At the Whitney Biennial, Walking through What It Means to Be American

A Lebanese artist applying for citizenship has some ideas, as do others in this excellent show.

I’ ve already written one general story about the Whitney Biennial. Since it’s a big exhibition and an important one, and since it runs for six months, I’ll see it a few more times and write about it again.

Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, wrote an unusually perceptive and wise preface to the catalogue. He was my predecessor as director of the Addison Gallery and is now, he notes, the Whitney director who has been there the longest.

I don’t think this dates us as antiques. Rather, it acknowledges we’ve both been around the block a few times, however much I’m doing it more slowly and muttering “Pick up your feet . . . don’t shuffle.” I admire Adam a great deal. He built the perfect new museum for the Whitney, and that took grit, charm, and taste. He’s a kind, generous person, too.

Adam wrote about the vital importance of in-person experience of art. Virtual looking and even looking at reproductions in a book alter, even compromise, dimensions, color, surface, layers, and nuance. As big a nut as he was as a general proposition, Dr. Barnes banned the dissemination of his art at what is now the Barnes Collection for these reasons, and correctly so. Usually distortions of the kind he feared are unavoidable. Most of us, for example, learn from books. There’s no substitute, though, for the real work of art.

Now that we’re free from the tyranny of the Covid regime, free from the useless, vindictive lockdowns and bubbles and free, if we choose, from the rectangular boxes and dulled senses that virtual life concocts, we can learn, critique, understand, or simply enjoy. My own scholarship over the years has focused on art and American identity.

Freedom’s part of our sense of self as citizens and as individuals. When I visit survey shows of American art, I always look for moments where the curators address what it means to be an American. In view of this, I think Rayyane Tabet’s 100 Civics Questions, from 2022, is the best beginning, middle, and end the Biennial could have.

“What’s he talking about,” you say? Throughout the museum and the neighborhood around the Whitney, Tabet’s piece, or project, sprinkles questions and phrases from the official U.S. study guide for the citizenship test. Tabet, born in 1983, is from Beirut and is currently applying for American citizenship.

“WHAT IS THE RULE OF LAW?” looms over the Whitney’s façade. “What is one promise you make when you become a United States citizen?” another segment asks. It’s installed at the nearest subway stop. Well, there are several, but I don’t think most citizens can answer one. We’d read the oath and say, “Well, that goes without saying” when we see statements such as “renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince” or “bear arms on behalf of the United States when required.”

Beirut is, on the one hand, still the Paris of the Middle East, in spots here and there. On the other, it’s a hellhole run by terrorists. It’s many things in between, among them lawless. “What is the rule of law?” is a question that seems irrelevant, even fanciful, in the context of where Tabet once lived and where his parents still live.

I like his project because, as we move through the Whitney, it makes us think over and over about what it means to be an American. His snippets sometimes sound contradictory or poetic or abstract, but they root us in the Whitney’s mission to interpret American art. They provoke us, since “What is the rule of law?” — which isn’t hard to answer — leads to “Why does it fail so often?” Tabet’s a smart artist. His work makes us think.

Adam Pendleton, born in 1984, is Tabet’s contemporary. How does he describe what he calls “Americanness”? Start, he says, by asking the question “Where does it hurt?” Pendleton’s a black artist. He’s got two things in the show. I’ll write about him in a couple of weeks. Tabet doesn’t seem to be an artist who cries about his pain. Crying is a Manhattan thing. It’s an island of left-wing aggrievement.

Of the 60 artists in the Biennial, 16 were born outside the United States. I’m not going to get into the issue of who’s grateful and who’s an ingrate. One of the things I love about Pao Houa Her, whom I wrote about last week, is her focus on displacement, a wistfulness or nostalgia that immigrants are bound to feel, even if it’s illusory or if their old homes, like Tabet’s, are far from ideal.

Her, born in 1982, is from Laos. Her father fought with the Americans in the Vietnam War, immigrating to America when Her was a child. In St. Paul, her new home, her parents worked overnight shifts. During the evening, Her listened to Hmong folk stories her father recorded to cultivate in her some measure of the old culture. Her admits that she places her subjects in what she calls “romantic environments” of Laotian flower patterns, villages, and Mekong River scenes. That’s good. I’m happy to see that American Romanticism still has a pulse.

Tabet, Pendleton, and Her are outsiders. While Pendleton’s otherness is something of a construction project, he’s no WASP, not bourgeois in his point of view, and, as does every good artist, he sees things others don’t. WASPs, country-clubbers, and Acela corridor dwellers aside, we’re a country of outsiders. I’m not writing about artists who fashion themselves as part of “the Resistance,” since most of those are bores and outrage pimps.

When I think about outsiders, I’m thinking, for instance, about disabled artists — simply because they understand the world in ways I don’t and can’t. Freedom is a natural subject for them since, whatever their disability, freedoms we take for granted are circumscribed. Emily Barker’s work, Kitchen, is a translucent plastic sculpture that’s sleek and clean and sparking and minimalist.

It’s a kitchen, though, with countertops 5′9″ from the floor. That’s the average height of the American man. Not even Michael Jordan could reach them. Barker, confined to a wheelchair because of a spinal-cord injury, tells us that as much as these counters and cabinets are inaccessible to the average man, most standard-shaped furniture, appliances, and fittings are inaccessible to her. The plastic shapes Barker uses work for her because they’re lightweight. If she used a heavier material, she couldn’t cut, manipulate, or rivet it. Her second piece in the exhibition is Death by 7,865 Paper Cuts. It’s a pile of photocopies of her medical bills. She says it’s about “the horror of privatized medical care.” I won’t visit the horror of socialized medical care but, rather, observe that a pile of photocopies of her medical bills isn’t art. It doesn’t belong in the show.

If the Biennial is meant to take the temperature of American art, taking the temperature of Mexican or Canadian artists is, at best, a tangent. I’m not the type who is bound by rules for the hell of it. If anything, I’m a transgressor these days. I don’t think showing the work of, say, a Mexican artist is taking away spots for American artists. The show’s as big as the curators want.

I’m not a chauvinist, either. Though a huge country, the United States is a thing unto itself, with its own history, systems, and ideals. This country isn’t bound by religion, ethnicity, or, anymore, by language. This makes our history and, as a better glue, our ideals, definitional and, to use a word that makes left-wingers cringe, exceptional. Our art expresses this. It’s why American art, in my opinion, exists on a continuum. I’ve written about this many times.

The show finesses its own American-only rule. I think Mónica Arreola is a very good artist. She lives in Tijuana, Mexico. Her photographs show housing developments in Tijuana that were stopped in their tracks by the 2008 financial crisis. Until the Covid catastrophe supplanted it, this crisis was the worst case of federal government malfeasance in our history. Every protective lever in government failed to work, either through incompetence or subversion. Her photographs tell us, she says, how sensitive Mexico is to financial upset here. Arreola isn’t depicting anything a Florida or Arizona artist doesn’t depict.

Arreola’s work also dates from 2008. It’s not new. I’m all for noting over and over how hellacious the financial crisis was and, especially, how many of the rats who made it still have their names adorning museum galleries and wings. That said, 2008 is a tumbleweed long past the hacienda.

Andrew Roberts is a fantastic artist and, at 27, the youngest artist in the Biennial, but he’s not an American, either. I’ll write more about him because he’s so good. I’d love to see an exhibition of his work at the Whitney, or at any museum. I don’t see how his work informs the state of American art. He lives in Tijuana. His video, La horda (The Horde), is a futurist contemplation of what happens when a labor force, turned zombie by the mores of the globalized economy, awakens.

Roberts says his work concerns “the necrocapitalist dynamics exerted by the military, organized crime, and the government on each side of the border.” Would a 27-year-old American artist do something like this? I’m skeptical. No 27-year-old American I know thinks about organized crime.

As visually arresting as I found Rebecca Belmore’s ishkode (fire), she’s Canadian. Her sculpture is a response to ongoing gun violence, she says, and that means American gun violence, especially “our inability to overcome the violence we wage against one another — and the violence we commit against the earth.”

“We” means “us,” and I can’t help thinking “mind your own business” and “stick to what’s wrong with Canada.” I see this not as chauvinism but patriotism. Again, her sculpture’s great. Without the label pushing gun violence as her chic subject, I think nearly all viewers would interpret it in entirely different ways.

I don’t have a set-in-concrete view on whether or not Canadian and Mexican artists belong in the Biennial, though it sounds like I do. It doesn’t seem right or logical or useful. I’m fine with this. What gives me pause is that Arreola, Roberts, and Belmore are very good. I want to see more of their art. What does it mean to the Biennial if it opens the door to Canadian and Mexican artists?

I suppose the most radical otherness is being dead. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha died in 1978. I don’t know why her work is in the show, but I’m open to an explanation.

Native American art is of deep interest to me, since the artists have a long history of exclusion. They’re Americans and part of our culture and our heritage. These artists aren’t all about grievance, though. I don’t know anything about the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota, which, I believe, were meant to stop construction of an oil pipeline that the protesters believed would endanger a Sioux reservation’s water supply and disturb what might be an old Sioux graveyard. I watched Navajo artist Raven Chacon’s Three Songs video, which shows Native women protesters singing resistance songs, playing a snare drum, and staring defiantly at state troopers.

I don’t know who’s right or who’s wrong and tend to think the Sioux locals have a good point, but I look at Chacon’s video as a documentary that belongs in a film series, not as art to be viewed in a gallery. Chacon filmed an event he didn’t orchestrate. What unfolds at the event is someone else’s composition, costuming, narrative, and sound effects. He’s not manipulating materials, either. As a contrast, Jacky Connolly’s video, Descent into Hell, from 2021, which I previewed last week, uses photorealistic 3D animation and machine-cinema, which is filming inside a preexisting video game. That’s art.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll write about visual conversations among works of art. The curators of the Biennial did a great job all around but particularly in arranging so much art, disparate in media and message, to make a coherent, organic whole.