Quiet as it's Kept: White Space at the Whitney

Rebecca Belmore, "ishkode (fire)" 

 -- By Tom Phillips

Two middle-aged white male art critics were coming down in the elevator after previewing the Whitney Museum of American Art's 80th Biennial.  With an air of befuddled irritation, one said to the other, "Quiet as it's Kept?  What does that mean?"  He was referring to the show's cryptic subtitle, which came from African-American co-curator Adrienne Edwards.  His friend had no clue.  

A third, older white male critic was standing nearby, and recalled for them the explanation Ms. Edwards had given in her pre-show remarks.  Her mother and her aunties used to say it all the time, she said--- to preface something widely known to be true, but not discussed in public. 

Oh, said the first critic as they stepped out into the basement cloakroom. So what is it we're not discussing?  Well, said the older fellow, I think it points to the ugliness of the show.  I was looking for something pretty, but I couldn't find anything.  

The first guy replied --  So, the theme of the show was ugliness? How about the film of that woman rowing a boat?  I thought that was pretty. 

Yes, said the other.  Except she was rowing the boat to Hart's Island -- New York City's burial ground for unclaimed bodies.  And the narration was about unclaimed bodies piling up, too many to bury, "too many to hide."  

The conversation ended there, as the first guy snatched his coat from a brown-skinned attendant, and joined a knot of his colleagues for a more private chat.   But the show will go on, and it is full of American ugliness: Plastic palm trees, ruined landscapes, disembodied kneecaps, zombie employees of leading American companies, sirens, arrests, explosions, night shots of hospital lobbies, a huge stack of coded medical bills, a sneering white gunman taking aim at an unknown target, an island of unmarked graves, a ghastly moonrise over a broken sea.  One artist's work was billed as "an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom."    

The 2022 Biennial is roughly divided into two parts, like night and day. The fifth floor is a dark space devoted to the ways in which people of color and marginalized populations see themselves in America.  Rebecca Belmore's shrouded figure surrounded by a circle of spent bullets (at top) seems to act as a centerpiece.    

The sixth floor is a light-filled space that might represent white America as seen by the marginalized. .  One large object is a clanking metal ferris wheel, made from prison furniture, revolving super-slowly in the sun.  The artist says it's designed to make the passage of time "palpable, visceral, even painful."  

Sable Elyse Smith, "A Clockwork"  

An art museum in America is a quintessential "white space," but in this show most or nearly all of the artists are from marginalized groups.  The critics at the preview were overwhelmingly white, but the space for once was not. The polarities were reversed. "White Space" was on display, and white critics were forced to experience it as if from a marginal, unprotected place. The artists and the art were saying: This is what you look like to us.   

Quiet as it's kept, it's ugly.  

.   

Buck Ellison, "Rain in Rifle Season, Distributions from Split-Interest Trusts" 

Copyright 2022 by Tom Phillips