When I visited the Whitney Biennial in New York City last weekend, I made a point of not reading the introductory text to the exhibit itself, and did my best to avoid reading the texts which accompanied the artworks, at least until after I had had a chance to take them in as artworks.
Reading the explanatory texts first is a habit I am trying to break, one rooted in my preference for interacting with the world through text, through reading and writing. But it also no doubt stems from a rationalist need to categorize, to know whether I am looking at a Renoir or a Bonnard, a Malevich or a Mondrian, to know where to put this thing in front of me into my mental map of art history.
From reading the review in the Times back in March, I had picked up that the show’s subtitle, Even Better Than the Real Thing, was, at least in part, a reference to the growing ubiquity of “artificial intelligence” functions in our tech tools, and especially to questions about those tools’ use in the creation of art. Indeed, there were two works that had clearly been generated by AI, but I can’t say that I had much of an emotional or aesthetic response to them, one way of the other. Maybe the explanatory text would have been interesting, had I read it — I dunno.
The AI-generated, um, “paintings,” were not the only pieces in the show that seemed more of an excuse for the curators (or the artists? I am never sure who writes those wall texts for living artists) to wax prosaic about the social issues that the artist is “interrogating” or “exploring” or “engaging with” or whatever. Especially given the brevity of my visit, if the physical presence of a piece didn’t engage with me, I simply moved on.
That said, there were some truly fantastic artworks in the show — and the ones that I most appreciated were the ones that, I think, lean into “the real” of sculpture and painting. As soon as I opened the door from the stairwell to the fifth floor (the Biennial occupies the third, fifth and sixth floors of the eight-story museum; we went from the top down), I was captivated by Lebanese artist Dala Nasser’s Adonis River, a towering structure of columns and wooden scaffolding draped with patterned and dyed fabrics.
I didn’t love Nasser’s commission for the most recent Carnegie International, Tomb of King Hiram — perhaps because its squat form (and the fact that I no doubt read the wall text first) simply overwhelmed me with the brute facts of Nasser’s practice. Both pieces consist of structures overlaid with fabric “paintings,” impressed with charcoal rubbings of the rocks and architectural structures of a specific site in Lebanon and then dyed with local clay and vegetation.
Upon seeing Adonis River, I quickly guessed that it was by the same artist — but in this case, perhaps because of the greater openness of the structure, perhaps because I simply found the colors more aesthetically pleasing, I was drawn towards the artwork with a sense of wonder. It did that thing that art is supposed to do, first and foremost, of being a unique thing that you could never have imagined existing in the world and then, here is it, standing in front of you, real.
My first two years of higher education were spent at a small liberal arts college just outside of New York City, and if I’m honest, its proximity to the city played a large role both in my decision to go there in the first place and in my decision, two years later, to transfer to another small liberal arts college in a small town in the middle of Iowa.
New York in the early 90s was still suffused with a vague sense of menace, at least to eighteen-year-olds from the college towns and suburbs of Kansas, Connecticut, Arizona, Washington State. That menace was our drug, the way all of our senses went on high alert as we took the Metro North to Grand Central, then the Lexington Avenue line down to the East Village. Everything we saw confirmed Lou Reed’s observation on his New York album that “Manhattan's sinking like a rock into the filthy Hudson, what a shock! They wrote a book about it, they said it was like ancient Rome.”
During my entire first year, Tompkins Square Park was sealed off by the police, in the wake of the riots and butchery of the late 80s. I remember walking around Alphabet City. It’s now full of trendy cocktail bars, but then the only functioning commercial concerns were a few sad bodegas, the open-air drug deals, and a crusty anarchist bookstore where I bought a small revolutionary booklet issued by the “Red Balloon Collective” — which I probably still have somewhere — from a wizened old man with long graying hair and ill-fitting clothes.
We went into the city every single weekend during the first month or two after our parents dropped us off. We would just walk around the neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, soaking in “the smelly essence of New York.” On the subway and the streets alike, we were frequently accosted by people who were homeless and/or mentally ill, looking for change or perhaps just some human attention. There was noise and garbage everywhere. We loved it.
More than the Biennial, what brought me to New York City last weekend was LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monuments of Solidarity exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.
I was first introduced to Frazier’s work a decade ago, when I saw the exhibit WITNESS at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Frazier is from Braddock, Pennsylvania — a steel town outside of Pittsburgh that has not recovered from the deindustrialization of the 80s. In 2006, John Fetterman, now Pennsylvania’s junior senator, began his political career with a successful bid for mayor of Braddock, a post he held until 2019. Then as now, Fetterman was mercurial and arrogant; while he may have had good intentions in his attempts to revive Braddock’s economy by promoting it to what we now call “the creative class,” his efforts reeked of white saviorism. (Braddock is majority Black; Fetterman and, to take a random example, the owners of the craft brewery that opened in Braddock during his mayoralty, are white.)
In WITNESS Frazier, who is Black, took particular aim at a 2010 Levi’s “Go Forth” ad campaign, launched with Fetterman’s blessing, which portrays Braddock as a new “frontier.” In handwritten commentary written around and over reproductions of images from the ads — mostly showing rugged white men (wearing Levis, of course) — Frazier critiques how the ad campaign erases Braddock’s existing residents while invoking the “settling” of the American West — a process that, of course, relied on the genocide of Native Americans. She juxtaposes the ad images with photographs of Braddock’s Black residents, including herself, her mother, and her grandmother — the “real” Braddock, you might say.
Monuments of Solidarity reprises some of the work from WITNESS and other photographs from Braddock, as well as photography projects that Frazier has done with residents of Flint, Michigan, fighting for clean water; with low-wage workers in Baltimore; with Sandra Gould Ford, an artist and one of the few Black women who worked in the steel industry in Pittsburgh; with Dolores Huerta, one the founders, along with Cesar Chavez, of the United Farm Workers; and with workers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, who fought, unsuccessfully, to keep their plant open when the company decided to close it in 2018.
The show’s “monuments” are not what one might expect from its title — grand depictions of workers in heroic poses. Instead they are simply large collections of portraits of working-class people, often in small groups, generally looking directly at the camera. Many are accompanied by texts that tell us who they are, how they have been impacted by broader forces like deindustrialization and systemic racism, and the actions they take, small and large, to maintain their dignity in the face of those forces.
The photographs and text are arranged not just along walls but often filling the center of the room — the photographs and text that make up The Last Cruze, Frazier’s work with the Lordstown autoworkers, are displayed on a connected series of orange metal frames reminiscent of an assembly line. They gain their monumentality, not by depicting dramatic actions like marches or strikes, but simply from the accumulation of stories, of relationships, of the variety of working-class life and the visual evidence that we are the many, not the few.
Eventually my college friends and I got tired of going into the city just for the sake of going into the city, and began looking for things to do while we were there — most commonly concerts. (A few weeks into that first semester, C, who was from Seattle, convinced us to all buy tickets to see some band none of the rest of us had heard of, which is how I came to see Nirvana, the day after Nevermind was released, in a half-empty club in the Meatpacking District, then known — though not to us — as a center of prostitution and drug-dealing.)
But the most New York thing we did was go to the Village Halloween Parade. Now over five decades old and promoted as “The nation’s most wildly creative public participatory event in the greatest city in the world,” in the early 90s its queerness still put it at the outer limits of what was acceptable in American society. Suburban women didn’t go to drag brunches back then.
Growing up in Kansas in the 80s, almost no one I knew was out (including even just to me), so New York was my introduction to queer culture. Mostly on campus, of course — but the halloween parade was, in some sense, a capstone to that unofficial part of my college education. Not simply the drag queens (though Lord knows there were plenty of drag queens), but the sheer variety of bodies and expressions of desire, each, at least in the context of its performance for the crowd, confident in itself, in its own reality.
Reading the Biennial’s description on the museum’s website after I got home, I learned that the show’s subtitle is intended to reference not only the way that “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is complicating our understanding of what is real,” but also how “rhetoric around gender and authenticity is being used politically and legally to perpetuate transphobia and restrict bodily autonomy.”
I dunno. To me, the “rhetoric around gender and authenticity” which they are referring to is not an invocation of the “real,” but an attempt to suppress it, to squeeze the intense realness of our bodies, in all their various shapes and expressions and desires, into a category. To know if you’re looking at a man or a woman, as if that’s important.
On a visit this past spring to another museum, I saw a video work which consisted, in part, of a queer Black woman standing on the balcony of the Whitney’s shiny new building, which opened in 2015 on the border between the West Village and the Meatpacking District, and looks out over the Hudson. She directs the camera down to the adjacent piers, pointing out the specific spots where she had once lived — the West Village used to be a gathering place for homeless queer youth, and the piers provided shelter for more than a few of them.
Since the arrival of the High Line in 2009, and the Whitney six years later, it seems unlikely that these neighborhoods, now fully gentrified, provide that social function any more. As the Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman wrote when the museum opened, “Now New York is a safe, glamorous tourist mecca and 24-hour, family-friendly spectacle.”
There is not a lot of traditional painting in the Whitney Biennial, but there are two large, fantastic canvasses by the Bosnian-born painter Maja Ruznic. The Past Awaiting the Present/Arrival of Drummers, my favorite of the two, is reminiscent of Marc Chagall in its variety of colors and surrealism — but whereas Chagall uses vibrant colors, acrobatic figures and space to evoke a sense of wholeness and joy, Ruznic’s more muted colors and tightly packed composition make for a more complex viewing experience. There is joy but also menace, serenity but also anxiety.
It was therefore not a surprise when, after taking in the painting, almost feeling its weird contradictions in my body, I read the wall text and learned that the painting was inspired by a memory of a refugee camp, and that Ruznic has said the painting “looks at how multiple things can be true at the same time: birth, violence, pain, suffering, joy, and music.”
For new subscribers, or old subscribers who missed it or would just like to reread it, at the end of 2022 I wrote a lengthy piece on the 58th Carnegie International. That essay also includes a bit of rumination on the role of wall texts in art exhibits.
Domestic Left #26: Finity goes up on trial
The Biennial’s subtitle is taken from the title of the second song on U2’s 1991 album Achtung Baby, which was released near the end of my first semester of college. On that album, the band moved away from the anthemic bombast of The Joshua Tree and their clumsy attempts to embrace traditional American musics on Rattle and Hum, instead incorporating hip hop beats, electronica, and noise, and exploring more complex emotions than the, ahem, righteousness which had characterized their earlier lyrics: confusion, self-doubt, vulnerability.
But they weren’t the only musicians experimenting with mixing post-punk and new wave with new musical elements in the early 90s. Here’s a bit of what I was listening to in those years:
I've yet to see the Biennial, but on my list for things to do in July. All of what you wrote about NYC is so funny because of how familiar it all is. I lived on St. Marks and Ave A, a few steps away from the park right after the riots when I was going to Cooper Union a few blocks up. And maybe you know this, but after 3 years transferred to a small school in Washington State the month that Nirvana played SNL, a college that was essentially their regular gig playing in the dorms. I've been writing a little about this period because I'm in such a nostalgic mode with my kids going off. Funny to see such a parallel experience here in some ways - or maybe it's typical of Gen X.