The last time the Whitney Biennial was presented, in 2022, its production was extended an extra year due to the Covid pandemic, and curators had to schedule the exhibition and meet artists in virtual visits via Zoom.
To prepare for the 2024 Biennial — the latest iteration of the landmark exhibition of American contemporary art, which opens March 20 — this edition’s organizers, Whitney Museum curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, hit the road. They made about 200 studio visits across the country and beyond. They visited dozens of exhibitions and art events from the German mega-show Documenta 15 to the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
So this cycle was, in a sense, more normal. But the normal stops here. The active phase of the pandemic, with its limitations, may have subsided. But the landscape left in his wake is a panorama of complex crises – and for artists, like everyone else, a time of high uncertainty and anxiety with the US election looming.
As they moved, Iles and Onli said in a joint interview at the museum, they felt environmental stress everywhere, whether they were smelling smoke from wildfires falling over freeways in Los Angeles — a reflection of overuse of land and climate change — whether they were hearing firsthand from women and LGBTQ artists about the outcome of overturning Roe v. Wade and the proliferation of laws that undermine bodily autonomy.
“We understand that we are in a turbulent period, which leads to another turbulent period,” Onli said. To make an exhibition under these circumstances, he said, “the show had to be politically charged.”
On Thursday, the museum revealed the names of the artists who will participate in the Biennale, titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” It’s relatively compact, with 69 artists and two collectives spread across the gallery’s exhibition, accompanying film and performance programs — and the world map: 20 of the artists, many filmmakers, live or work outside the United States.
For Iles and Onli, the focus is less on the state of American art than on America itself at a raw, vulnerable moment. They were drawn to artists who explored how people carried and processed the wounds of society in their bodies and minds—and what creative renaissance this sparked.
As for the title, it’s a kind of multifaceted response to the culture wars over what’s “real” — from the rise of artificial intelligence to efforts to enforce social and physical conformity. “There’s a type of queer playfulness,” Onli said of the offerings—a tongue-in-cheek humor that insists, “Of course we’re better than the real thing!”
The group is diverse, as with recent biennales. There are two dead artists, the Jamaican-born painter inspired by architecture Mavis Pusey, who died in 2019 at the age of 90, and the filmmaker Edward Owens, who died in 2010. There are five elders, born between 1941 and 1944: the pioneering feminists artists Mary Kelly and Harmony Hammond; Famous black abstract painters Mary Lovelace O’Neal and Suzanne Jackson. and transgender sculptor and performer Pippa Garner. Otherwise, the show is younger: 17 of the 42 artists in the main galleries were born in the 1980s, and nine of them in the 1990s.
Not surprisingly, New York is well represented: 13 artists in the galleries and seven in the film and performance programs live here. Twelve artists in total are based in Los Angeles. Four, it turns out, live in New Mexico: Hammond, who moved there in the 1980s; indigenous artists Rose B. Simpson and Cannupa Hanska Luger; and Bosnian-born painter Maja Ruznic, who is influenced by mysticism and psychoanalysis.
The film and performance programs — curated by guest curators asinnajaq, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Zakary Drucker, Greg de Cuir, Jr. and Taja Cheek — include works by Southeast Asian filmmakers who respond to America’s broad cultural and political reach, and by indigenous filmmakers of Sami, Inuit, Mongolian, and Native American descent who target exchanges across colonial borders.
Few artists are celebrities or market stars. Perhaps the most important is director Isaac Julien, whose lavish five-screen installation “Once Again… (Statues Never Die),” premiered at the Barnes Foundation in 2022. He examined issues surrounding African art objects in Western collections and will have his New York debut at the Whitney.
In short telephone interviews several artists described the work they will present.
Los Angeles and London-based artist P. Staff has one of the most spectacular, jarring works: “Afferent Nerves,” a large installation in which viewers will walk under electrified netting, inaccessible but “somewhat audible ” creaks. . The area is bathed in yellow neon light. The intention, the artist said, is to create a sense of “choreographed danger” that heightens the visitor’s awareness of the art and perhaps their own sense of safety.
New York-based sculptor Jes Fan makes disturbing work in another register: He took a CT scan of his body, then 3-D printed various organs and carved and sanded the resulting forms. The inspiration is a type of tree in Hong Kong, where Fan grew up, that is aggressively cut down or infected with fungus to yield a precious incense.
The sculptures are part of a series, “Sites of Wounding,” in which Fan explores how organisms, while accumulating trauma, “can create something substantial, some kind of regeneration that happens in the formation of the scar,” which relates to the human condition.
Philadelphia-based artist Karyn Olivier, known for work that responds to historic monuments and public art — most recently in Newark Airport’s Terminal A — is showing her “more intimate, quiet sculptures.” In one, “How Many Ways Can You Disappear,” it features tangles of fishing nets, rope and buoys. another is made of washed-up driftwood and discarded scraps of clothing.
Olivier said she feels like she’s processing the upheavals and losses of the pandemic season. “It’s almost a metaphorical attempt at a solution,” said the Trinidadian-born artist – and rich with allusions to immigration, displacement and her Caribbean origins.
Some messages are more blunt. Luger, who was born in North Dakota on the Standing Rock Reservation and lives in New Mexico, is setting up a full-size tipi — upside down. “It’s a signal that the way we’re going as a species is upside down,” he said.
In “The Last Safe Abortion,” Columbus, Ohio-based artist Carmen Winant—a self-described “expired photographer” who works through collage and installation—offers a perspective on the lives of abortion workers in Midwest, drawn from thousands of snapshots, largely from clinics. Views are of everyday work — meetings, office, phone calls. “This is not about abortion at a 30,000-foot ideological level,” Winant said. “It’s about the human beings who do it.”
The post- Roe climate has raised the stakes for Winant, whose works have also celebrated maternity and domestic violence workers. Some clinics where he photographed were closed. “I’ve always felt ambivalent about what art can do in terms of political impact and effectiveness,” she said. “But as I worked on this project I felt more and more that it was imperative.”
For the Biennale’s older artists, if recognition is slow in coming it is certainly welcome. “This is not something I ever expected at my age,” said Jackson, who ran a famous but short-lived black artists’ space in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and now lives in Savannah, Ga.
Included in the survey are her hanging abstract acrylic paintings without stretchers. “They are living structures that are pure colors,” he said, inviting viewers to a kind of dance.
Hammond, a figure in the New York feminist scene in the 1970s, was featured at the Whitney but long ignored by the Biennial. “I just kept working,” she said from her home in Galisteo, NM
Her recent work includes thickly layered paintings, sometimes incorporating belts, cloaks or quilts, with patches and slits that evoke female bodies, childbirth and wounds. In the colors that penetrate the layers, Hammond said, she summons “voices that are buried beneath the surfaces and that assert themselves.”
As they organized their show, Onli and Iles brought some artists into the process as collaborators, breaking the secrecy that often attends Biennale preparations.
One was JJJJJerome Ellis, an artist and performer in Norfolk, Va., whose work (and name) explores the condition of stuttering. Working with four other people who stutter, Ellis led the development of a text billboard facing Gansevoort Street in Spanish, Mandarin and English in which the dissonances of stuttering—repetitions, sustained sounds, blocks or pauses—are represented by typographic symbols.
Ellis will also create a score for the Biennale, the format of which will be determined once the exhibition is installed.
Berlin-based artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis presents a dance-based film installation, “A Plot A Scandal” at the galleries – subjects include philosopher John Locke, Cuban anti-slavery revolutionary José Antonio Aponte and Lewis’ maternal ancestors . the Dominican Republic. It was Lewis who came up with a metaphor that the curators found inspired to describe their Biennale: a “dissonant choir”.
As they install the survey, the curators said their goal is to create a show that breathes and flows while honoring this dissonance. “What does it mean to be in the middle of this chorus as a spectator,” Iles said, “to hear and see?”
