Biennial in a Bag

 

Kiyan Williams   "Ruins of Empire"

It was almost as if the Whitney Museum of American Art didn't want us there for the press preview of their 2024 Biennial -- titled "Even Better than the Real Thing." (The title is supposed to refer to Artificial Intelligence and the like, but the exhibit had little to show on that.) 

The day before, they cancelled the usual opening reception -- traditionally a posh affair with fresh pastries, fresh-roasted coffee and boasting "remarks" by curators and museum bigs.  Instead they offered lukewarm coffee and an unsupervised stroll through a mostly morose collection of new and not-so-new works. 

The outdoor mega-sculpture on the sixth floor was made out of mud by Newark artist Kiyan Williams, part of a series he calls "Ruins of Empire." It's a brown version of the White House, listing badly (to the left or right, depending on where you stand) and sinking into the mire, flying an American flag upside down.  It's fun to walk over the mud lawn, but it doesn't exactly make you stop and think.  

"Singin' in Sweetcake's Storm" (detail) 

Stopping to think in the ruins of empire, a creative mind might come up with something to do with them.  At least one artist showed how.  Suzanne Jackson's brightly colored junk paintings resemble plastic shower curtains, inlaid with pistachio shells, shopping bag netting, graphite, string, etc.  The most elegant and elaborate was a rectangular sheet titled "Singin' in Sweetcake's Storm," a reference to the hurricane that divides the people and drowns the land in Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes were Watching God."  

The show is heavy on female artists, trans- and gender-fluid themes, and films and videos trying to talk their way through the haze of the past and the maze of the present.  I lay down on a king-sized bed -- part of the art -- with several other journos to watch a cautious meditation on the Rape of Nanjing, by Diane Severin Nguyen.  It's a story told by a film actress, uncomfortable in her role as a Chinese victim of Japanese war crimes.  The question seems to be -- are we comfortable with her discomfort?  The answer seems embedded in too many mattresses of meaning.       

One large room was filled with screens showing various angles of a black-and-white filmed conversation.  Isaac Julien's "Once Again ... (Statues Never Die)" looked like a polite version of James Baldwin's face-off with William Buckley in 1965.  A Black scholar explains to a white connoisseur the impossibility of capturing the creative energy of African-based art in a European-style museum setting.  Point well taken, and amply illustrated.  

 In what has become its Biennial custom, the Whitney Museum of American Art bashes America, and trashes the idea of a museum.  Such self-abnegation can be bracing when done with nerve.  But this was like, decaf. 

Copyright 2024 by Tom Phillips