A First Look at the Whitney Biennial

In the hands of two smart, sensible, and experienced curators, it’s a success. 

T his year’s incarnation of the Whitney Biennial is Quiet as It’s Kept. The Whitney is dedicated to American contemporary art, and its Biennial, held since 1932, “captures the spirit of its time,” the museum’s director, Adam Weinberg, said at the press preview on Tuesday. It’s an impossible mission since the country is so big and disparate. Still, Mission Impossible did indeed hit its target every Saturday night. The curators at the Whitney selected work by 63 artists from all over America and a few from Canada and Mexico, which irks, since these artists aren’t American and I’m afraid I’m picky about rules and, besides, think Americans, Mexicans, and Canadians are distinct species.

I think it’s a very strong show. Good for the Whitney. I’ll write a series of Biennial stories, one now and another next week, and one or two after that. This is my introduction and preview, as the show is not open to the general public until April 6.

This Biennial was slated to occur in 2021, but the Covid mass hysteria and consequent restrictions pushed it to this year. Both 2020 and 2021, dark years, were, Weinberg said, “marked by the pandemic, environmental catastrophe, economic inequity, political turmoil, and racial reckoning.” I’d dicker on terms, assume that “environmental catastrophe” refers to the climate hoax, see “economic inequity” in terms of a gross excess of crazy billionaires, and add “a ruling kleptocracy” and “a hideously incompetent government topped by a president with dementia.” Granted, the times are both ugly and fevered.

The title, which I think is an inauspicious one, comes from the first line of Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. It’s a Southern expression, mostly used by grandmothers and great aunts, which explains why I don’t know it. Adrienne Edwards, one of the two Whitney curators who organized the show, grew up in South Carolina. She says that the phrase precedes an observation or anecdote whose moral is “we all know this to be true, but no one talks about it.” I’m not suggesting something obvious and catchy like “Annie Get Your Gun,” but this title is both cryptic and prone to summon irrelevant dead ends. “Quiet as It’s Kept,” though, at least aims at subtlety and, goodness knows, there’s not enough quiet in this troubled world.

David Breslin and Edwards, two Whitney curators, organized the show. Breslin was one of my Williams students years ago. I have followed his career and last saw him four years ago, think he’s a great curator, and don’t think I’m a mentor, so feel I can evaluate his work objectively. He did the first-rate David Wojnarowicz retrospective at the Whitney a few years ago, both dazzling and cool. He’s in charge of the Whitney’s permanent collection.

I don’t know Edwards. She’s the curator of performance at the Whitney. She did Black Abstraction, a very good show that I saw at Pace Gallery a few years ago, and she also mounted an intelligent, effective retrospective on the jazz pianist Jason Moran at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Moran’s a musician as well as an artist who has collaborated with Glenn Ligon, Carrie Mae Weems, Joan Jonas, and Julie Mehretu. I saw her show last year about a California group called My Barbarian that’s both a musical band and a trio of storytellers.

I didn’t think I’d like her My Barbarian show as much as I did. One of the members of the group described it as “expressing excess without attempting reality,” which I nominate as the motto of 2020’s protest culture. It’s offbeat cabaret but, after 20 years, there’s material for a museum exhibition. Next year, they’ll perform a musical at the Whitney about the truly dreadful Rose Bird, the criminal-coddling abortion impresaria and California supreme court chief justice in the 1980s. I think I’ll skip this.

It’s all L.A. Dada. As a curator, Edwards did a good job arranging and interpreting video, ephemera, music, and 3-D art to make something coherent and engaging.

“Performance” isn’t a medium like painting or sculpture. It’s more nebulous, and it’s new rather than traditional. I call it “liveness,” since it’s about physical movement, it elicits audience response as part of the work of art, and it’s usually evanescent. I know it best from artists such as Tristan Perich, who combines the visual arts and music, Kevin Beasley, who uses sound, sculpture, and found objects and makes, for instance, a city intersection the set for his art. The enchanting Lee Mingwei, who does participatory installations, is one of the best artists in America.

Edwards is one of the pioneers in bringing performance into art museums. I’m all for what she does, since it’s interdisciplinary. I’m curious about things that are new, though I usually discover they’re bad, often gobsmackingly bad, and rise above it. But Edward is the real thing, a serious curator, a scholar, and a measured, reflective person, as is Breslin. They’re trustworthy, respectful people.

I’m writing what sounds like a panegyric, since the Whitney Biennial is a curator-driven exhibition, so the result, or consequences, spring from the choices, or biases, of the one, two, or three curators picking the art. Not to dwell on the past, but Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, the curators of the 2019 Biennial, didn’t, in my opinion, know much about the country and, among other shortcomings, brought a blinkered Manhattan view to their travels and their selections.

The exhibition covers two floors of the Whitney and, at 15,000 square feet, is big. The sixth floor, where visitors should really start, is labyrinthine. The floor beneath it is open and spacious. There’s art in the lobby, too, and a painted column by Rodney McMillian called “shaft” that runs up the museum’s central staircase. It’s a history landscape drawing from what he learned as a child growing up in South Carolina. He calls it “a rich vehicle for conversation,” which it is, and that’s fantastic. This Biennial, almost without exception, doesn’t clobber us over the head with dogma or tartuffery.

At the press preview, Edwards emphatically said, “We are historians,” to which I nearly exploded with the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Both she and Breslin are art historians, and good art historians, like every other good historian, must concern themselves with context, approach their topics with a respectful and deliberate distance, look more for results than intent, and extinguish “I wish, therefore it is” from their evaluation.

They said, and I think they followed their own advice, that they privileged nuance over art that slapped visitors as hard as You-Know-Who, art that left viewers speculating rather than bruised by the artist’s ego and certainty. That’s curatorial maturity. In any event, Tiffany’s is the lead corporate sponsor, so a classy show isn’t a surprise.

There are many, many good things in the exhibition. Leidy Churchman is a New York- and Maine-based artist whose Mountains Walking, from 2022 is suffused with his Buddhist faith. It’s a landscape that suggests, at least to me, Monet’s water-lily pictures. “It’s about autonomy,” he says of his paintings. “I’m going to let this painting have its own subject, its own way, and its own universe.” Praise the Lord, and here’s to Buddha. Churchman’s an artist who respects his art and his creativity. Matt Connors’s abstract, colorful paintings are strikingly beautiful. They’re two of many good painters in the exhibition. Harold Ancart uses graphite and oil glue stick to create wistful, ethereal work that, he says, “brings viewers in, encourages them to look longer, and make their own meaning.” Lots of the artists in the show seem to respect the intelligence of art lovers. I think The Guiding Light, Ancart’s 2021 colored drawing, has that touch of mystery.

Danielle Dean’s video and suite of watercolors examines Fordlandia, a 1920s-era mill town built in Brazil by Ford Motor Company to introduce assembly-line practices in South America and, I’m sure, to harness a low-paid workforce. The environmental and social consequences were understandably disastrous. Buck Ellison is a Los Angeles artist I wrote about this past summer. He’s a very clever photographer who, in his Biennial work, uses Erik Prince, the Blackwater mercenary mogul, as a subject.

These are artists I know but many I don’t. Pao Houa Her is a Hmong-American artist, born in Laos. Her photographs are about the collective memory of a diaspora that’s not only here but all over the world. There are a few ensemble moments in the Biennial where one artist gets a prominent, well-arranged wall.

Adam Gordon’s another example, and he was new to me, too. Rose Salane is a young New York artist who works obsessively with unorthodox materials. 64,000 Attempts at Circulation uses discarded slugs once used as counterfeit New York subway tokens. When I was a museum director, we did an exhibition of the work of a dozen artists using material, among other things, plastic straws, Magic Marker caps, and heroine bags. It was called “Over and Over.” A bizarre show, and one of my favorites in my career. She and Gordon are just over 30.

Jacky Connolly’s video tells us how technically complex this medium can be. “Descent Into Hell” is part hyperrealistic 3-D animation juiced by AI enhancement and part an edited version of “Grand Theft Auto IV,” a video game that allows altered editing. Video games didn’t exist when I was young, and I barely can use a computer, so what she does is foreign to me, but Surrealism, apocalyptic history painting, and Romantic-era horror art aren’t. This is Henry Fuseli on steroids, not LSD since he and his contemporaries were well dosed with hallucinogens. Specifically, her video, about a woman with a two-track life, one alone in her apartment as the only human left on the planet and another riding mass transit all day and night in California.

There are famous artists in the Biennial such as Charles Ray, who has a show now at the Met, so this is his year. He’s hard to classify, which is a good thing. Alfredo Jaar’s tiresome video is about the legend surrounding President Trump’s appearance in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., the day after the historic church was partially burned by rioters, during the height of the George Floyd protests. “Yawn,” I say about an artist who is just not that good.

I suppose everyone at the Whitney felt there needed to be some reference to the riots. Jaar’s statement that cops brought fascism to America might seem plausible to him, but it’s both superficial and wrong. He’s an artist whose view of the country is static.

This cycle’s Biennial envisions anger, despair, and joy, a counterintuitive constellation, but such is life. The curators spoke of shifting sands as a metaphor for a country always in flux. The trick is finding the art expressing it.

There are, as is always the case in the Whitney Biennial, too few artists from the Midwest, the South, the mountain states, and the country. The lockdowns during the Covid epidemic hampered travel, though epidemics, alas, are part of human existence. The two Whitney curators strike me as intrepid, but museum policy is museum policy. People from Manhattan worked themselves into a neurotic stupor over Covid — once, that is, they rebounded from their mayor’s “hug a Chinese” policy. You’d think that state-based restrictions and lockdowns would have pushed the curators to look at artists from Florida and Texas.

Since the Covid crisis started, I’ve been to nine states outside of New England and the Acela Corridor and not called California, though I’ve traveled there, too. There’s great art all over the country. If I can get my senior-citizen self to Texas, Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, Illinois, Arkansas, Michigan, Oregon, and Ohio to find and see contemporary art, and I no longer cavort like a gazelle, why can’t curators 20 years younger than I?

There’s a huge amount for me to absorb in the Biennial so “stay tuned,” an appropriate cliché given that the Biennial has, it seems to me, a surfeit of video art. I think Edwards, the performance-art curator, is drawn to things that move, and that makes sense. They’re consuming, though, so I’ll need to see them all, in their entirety, and that takes time, focus, and repeated visits. Edwards has good taste, so I think this will be very rewarding.

The show will evolve as the months pass. Alex Da Corte’s piece is part video, part performance, part sculpture, part painting, and part light show. His brother, a professional housepainter, will change the color of a big wooden cube periodically. The new color, projected by light, will, I think, change the look of a big spread of the open fifth floor. Ralph Lemon’s dynamic, colorful drawings will rotate, too.

The curators naturally thanked Weinberg, the Whitney’s great director. I can’t remember which of the two curators said “he never told us no” over two years of planning and what must’ve been lots of meetings. I’m sure this is a diplomatic and celebratory, since a good director says no a lot, though Weinberg does it with a generous, kind touch.

I wish he’d said “no way” to the pronoun fascists who, if there are indeed fascists in America, most definitely have found a beachhead in the Meatpacking District. “Thems” and “theys” confuse the assiduous label reader and seem silly. I’ll propose a compromise. Let’s stick to English as the gendered language it’s been for, say, a thousand years. Unorthodox plurals allowed for actors and actresses auditioning for a remake of The Three Faces of Eve.

There have been 80 shows that the Whitney considers temperature checks, broad surveys of the state of American art. What we call the Biennial was, for many years, an annual show. I’ve seen, I think, 15 or so Biennials since the mid 1970s. They were once essential cultural experiences and covered nationally. Some were unbearable, but I’d call this one a success.