What Does ‘Now’ Look Like?
The Whitney Biennial returns, unusually late and uncommonly strong.
of this year’s Whitney Biennial, “Quiet As It’s Kept,” is really alive. That’s passably high for one of these cattle calls—in fact, it means that this Biennial, which was delayed a year by the pandemic, is the best one in some time. There’s very little here that’s really bad. Too much that’s mild. The Biennial has always trafficked in the contemporary, but this offering radiates the power of now.
The star of the show may be the space. Walking through the rampantly filled fifth floor is like drifting distracted through a spice market of art. It’s a swap meet of unalike items, a rejoinder to minimalism. An abundance of abstract painting—some of it very strong—lends much-needed gusts of color that exhibitions like this often lack. The sixth floor reflects our collective trip into the underworld, echoing the fear and isolation that took hold in the era of covid-19 and white ethno-nationalism. It is dark, filled with alcoves, bottlenecks, and ceiling installations that make the world topsy-turvy. Some of it feels dated, the dying remnants of a contrived postmodern fracturing. There are long wall labels projecting meanings that are not actually in the art. This feels predicated on the idea that if the cause or subject matter of a work of art is good, then the work itself is good. For better and worse, “Quiet As It’s Kept” is a black mirror of our times. Two telling exclusions complicate things, however.
The diligent curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, omit what may be the most impactful video made in the 21st century. This is the ten-minute-and-ninesecond continuous sequence made by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd. There is a powerful precedent for its inclusion: George Holliday’s recording of the beating of Rodney King was a cornerstone of the 1993 Biennial, a show the curators praise. Breslin and Edwards had good reasons not to show the Floyd video—out of respect for both viewers who may have seen one too many images of violence against Black people circulating online and Floyd himself.
The irony of this omission is that the best work in the current Biennial is not derived from postmodern theorizing or academically approved post-conceptualism but founded on the tenets offered in Frazier’s
video: that images and objects can speak for themselves and blast through doubt, paranoia, dogma, and insularity. This work is rooted in the premodern idea that art is a primary tool for exploring consciousness, putting us in contact with grief, memories, and precincts beyond reason. This is art as testimony and witnessing. Which brings us to the other exclusion. There have been scads of bad figurative painting lately that seems to want to make the world safe for portraiture. There is also a generation of artists of color—including Salman Toor (who had a strong 2020 show at the Whitney), Amy Sherald, and Jordan Casteel—who have jump-started something magnificent. None are in this show. (Have some artists been shunned for making it on the market?) As a way of honoring the past, almost a quarter of the artists here have been in previous Biennials. Several of their works stand out, including Coco Fusco’s dreamy film featuring a cemetery island in the waters of New York and Ellen Gallagher’s tomblike paintings made with oil, pigment, palladium leaf, and paper on canvas. Best in this subcategory are Charles Ray’s three figurative sculptures, made of steel or painted bronze, of ordinary men sitting on stools and blocks. Oversize and brooding, they exude an otherness that changes the gravitational fields around them. Among those making their Biennial debut, there are some powerful examples of artist priestcraft. Emily Barker creates a translucent kitchen with a countertop set five feet nine inches high, which is the average height of an American man, making the cabinets almost out of reach. This surrealist displacement transforms into a living nightmare when you learn that Barker uses a wheelchair and this is how they experience their environment 24/7. Nearby is a stack of 7,865 sheets of bills from one year of their spinal-cord-injury and chronic-pain management. It is bureaucracy and callousness made visible. Another sort of system is made visible in Rose Salane’s mad Smaug’s treasure 64,000 Attempts at Circulation, consisting of hills of counterfeit coins, tokens, foreign currencies, casino chips, and other souvenirs many of us once used—a Darwinian testament to the adaptive ways we get by in the city. Three Songs, Raven Chacon’s solo Biennial debut, is a series of gorgeous videos of American Indian women singing “songs of resistance,” accompanied by a solitary snare drum that hits you with the force of hieroglyphics. Lucy Raven’s video installation of beautiful southwestern landscapes followed by muffled explosions shook me. Jonathan Berger’s charcoal-floored room is like a chapel, decorated with screens of metallic letters spelling out visionary texts, making you feel as if you’re deciphering the secret languages of God. Then there are Rayyane Tabet’s own texts, installed throughout the museum in fragments and on the façade in large letters. These freaked me out: They’re the maddeningly impossible questions the Lebanonborn artist encountered in anticipation of taking his U.S. naturalization test, such as “What is the rule of law?” and “What is one promise you make when you become a United States citizen?” Near the loading docks, almost begging to be missed, is Nayland Blake’s simulacrum of the entry to the legendary BDSM leather sex club the Mineshaft, once located a block or so from where the Whitney now stands. It’s a black wall featuring two white arrows with the words private club and members only pointing to a red industrial door with an empty awning. Blake rubs the side of the museum like a magic lantern, conjuring the lost desires of the lovers, losers, and holy spirits in search of their city of dreams, those who did it for lust and ran with the night. Close your eyes and glean the glory and horror of the years between 1976 and 1985, by which time the Mineshaft had closed, aids was raging, and the entire world had come down like a ton of bricks on places like these and those who frequented them. On hot summer nights, this area was like a city of shades, an exodus looking for redemption and ecstasy. I see David Wojnarowicz, who famously installed art on a pier along the Hudson. Before aids took his life, he wrote about “daydreams of tipping amazonian blowdarts in ‘infected blood’ and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or nazi-preachers” and imagining friends of aids victims dumping their corpses on the front steps of Reagan’s White House. Here are demons and angels and the smell of sex and fear of contagion. But also liberation and something immense that refused to keep quiet, that wouldn’t be denied and left for dead even though so many, then as now, were dying. Here we glimpse vision, poetry, freedom, courage, and an angry bile duct—a termite mound of new ideas and beauty. ■