IT COULD BE WEIRDER THAN THE REAL THING
BY MARTHA SCHWENDENER
When the artists and collectives selected for the Whitney Biennial were announced in January, next to most of the artists’ names, in parentheses, were gender pronouns. I started reading the list — and immediately got distracted. (Remember when it was the medium that was paraded: “sculptor,” “painter,” “performance artist”?) This, of course, is among the most fraught topics of the moment. In a stroke of perfect cosmic fate, Judith Butler’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,”which details authoritarian responses to current gender debates around the globe, even drops the day before the biennial opens to the public.
I was prepared, then, for a biennial in which identity was showcased, and the curators have indeed set out to celebrate the work of Black, L.G.B.T.Q., Indigenous, disabled, marginalized and overlooked artists. The results are mixed. But first, the art.
The best works here, for me, are film and video, followed by sculpture and trailed significantly by painting. Some of the standouts in the video category are Tourmaline’s six-minute elegiac and playful meditation memorializing the transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson. You step off the fifth-floor elevator and the first thing you see is an arch leading to Tourmaline’s video.
Nearby is the Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin’s wonderful video installation with people playing 3-D-printed replicas of Maya wind instruments and the terracotta-colored instruments themselves displayed on the wall to this space. The juxtaposition of instruments with life and music in them, compared to those in nearby cases, treated as static objects and artifacts, is a great illustration for how colonized bodies and cultures themselves are treated.
The Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo has made a watery, poetic exploration of Indigenous cosmologies, while Dominican-born Ligia Lewis’s video, shot in Rimini, Italy, is more hard-hitting. The camera gazes up at the cypress trees in that town, but the video considers how place and philosophical humanism are connected — particularly, in her words in the wall text, “Eurocentric ideas of (white) Man’s dominion over the land.”
Isaac Julien’s masterful video and sculpture installation is a highlight of the show. It remakes the dialogue between the Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke and the collector-philanthropist Albert C. Barnes, and there is an absorbing discussion of how Europeans and Americans viewed African sculpture — and the responses of Black versus white artists and collectors to such objects.
Sculpture here tends toward monumentality and is often relegated to the outskirts of the exhibition. Some of the best works include Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s block of shifting, pre-fossilized amber, embedded with plants and even typewritten documents, suggesting both natural and cultural elements in an unstable state. Torkwase Dyson has taken over an outside terrace on the fifth floor with two arching black behemoths you can climb and sit on. Dyson has been working in a late-minimalist vein for a couple of decades, and her ideas of Blackness and abstraction in physical spaces, including the vast city stretching out before you on the terrace, resonate through this work.
On a smaller scale, Jes Fan’s upright sculpture remakes Isamu Noguchi’s modern biomorphism — using fiberglass and CT scans of his own body. Holes are also burrowed for viewers to peek into the gallery wall, suggesting art as a living organism and providing a weird element in an exhibition that is largely lacking in weirdness. Meanwhile,Rose B. Simpson’s totemic figures made with ceramics and even animal hides hark back to Pueblo pottery and matrilineal Indigenous culture.
Where the show falls short, in my estimation, is painting — ironically one of the most robust areas of contemporary art. Nonetheless, some standouts are here, including Takako Yamaguchi’s curious and colorful graphic abstractions, as well as Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s large canvases, which mix the Black figure and animals with drippy gestural abstraction, and Suzanne Jackson’s painterly skins, made with gel medium, suspended from the ceiling.
After the rise of installation art in the ’80s and ’90s, large-scale installations have become a mainstay. The best one here, for me, is Pippa Garner’s layout of photographs, photocopies and other ephemera tacked onto wood paneling, which stretches along most of the third floor. Here, she tracks, with sly humor and intelligence, her gender transition in the midst of post-World War II consumerist culture and the idea that the body is “just another product.”
So how does the identity focus play out? The catalog names a lot of exemplary thinkers around this nexus — including Saidiya Hartman, whose idea of Black enslaved bodies as “abstract” chattel obviously ripples back toward art and its obsessions — and the curators say they are aiming toward “destabilized identities.”
That’s not always what’s happening in the galleries, though. There is a bit too much predictability — the A.I. transfer prints of work by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst pale in comparison to the wild inventions you see any day on social media — and I would like to see identity scrambled a lot more. For instance, what if the curators had invited an Indigenous person making A.I. works instead of the stereotypical references to tribal arts? What if a feminist’s vaginal allusions were ditched for neon signage?
The message conveyed is that you have to conform to distinct identity stereotypes rather than subvert them to succeed in the art world, which artists have railed against for decades.
Don’t get me wrong: This is a well-researched, well-intentioned, beautifully installed, if sedate, edition of the biennial. We all need a rest in this moment of upheaval and change, when being a person can feel as complex as creating an artwork. But as the trans activist and legal adviser Stephen Whittle has pointed out, we’re moving “into a new world in which any identity can be imagined, performed, and named.” The next step, of course, is a world in which no demarcating “identities” are needed at all.
