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The last time the Whitney Biennial was held in 2022, it was extended by an additional year due to the coronavirus pandemic, requiring curators to plan exhibitions and meet with artists via virtual visits via Zoom.
Whitney Museum curators Chrissy Iles and Meg Only have departed to prepare for the 2024 Biennale, the latest in a series of groundbreaking exhibitions of contemporary American art that opens on March 20th. . They conducted approximately 200 studio visits throughout the country and beyond. They visited numerous exhibitions and art events, from Germany’s mega-show Documenta 15 to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie International.
So this cycle is, in some ways, more normal. But it usually stops here. The dramatic phase of the pandemic, with its restrictions, may have receded. But the landscape left in its wake is a panorama of increasingly complex crises, and for artists, like everyone else, with the US election looming, we are at a time of great uncertainty and anxiety.
In a joint interview at the museum, Ms. Ailes and Ms. Onri said that while they were on the road, they felt pressure from their surroundings everywhere, including the smell of wildfire smoke on Los Angeles freeways (reflecting land overuse and climate change) and their hearing. He said he felt We hear directly from women and their LGBTQ artists about the impact of the Roe v. Wade reversal and the prevalence of laws that undermine bodily autonomy.
“We understand that these are turbulent times, leading to new turbulent times,” Onri said. To hold an exhibition under these circumstances, “the exhibition had to have a political content,” she said.
On Thursday, the museum revealed the names of the artists who will take part in the biennale, titled “Better than the Real.” Relatively compact, it features 69 artists and his two collectives spread across gallery exhibitions, an accompanying program of films and performances, and a world map. He has 20 of the artists, many of the filmmakers live or work outside the United States.
For Isles and Onri, the focus is less on the current state of American art and more on America itself at a raw and vulnerable time. They were drawn to artists who explore how people carry and process the wounds of society in their bodies and minds, and what kind of creative rebirth this inspires.
As for the title, it’s a kind of multi-pronged rebuttal to the culture wars over what’s “authentic,” from the rise of artificial intelligence to efforts to impose social and physical conformity. . “There’s a kind of weird playfulness to it,” Onri said of the product. It’s sarcastic humor that claims, “Of course we’re better than the real thing!”
As with recent biennales, the group is diverse. The two artists who have passed away are Jamaican-born architecturally inspired painter Mavis Pusey, who died in 2019 at the age of 90, and film director Edward Owens, who died in 2010. There are five elders born between 1941 and 1944. Mary Kelly and Harmony Hammond. famous black abstract painters Mary Lovelace O’Neill and Suzanne Jackson; and trans sculptor and performer Pippa Garner. Otherwise, the exhibition skews toward a younger audience. Seventeen of the 42 artists in the main gallery were born in his 1980s, and nine of them were born in his 1990s.
Not surprisingly, New York City is well represented. Thirteen artists live here in the gallery and seven in the film and performance program. A total of 12 artists are based in Los Angeles. As it turns out, the four of them live in New Mexico. Hammond moved to New Mexico in the 1980s. Indigenous artists Rose B. Simpson and Kanupa Hanska Luger; and Maja Ruznic, a Bosnian-born painter influenced by mysticism and psychoanalysis.
The film and performance program, curated by invited curators Ashin Najak, Korakrit Arunanonchai, Zachary Drucker, Greg de Cuir Jr., and Taja Cheek, includes a wide range of American cultural and It includes work by Southeast Asian filmmakers fighting against political influence, as well as work by indigenous American filmmakers. Sami, Inuit, Mongolian, and Native American people who aim to communicate beyond colonial borders.
Few artists are celebrities or stars in the market. Perhaps the most famous is director Isaac Julien. His gorgeous five-screen installation, Once Again… (Statues Never Die), premiered at the Barnes Foundation in 2022. The work examines issues surrounding African art in Western collections, and new works will be exhibited. York makes his Whitney debut.
In a short phone interview, several artists discussed the work they will be presenting.
The works of Los Angeles and London-based artist P. Staff are some of the most spectacular and shocking works of art. “Afferent Nerves” is a large-scale installation in which viewers walk under an electrically charged net and, although it is out of reach, “you can hear some crackling sounds.” . The area is surrounded by yellow neon lights. According to the artist, the aim is to create a sense of “staged danger” that increases visitors’ awareness of the art, and perhaps their own sense of safety.
New York-based sculptor Jess Huang creates disturbing work in a different department. He took CT scans of his body, 3D printed various organs, then sculpted and polished the resulting shapes. The inspiration was a type of tree in Hong Kong, where Phan grew up, that was actively cut down and infected with fungi to produce precious incense.
These sculptures are part of the series “Sites of Wounding,” which explores how a living creature, while suffering trauma, can “create something meaningful, the kind of regeneration that occurs when a scar is formed.” is exploring. human condition.
Philadelphia-based artist Karin Olivier is known for her work responding to historic buildings and public art, most recently exhibiting “more intimate, quieter sculptures” at Newark Airport’s Terminal A. ing. One of his works, “How Many Ways Can You Dislapse,” depicts tangled fishing nets, ropes, and buoys. The other is made from driftwood and pieces of discarded clothing.
Olivier said she feels like she is processing the upheaval and loss of the pandemic period on her own. “They are almost figurative attempts at resolution,” says the Trinidad-born artist, whose works are rich with references to migration, forced migration, and her Caribbean origins.
Some messages are straightforward. Luger, who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota and now lives in New Mexico, has a full-sized teepee set up upside down. “This is a signal that our path as a species is reversing,” he says.
Carmen Winant, an artist based in Columbus, Ohio, who describes herself as a “lost photographer” through her collages and installations, has created “The Last Safe Abortion,” a collection of images from thousands of people in the Midwest. It provides a perspective on the lives of abortion care workers. Snapshots are primarily provided by clinics. Scenes from daily work such as meetings, desk work, and answering the phone are displayed. “This is not about abortion at an ideological level at 30,000 feet,” Winant said. “It’s the humans who make it happen.”
The post-Roe climate raises the stakes for Winant, whose project also celebrates maternity and domestic violence care workers. Some of the clinics she photographed have been closed. “I’ve always been ambivalent about what art can do in terms of political influence and effectiveness,” she says. “But as I worked on this project, I started to feel like it was my obligation.”
For older artists at the Biennale, the delayed recognition is definitely welcome. “I never expected this at my age,” Jackson said. Jackson ran a prominent but short-lived black artist space in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and now lives in Savannah, Georgia.
The investigation also includes her abstract acrylic paintings, which are suspended without the use of stretchers. “They are living structures made of pure paint,” she says, inviting the viewer into a kind of dance.
Hammond was a figure in New York’s 1970s feminist scene, featured at the Whitney but long ignored at the Biennale. “I just kept working,” she said from her home in Galisteo, New Mexico.
Her recent works include paintings of thick layers, sometimes incorporating straps, grommets, or quilted coverings, with patches and slits that evoke the female body, labor, and scars. According to Hammond, the color that permeates through the layers calls out “the voices buried beneath the surface that are asserting themselves.”
In planning the show, Onri and Isles partnered with several artists to participate in the process, breaking the secrecy that often takes part in Biennale preparations.
One is JJJJ Jerome Ellis, an artist and performer living in Norfolk, Virginia, whose work (and name) examines the condition of stuttering. In collaboration with his four other stutterers, Ellis led the development of text-based signage in Spanish, Mandarin, and English on Gansevoort Street. This sign uses typographic symbols to represent the fluency disorders of stuttering: repetitions, prolongations, blocks, and pauses.
Ellis will also create the music for the biennale, the format of which will be decided after the exhibition is installed.
Berlin-based artist and choreographer Lygia Lewis is exhibiting her dance-based film installation “A Plot A Scandal” in the gallery. Its subjects include philosopher John Locke, Cuban anti-slavery revolutionary José Antonio Aponte, and Ruiz’s own maternal ancestors. dominican republic. It was Lewis who came up with the metaphor that inspired the curators to describe the Biennale. It’s a “cacophonous chorus.”
When conducting the survey, the curators said they aim to create a show that breathes and flows, while respecting that cacophony. “What does it mean to be in the middle of that chorus as a viewer?” said Ailes, “not only to see, but also to hear.”
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