual membership (which was declined), I took the elevators up and saw the show. Some art was good, some was bad, much was boring—essentially, the Normal Distribution. What was interesting, however, was a shared hermeticism by the art and exhibition alike. There is, for example, quite a lot of video art. Video Art is popular because it fuses the visual with the didactic in a way that seems to intensify meaning making—an image that symbolizes something + a voiceover about theory or whatever = a stronger message. And because the value and qualities of an artwork are unfortunately seen at the moment to be identical with whatever the work's content or what it is "about," this makes an appealing way of making powerful political work. The problem with video though, is that people actually have to watch it. And since a lot of video art is long, atypical in what people expect from video content, and sets its own terms of encounter (all the audience can do typically is decide when to start or stop watching) no one really engages with it. As a result, it's a mode of artistic production that forecloses the possibility of enacting any effects.1 It plays itself, while no one watches.
There is also a lot of sculpture in the biennial. Where sculpture once seemed to foreground the phenomenological and act on the real itself, now it too relies largely on obvious symbolism. Making the facade of the White House out of mud adorned with an upside-down American flag is something that should get you bullied in crit, not land you in a museum show. There is, thankfully, more subtle work, but even here it seems hamstrung and closed off from the world. Carolyn Lazard's Toilette forms a mini corridor out of mirrored medicine cabinets slathered in vaseline. An obvious reference to minimalism, but with a twist, shunning the movement's perceived misogynist cult of the heroic artist for a focus on domesticity and disability. Sadly, this similarity is, to quote a minimalist, pseudomorphic. The sculpture is secured behind a wraparound stanchion, which closes it off from the outside space or from its possible influence on experience. Most minimalist works engaged the viewer directly, whether they liked it or not (Fried's "theatricality'), and while Lazard's pieces may look like some of Judd's output, it acts nothing like it—let alone other works like Morris' passageways or Nauman's steel cages. It's not so much sculpture as it is image, albeit one presented in three dimensions.
Sculpture as symbol really comes to the fore, in perhaps the highest-profile piece in the show: Demian DinéYazhi's we must stop imagining apocalypse/genocide + we must imagine liberation. The title alone should give you pause, but it gets worse when you find out that it's a poem set in neon—probably the worst kind of work possible. In this particular case, it made the headlines not for what it said, but because some of the neon letters flickered on and off. When put together, they spell out "free palestine." That this could be seen as a powerful, potentially threatening, political act tells you everything you need to know about the relationship of artists and artworks to the world: the political cannot be accessed through action, by engaging directly with the world, but instead only lies in tepid symbolic gestures.
- There is, of course, an alternate path here which would be to create videos (and other kinds of artwork) that leverage their own processes of production and circulation as the Art itself, disregarding the aesthetic viewing of the work. That unfortunately isn't happening here (or, largely, elsewhere).