haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

To wrap up from last time, nothing matters more to the 2024 Whitney Biennial than globalism and gender. Well, that and not AI but multimedia. Not that politics is anything new to a biennial, and neither is controversy.

The 2000 Biennial targeted Rudy Giuliani, who took his usual potshots at art in return. Artists walked out of the 2019 Biennial over a board member’s role in the arms industry and protested the 2017 Whitney Biennial over a rendering of the death of Emmett Till. Politics is news, by definition, but can diversity still make the headlines? Can it take a stand on the fluid and permeable without sinking? If so, does that make it “same old, same old” after all?

Some have thought so, while others have found the biennial’s quality at odds with its message. I can sympathize. Many works do hector, like a screed on colonialism from Demian DinéYazhi’ in neon. Others may refuse to hector, but wall text does not. There the work takes a back seat to its supposed origins in the issues of the day. That can make art needlessly obscure, but it makes all the clearer how much art conveys issues of the heart.

Artists, then, can still win out. The biennial can take credit, too, for extending diversity in American art from blacks and women to LGBT+ and other nations. That expansion is at its best in video that refuses to lecture, like Julien’s. Clarissa Tossin connects Mayan artifacts to life in Guatemala today, while Seba Calfuqueo sees Chile’s heartland as if for the first time. They may come down to little more than travel ads, but have a nice trip. Dora Budor lends New York’s most exclusive and abhorrent real estate deal, the Hudson Yards, a spooky appeal.

Others are shriller and less coherent. Sharon Hayes tapes classroom discussions (about gender), but they look more like episodes of The View. Lewis listens to church bells in Italy and hears only the dominance of Western civilization. I can feel the puzzlement and pain as Diane Severin Nguyen grapples with war crimes, but only if I get past her ham acting. Still, the impact of video points to what could be the biennial’s greatest achievement. It takes light, sound, multimedia, and collaboration seriously.

JJJJJerome Ellis has a lot of J’s and an open invitation to respond to the entire biennial in sound, while Andrews already fills the stairs with choral music somewhere between speech and song. Nikita Gale lends a piano without strings her lively Tempo Rubato (Stolen Time). She adopts a literal translation of the musical term for loose, expressive rhythm, but then in this life time is always short. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich honors a Caribbean philosopher of “Négritude” with nothing more than slowly brightening and dimming light. When she calls it Too Bright to See, she could be speaking of race, philosophy, or the cycle of day and night. Like James Turrell with natural and artificial light, she is teaching herself and others to look.

Too much else is business as usual or, worse, a loaded agenda. Too much, too, is out of the picture. Diversity is important, but it is not everything. The last few years of controversy, classics, and creative hanging are looking better all the time. Still, there may never be a balanced biennial, and there never should be. For now, there is more than enough light to see.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time, most of the seventy-one contributors to the 2024 Whitney Biennial have a room to themselves. It gives them space like a solo exhibition, yet it also turns almost everything into an installation.

Rooms to the side for new media punctuate the flow. Isaac Julien begins his with a wall of mirrors, before a quiet narrative set on several screens. It tracks a silent conversation between past and present African American sculpture and an intellectual founder of the Harlem Renaissance. One might have wandered into a maze, where the only way out is to sit still.

Speaking of permeability, they also bleed into one another. Each floor of the 2022 Biennial had its own character. This one has instead a continuous flow. One can step from Suzanne Jackson, whose layered paint and gel become their own armature, to a different kind of hanging, by ektor garcia in cotton and lace. It is only a step from there to tatami mats and film stained with color by Lotus L. Kang, like Mark Rothko set free from the walls. Karyn Olivier leaves more clothing in a circle on the floor, as a pile of trash or a place of rest.

One might turn from testimonies to abortion by Carmen Winant, more than twenty-five hundred of them, to pregnancy and motherhood for Julia Phillips. You may remember her ceramic hips when you come to body casts from Jes Fan or a bronze liver from K. R. M. Mooney. Nor is it far from Westin’s smoked glass to a Lakota tent from Cannupa Hanska Luger—it, too, inverted and suspended overhead. It is Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure, because her entire “world is upside down.” Draped pillars from Dala Nasser in Lebanon stand beside four Daughters from Rose B. Simpson in New Mexico. They could be a single cross-cultural installation.

Out on a terrace, Torkwase Dyson arranges massive geometry in black as a “playground.” Tony Smith and Minimalism meet African American art now. A floor above, Kiyan Williams fashions a reproduction of the White House from black soil. It tilts badly, just as Luger’s tipi is inverted. A wall of amber from Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio stands just inside. I mistook them for work of the same artist.

Old media like painting and drawing are rare but worth regarding. Mary Lucier marks a calendar with the many deaths of colleagues and friends. Phillips recovers memory from “conception drawings” in vegetable oil and oil pastel. Mavis Pusey in 1970 took her active geometry from an ever-changing New York, but it looks more like prewar abstraction. Mary Lovelace O’Neal may have been thinking of blackness, but she rides a blue whale in wave upon wave of paint. Jackson is still very much a painter.

If you forget that, you have bought into a stunning but heavy-handed biennial. It has older artists, like Lucier, Jackson, and Harmony Hammond, all born in 1944, and Lovelace O’Neal, born in 1942, although a generation or two goes largely missing along the way. Hammond, too, works between weaving and abstraction, like Minimalism brought to feminist life. Pusey, like Jackson a black artist, died in 2018. You might not know it, though, in a show that wants desperately to be current. Oh, and did I mention politics, for next time I focus on that and and its reliance on light, sound, and video?

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time, the 2024 Whitney Biennial is thinking big. It has not just the museum’s two largest floors, including both terraces, but also the lobby and the space outside the education department and theater.

They, too, have lost their intimacy. Entering the lobby gallery is like entering New York itself, with a shopping cart, a fire hydrant on its side, and other debris, although Ser Serpas herself has left the city for LA. If steel spheres framed by piled fencing look like spaceships, welcome to the known universe. Two floors up, Pippa Garner papers the walls with hundreds of pretend advertisements for her own inventions.

Any biennial is daunting, much like the art fairs or a month in the galleries. Take dozens of artists with a work apiece and call it art now. Do not even try to keep up with the latest thing, lest one lose one’s objectivity, and the 2015 Biennial had a median age of past fifty. Always bear in mind the rediscovery of painting in the new century. This time, though, the Whitney is all over the map. The curators, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes, refuse the whole idea of objectivity.

They speak instead of the “permeability” of relationships, the “fluidity” of identity, and the “precariousness of the natural and constructed worlds.” They evoke AI as better than the real thing. In practice, the sole AI art is in another show entirely, now closed—of Harold Cohen a floor above. The closest thing here looks like characters from a bad superhero movie, in a familiar cross between a robot’s armor and winter parkas. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst claim only to be training the data behind artificial intelligence. It has a lot to learn.

Still, the 2024 Biennial speaks more of certainty than fluidity, and its welcome is precarious at that. Garner’s ads, the Whitney swears, dismantle marketing and gender. That huge video past the clouds, by Tourmaline, celebrates a trans black activist and performance artist. Between the yellow walls, the artist, P. Staff, appears in silhouette in ominous black. An electrically charged orange mesh protects the ceiling. And here you thought you could ascend to the clouds.

Already you know what to expect. Nothing will be clear, and everything will be political, if only you could say why and how. The artist will always be present, especially in absence, as with body casts by Jes Fan or bathroom cabinets from Carolyn Lazard filled with petroleum jelly. New media and performance will dominate, from music to dance video by Ligia Lewis that leaves the dancers as ghosts. Thanks to Holland Andrews, freight elevator and stairwell leading up are awash in sound. Here at last is the biennial’s promised “dissonant chorus.”

Almost anyone and anything can count as American art and add to its vitality. Lewis, who lives in Germany, is from the Dominican Republic, Staff from the UK. Everything verges, too, on art-world platitudes, but with a twist: art here is material and big. That industrial orange curtain has its echo in a descending sheet of smoked glass from Charisse Pearlina Weston. Either might shatter as it falls—and not without a threat to you, and I walk you through the biennial next time to get to know the artists and to see how the permeability and the threats play out.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

You may not receive a warm welcome to the 2024 Whitney Biennial, but you could hardly encounter a more impressive one. You could drive a truck through the entrance to each of its two main floors, at the Whitney through just yesterday, August 11. Maybe you should for self-protection (and forgive me for not posting this last week to remind you to go, but with fall coming soon this is still a good time to look back).

Painted clouds frame one entrance, as if the biennial itself had descended from the sky. It opens onto a wall-sized video and unknown voices over gentle music. The other dares you to enter a room of searing yellow. If it all feels slightly unreal, it is, as the show’s title has it, “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” Yet it seems determined to “get real,” with an outsize display of raw materials and all too serious politics. Such, it announces, is the larger than life state of the art.

So much larger, in fact, that I shall take you through it piece by piece over the course of this week, starting with an extra post for tomorrow. Next time, then, I ask what the show is really about, its themes and its expectations. Then I take up the story with a walk through the exhibition to see what holds the experience together. Last, I focus on two dominant motifs, multimedia and politics. Could there be real drawbacks in big ambitions? Definitely, but also what amount to exhibitions in themselves along the way.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To wrap up from last time on New York summer sculpture, Suchitra Mattai saves the last dance for herself and her memories. The Broadway billboard over the entrance to Socrates Sculpture Park is not, strictly speaking, sculpture—or even part of many a summer show. More often than not, it devolves to a different artist entirely. Here, though, the sculptor herself gets to introduce the park and her work, and it is an upbeat introduction.

Mattai depicts little girls in a circle dance, with tapestries behind them and flowers at their feet to either side. It may not have you in the mood for a dance, but you can imagine dancing going on inside.

Queens residents flock to the enclave by the waterfront for the sunshine or the view. The BBQ pit by Paul Ramírez Jonas, is gone, but a flashy new construction offers shelter for movie nights. Still, this is Mattai’s dance, to celebrate, she says, her “past, present, and future Indo-Caribbean ancestors.” The girls may have darker skin than hers, but her celebration extends widely, from her birthplace in Guyana to “diasporic communities” and their “migratory oceanic journeys.” Forget the refugee camps of Petrit Halilaj on the Met roof. Here We Are Nomads, We Are Dreamers, through August 25.

Their art seeks shelter, under a dome of arched branches and leaves, and lurks in the trees, where fabric spheres descend like wrecking balls. Out on the lawn, six colorful works could themselves be tree trunks, were they not so thick and colorful. Mattai has sliced them all right through at a diagonal, in one clean cut. Squirrels may still seek their own shelter through small holes at their base, and the mirrored cuts shine. In spring, they glistened with water from sprinklers tending to the park’s slightly ratty grass. I could imagine them fresh with dew.

Cannupa Hanska Luger counts himself a descendent of the Buffalo people, and he identifies the near extinction of the American bison with the loss to “extractive colonizers” of Native Americans as well. Now the hairy animals again once roam the plains, and he sees them as a symbol of sovereignty and resilience. You might not know it, though, from his ash-black bison in City Hall Park, dead on its back. Not that Luger ever settles for happy endings or, conversely, things as they are. He brought mythic creatures from the white desert sands of his New Mexico to Wave Hill in 2022. He brought, too, an inverted Lakota tent to the 2024 Whitney Biennial for “intergenerational protection” turned upside-down.

The ten-foot skeleton rests not on a lawn, but on a bed of grass from tribal America, through November 17. Each summer, an artist gets free run of park’s sparer grass and walkways. Luger prefers a single work. Alone it becomes a monument, even flat on the ground, on the path to City Hall. Alone, too, it can better stand for loss, with a work titled Attrition. Either way, he is making demands and pointing the way to change.

Summer sculpture as become more and more responsive to its surroundings. To end where I began, Rose B. Simpson has her heroine rise out of the grass and sod of Madison Square Park—unless she has sunk into it up to her waist. She has, though, “guardians” to protect her. That term harkens back to David Smith, as does their height, their steel, and their planar composition. Two more stand guard over a lonely corner of Inwood Hill Park, by the northern tip of Manhattan, for the determined few to find. But then Simpson has long since made up her mind about who is in touch with the city and the earth.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on New York summer sculpture, Huma Bhabha may seem a strange choice for Brooklyn Bridge Park, overlooking the New York harbor and a gateway to the New World. This artist looks out on nothing but the pitiless depths of the human heart.

She has an uneasy relationship with a park’s natural growth as well. The Pakistani American called a solo show “Unnatural Histories” and appeared among others in “After Nature,” and the work itself has an unnatural darkness. She carves four plinths from cork before casting them in bronze—and their heads from skulls. She sets them in a secluded lawn, facing one another or looking within.

Unless, that is, they are staring down the viewer, through next May 9. For all her pretension, she is not turning away. The carvings bring fullness to their bodies and the spirit life at their base. Their title, Before the End, quotes a medieval writer’s apocalyptic visions, but eternity has already arrived. Bhabha brought her strange beings to the Met roof in 2018, and the whole point could be the interplay of weekend pleasures and spiritual aspirations. Were the four mythic women not so far apart, one could almost call them a community.

Jorge Otero-Pailos has modern sculpture tied up in knots. His welded steel on Park Avenue’s median strip looks back to David Smith in its industrial materials and sharp edges, like farm equipment no longer able to produce anything but art. Still, his spikes and coils have a clear sense of direction, at facing ends of a block and a mile north—perhaps an artifact of its original site in Oslo. The Spanish artist invites viewers to start crossing the street only to stop dead in the middle, through October 31. Most artists would bring more than three works, to fill more of the avenue, but Otero-Pailos sticks to such classy neighbors as the Seagram Building and Park Avenue Armory. Call it classicism run wild.

Further up the avenue, is that a totem, the old staple of public sculpture? A block further, is that one huge roll of toilet paper? But no, both are used tires. Betsabeé Romero embellishes the first with traditional Mexican garments, the second with gold and silver leaf. A third sculpture, a tire alone, bears images that I can only guess are ancient warriors or gods. They may respect their ancestry, but, they are begging to hit the road.

Only someone with a lot of nerve could welcome summer two years running with a bright pink tree bare of leaves—or only an artist. Pamela Rosenkranz is both, and she names her construction on the spur of the High Line Old Tree at that. If it seems as confrontational as the 2022 pretend drone airplane by Sam Durant, it is a lot more colorful, through fall. Besides, now it has company, in an entire Secondary Forest four blocks away, through next March. Giulia Cenci populates it poignantly, with figures in melted down scrap metal, the trees their skin and bones. They do not look sad, though, and one could almost call it a park.

Also on the High Line, Kapwani Kiwanga adds a single fern, in shifting colors behind dichroic glass. The tall glass and steel case has a beauty of its own, though October 31. After so much artistry, it seems downright peevish for a ballerina to take her curtain call, roses in hand through November 30, for Karon Davis. The act continues with an entire rock band from Cosima von Bonin, through August 31, of six smiling fish. Lily van der Stokker adds to the cutes with a billboard reading THANK YOU DARLiNG through November. If you, like the artist, find this a feminist statement, you are only taking the bait—and I pick up the tour next time in Socrates Sculpture Park and beyond.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.