Whitney Biennial

“Even Better Than the Real Thing” is the coyly and suggestively named exhibition title of the 81st edition of the Whitney Biennial. Presumably this is a mostly ironic reference to our pixelated and increasingly online reality of deep fakes, fake news and simulacra; culture wars around identity and social perspective, and what constitutes an authentic one; and the advancing impact of AI. All of this has brought a new level of proleptic frenzy to our ideas about the future, spawning even more intensely utopian and apocalyptic rhetoric than we already had, in almost equal measure. The show’s real purpose, though, alongside the Biennial’s addiction to a maximalist installation strategy, is to impact the viewer holistically and speak to at least a broad progressive political perspective, if not the particular one of the curatorial team, in an emotionally generous and appreciable desire to introduce a healing element into visual arts culture. The show is strong overall as a presentation, and contains a capable variety and a number of brilliant individual offerings. There was a pleasing variety of media as well, and a surprising amount of painting, with an aesthetic and highly professional level of finish and refinement to almost all the work, regardless of media. The title of the show may be hinting at a subversive idea of how to understand the mainstream or putative notion of a thing, the possibility that many of the “real things” out there may not be what they claim, and that perhaps we should regard as many real things as there are things. If not more.

Jes Fan’s four sculptures, alone in a small room that somehow sustains a bit of privacy for the work, are very beautiful objects, made from polylactic acid filaments, resin, glass and metal. They derive from 3D printed CAT scans of his body, inside and out. A very complex tower-like piece centres the room; two smaller, more lyrical pieces are wall-mounted; and a final piece is located on one wall, viewable only through three quite narrow low apertures. That one, Gut, represents the artist’s stomach. The works were inspired by a species of incense tree that grows in Fan’s hometown of Hong Kong and that is a self-healing tree, making Fan’s lovely installation a kind of visual synecdoche for the entire Biennial, as well as a sensitive examination of queerness and racialization. It is also, quite simply, a formally successful series of gorgeous sculptures.

Carmen Winant’s massive 2,700 inkjet photographic print piece, and three supporting smaller pieces, powerfully address the issue of abortion health care. The images were assembled over a 50-year time span, but her work has taken on even more urgency in the aftermath of the SCOTUS decision to reverse Roe v Wade in 2022. The piece has a tremendous visual impact, moving and magnificent, equally as an experience to see and to contemplate. Every single one of the smaller images yields an emotional payload, as the viewer looks over and interacts with the enormous presence of the whole work. Mary Kelly’s Lacunae is a large but mordantly quiet piece, a long paper and vellum rectangle in black and white under plexiglass, with a series of calendars marking the passage of time in the artist’s life and the lives and deaths of personal friends. Both our physical materiality and the uncanny fact of our common mortality are raised and borne along as we look at and over this work. Winant and Kelly both address our bodies and their needs and vicissitudes as conceptual problems to be engaged, if not solved, visually and in aesthetic terms, folding in ethical and ontological concerns along the way. They perceptively ask us to understand all these supposedly different areas of knowledge as, at least, overlapping if not simultaneous in time and space.

Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s three enormous paintings on canvas, variously in acrylic, oil and oil stick, and some glitter, possess tremendous energy, and sustain both lighter and heavier kinds of readings and understanding. For over half a century her paintings have addressed, among many other things, the complexity of her own painting practice and its requirements as a Black woman, and forged a terrain in which outrage and joy—and joyfully and purposely outrageous subjects—fuse in a cacophony of image and abstraction. Her painting Blue Whale a.k.a. #12, from the “Whales Fucking” series, is a wonderful case in point. Another painter, Eamon Ore-Giron, approaches the canvas with hard edges and great precision, and a fair amount of flat ground on which his reimagined Peruvian and Mexican deities stand out with clarity and alacrity. “Talking Shit” is the title of his project, reflecting his desire to engage with cultural history in an informal manner, as well as with as much pictorial energy as possible. Maja Ruznic’s two huge and colourfully magnificent paintings depict spiritually charged, atmospherically calming images of her experience as a refugee fleeing Bosnia in the 1990s, which propose and offer themselves as sites of recuperation and renewal. Both for herself and for us as well, they do possess balm-like qualities. All told, this Biennial addresses painting in an engaging manner, just as it does with video and 3D and installation works, which gives it a more comprehensive feeling than some of its predecessors.

The Biennial’s filmed artworks do take centre stage, though. Tourmaline’s five-minute video Pollinator centres on the figure of Black trans activist Marsha P Johnson, who died in 1992, and includes footage of the artist’s late father as well, singing “The Cisco Kid.” Touching and intense, this short film seeks to further the legacies of people whom Tourmaline holds up as inspirations and to join her own contribution to theirs. It expresses loss and trauma as equally as triumph and continuation, with emotionally exhilarating effect. Sharon Hayes’s Ricerche: four, a double-screen, 80-minute video piece, records an in-depth conversation between a group of LGBTQIA elders, who gather to discuss, in an open forum, gender, sexuality and their long experience of many forms of marginalization and struggle. Ultimately, the subject is the nature and meaning of such a gathering in this time. A touching and poised intimacy and reckoning are achieved for the viewer who has watched the whole work. Perhaps the tour de force piece in the entire exhibition, though, is Isaac Julien’s Once Again … (Statues Never Die), an extraordinary experience in five-channel black and white, with stunning acting and music, and a number of actual sculptures made by Black modern artists referred to in the video. The central figure of the piece is the Harlem Renaissance philosopher and critic Alain Locke, who engages in a revelatory conversation with Albert C Barnes (played respectively by André Holland and Danny Huston), about Black artists and modern art, unlocking a fascinating and cathartic finale of sight and sound, beautiful music drenching the room. Shots at the beginning and occasionally throughout cut to the outside of the Barnes Foundation building, with snow gently falling and time seemingly slowed to a synchronous instant of resonant meaning. Unfolding inside are the dynamic events, creating a sublime effect that recentres our vision. Julien seeks to achieve a new understanding with the viewer, and the piece hits hard.

We are tempted to think that the title of the Biennial’s synonymous reference to an annoying song by U2 of the 1990s is, probably, accidental. ❚

Whitney Biennial 2024: “Even Better Than the Real Thing” was exhibited at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from March 20, 2024, to August 11, 2024.

Benjamin Klein is a Brooklyn-based artist and writer.