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Every self-portrait is a boast—a double boast. Yes, says the artist, I am a worthy subject, and yes I can pull it off with my art.

With “What It Becomes” at the Whitney, make that a triple boast, through January 12. Yes, its adds, I am worth hiding as well. There was more to me than you saw all along, and it is up to you, the viewer, to find it. As David Hammons has it, Close Your Eyes and See. .

Self-portraiture’s dual or triple nature goes back to its origins, in the Renaissance. An artist like Albrecht Dürer could boast not just of his skill, but of a new-found status relative to his patron as well. For Dürer in silverpoint at age thirteen, he had not yet even earned a patron. With “Hidden Faces,” covered portraits of the Renaissance at the Met last spring, every portrait was also a mask. Its sitter, after all, had an image to convey, too. By the end of 1960s, though, when the Whitney begins, the mask itself became a place to hide.

“What It Becomes” does not speak of masking. It calls art a way “to reveal the unseen” and to “make the familiar unrecognizable.” In other words, it is about self-creation. The curator, Scout Hutchinson, also speaks of art’s material presence, even in a space largely dedicated to works on paper from the museum’s collection, just outside the education department. It is about “inscription, erasure, and tactility.” It is a vanishing act all the same.

Presence is as presence does, starting with David Hammons. His body prints put himself into the act, but not to show his face. A famously reclusive artist, he reveals nothing, least of all his skill in drawing. They might as well be tire treads. He confronts, too, a black man’s invisibility to white eyes or, worse, violent removal. Body prints by Yves Klein in blue, not in the show, seem an empty boast by comparison.

The small show could be a catalog of strategies for vanishing. Some play the part of others, like Darrel Ellis in black wash, posing after a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. Wendy Red Star leaves herself out entirely in favor of a leading Native American around 1880. The same red outlines in ink-jet prints frame her text and a hatchet in his hands, both as weapons. Toyin Ojih Odutola gives black skin to “famous whites.” Jim Hodges works with his own saliva, but the results look more like pond scum than a portrait.

Naotaka Hiro promises to Map His Body, with pretty enough colors but not much else. Others appear explicitly, but masked. Rick Bartow takes on the teeth and smile of a wild animal, in pastel and pencil. Maren Hassinger takes pains to apply her mask, like a woman applying makeup, but as blackface. I cannot say for sure whether her video celebrates, defies, or condescends to gender and race, but it resonates. Blythe Bohnen acquires her mask simply by time-exposure, so that the blur of her features serves as a beard.

Catherine Opie hides behind nothing more than her back and its blood-red incisions. And Ana Mendieta, never one to hide, brings one last strategy for vanishing. She sets an effigy on fire, leaving her very body image in flames. Self-portraits have become all but a ritual these days, as an affirmation of personal and cultural identity. These eleven artists look back to a time after Modernism when such things came with irony and pain. For all their flaws, they could still mean more than what it all became.

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It would be terrible to leave you this week’s review of Robert Frank at MoMA, in collaboration and alone, without the context of his greatest work. Let me, then, offer a taste of my review from 2010 of The Americans at the Met, with a link to more. I have also written about something closer to his present show, the mayhem of Frank’s contact sheets.

In 1955 a Swiss immigrant set out to discover America. He almost found it all on a streetcar in New Orleans.

Robert Frank chose it for the cover of The Americans, his eighty-three photographs published in this country in 1958. Trolley–New Orleans alone holds a cross-section—male and female, black and white, young and old. Its windows run parallel to the picture plane, like the cells of a contact sheet. Frank in fact winnowed the book from hundreds of rolls of film and twenty-eight thousand shots. It is an emblem of life on the road, a portrait of the artist as an American.

It is also an image of perplexity. The horizontal of that streetcar runs askew. None of the eyes or social strata make contact, with each other with or the photographer. Still others lurk in the fog of its upper windows. Within the book, the image directly follows one of a Fourth of July picnic, dominated by an American flag worn almost to transparency. For blacks on or off the streetcar, so had the American dream.

They are Americans in motion, just as the streetcar is moving past. They love cars, and they love the movies. The Met describes Hollywood here as an elite—Marx’s opium of the people. Frank will not condescend to the masses even to that extent. One really can identify the photograph of the streetcar with his art form and his art form with motion pictures. Andy Warhol, Warhol’s influence on Pop Art, and sly takes on commercial photography by Alfred Gescheidt were erupting at around the same time, and they were tracking the same upheavals.

One can see the entire book as a movie, with an enigmatic beginning and a happy ending. As it opens, two women watch a parade from separate windows. An American flag hides one woman’s face, and Frank’s point of view masks the other in darkness. Frank’s final scenes include sunbathers or drifters in a public park, and a wedding at City Hall. By the end, too, blacks get more screen time, as well as the book’s sole exchange with the photographer. A black couple turns to glare back, and young blacks in a car grin broadly.

All along, the same devices that create a distance between people also create ambiguity and humor. A black nurse holds a round-faced white infant, like a Renaissance prince. A man’s tuba obscures his face and makes a mockery of his celebration, but it also gives him a smiley. A photo booth invites people to remember their loved ones for sixty-nine cents, and maybe they will. Jack Kerouac, the beat writer, loved the free associations, like the turn from decorative stars to a starlet—as he termed it, “potry.”

Frank promised the Guggenheim that his project would be “sociological, historic, and esthetic.” He belongs at once to documentary realism and the Beats, but also to postwar formalism, escapism, and the triumph of a very American esthetic. Does that leave him in a strange middle ground, with unanswered questions about art and America? In the very last photograph, Frank steps out onto the road to shoot his wife, in the confined space of the car and at a perilous angle. Is an American journey a gesture of abandonment or of love?

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You may find yourself counting the seconds at the Whitney, but why bother? Mark Armijo McKnight counts them off as no impatient human ever could. Who knows what that will leave a gay artist or the viewer when it is done? McKnight’s film makes his gender as hard to pin down as his landscapes, but everything counts—and I work this together with a recent report on a show at Wave Hill of queering nature as a longer review and my latest upload.

Dark clouds loom over a full wall, as ominous accompaniment. Will it ever end, and will the darkness? And then at last, after a totally black screen, the shot comes to rest on an otherworldly landscape and a metronome. It is McKnight’s coming to be as a gay male and an American artist. It is also his “Decreation,” through January 5. He just happens to leave something temptingly incomplete along the way.

McKnight takes his title from Simone Weil, who began as an activist and ended as a mystic. As a mere child in a Jewish family, she spoke out against World War I. Through a lifetime of poor health, she stood up for trade unions and, like Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. In the end, though, she had a vision of the loss of self before a Christian god. It was as if her entire life had been shot out of the barrel of a gun, never to return. A photo from McKnight could well depict just that.

In reality, its puff of smoke belongs to clouds, wispy bright ones, as does a trail of smoke. It evokes Western skies in a great tradition of American art, of Ansel Adams in photography or paintings and drawings by Georgia O’Keeffe. A dreamer might say that it belongs, too, to the promise of an expanding nation—and an activist to its violence against Native Americans. McKnight could well identify with them all. The curators, Drew Sawyer with Nakai Falcón, surround the film with just half a dozen large photographs and two sculptures. They fall somewhere between a single installation, a premature retrospective, and the decreation of the artist’s dreams.

Titles speak of The Black Space, matter, sleep, and dreams, and McKnight writes of the “queer refusal of the disinterested gaze.” More than one photo shows naked bodies entwined and out of doors. They are all but indiscernible from strangely biomorphic hills—or an animal’s corpse in the dried grass and weeds. The photos stick to black and white, the film to sixteen millimeters, as if caught in an embodied world before the digital. Anti-Matter, also a photograph, looks all too material. Even the sculpture, concrete blocks with serious chips at their base, might be coming apart.

The film is in a tradition of lushness and austerity. It is going nowhere fast, like films by Michael Snow or the Empire State Building for Andy Warhol. The relentless ticking of a metronome recalls Minimalism in music and the refusal to make music at all in John Cage. McKnight says that he drew on György Ligeti, the Hungarian-Austrian composer of “micropolyphony.” While the film closes in on just one metronome, one can hear many more through speakers high on the facing wall. He swears that one could see them all if only the camera drew back.

Things happen when they happen and no more. The ticking continues, loudly, and comes to an end as abruptly as it began. Circles, incised in concrete and crossed by diagonals, could each belong to a clock face lacking numbers. Like the film, they gesture to passing moments but refuse to tell time. I cannot swear what “Decreation” has to say about mysticism, gender, the environment, or the United States. Still, it speaks loudly, and McKnight can claim the lushness and austerity as his own.

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It was 1972, and environmentalists were desperate. At least Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison were, and they sought a “survivalist alternative” where you might never expect it, in a work of art—and I work this together with past reports on summery sculpture indoors and out in Harlem Sculpture Gardens and by Alexis Rockman and Tiril Hasselknippe as a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

Their Survival Piece (the fifth of seven) made its debut that year in the gallery at Cal State Fullerton. In its Portable Orchard, nature had an assist from recycled redwood and artificial light. Now the Whitney recreates it, through January 1, and one can hear their urgency. “To survive as a species,” they wrote, “we are going to have to learn how to grow our own food and take care of ourselves.” So why has it gone all but forgotten? And why does it look so calm, so composed, and so green?

The Harrisons were themselves survivors. Like the fruit of their “sustainable food system,” they lived to a ripe old age. They would be in their nineties were they alive today. Their indoor citrus grove includes all that one might wish, including lemons, limes, grapefruit, and naval and mandarin oranges, each carefully labeled. On the First of July, just days after the opening at the Whitney, young fruit had already begun to appear. As if to proclaim their eco-friendliness, they were all still green.

To appreciate it, though, you may have to get past the rhetoric. The enterprise sounds not just urgent, but downright bureaucratic. It speaks of not natural farming, which in any case takes more land to feed the millions, but natural farming practices—and they are not just obsolete, but “cannot be taken for granted.” You must get past the contradictions as well. This may be sustainable agriculture, but not for eating. If it makes you think of Rirkrit Tiravanija, “relational esthetics,” interactive art, free food, and sharing, forget it, and do not touch.

Perhaps the contradictions come with the territory, where fears mix with love. The Whole Earth Catalog appeared in 1972, Silent Spring was ten years old, and the Whitney has copies of both. Like the EPA, established in 1970, they attest to urgency, but also to hope. Artists may have felt a sense of desperation as well, as late modern art gave way to criticism and chaos. Besides, fears are easier to understand than ever in light of climate change. Yet artists like Maya Lin do not just conserve the environment, but transform it.

The orchard flourishes all the same. The Whitney has removed its eighth-floor partitions, leaving a wide-open room with planters in neat rows. They share their redwood hexagons with parallel light tubes directly above. As trees grow, their peaks extend into those upper hexagons as well. Other survival pieces included a hog pasture, a fishery, and an entire farm, all portable. Here a uniform design and strong colors carry the day.

It is tendentious all the same. This is not the future, sustainable or otherwise. It is art, and a true New York landmark shows what that might mean. Back from college in the 1970s, I was rediscovering the city, its neighborhoods and its architecture. The Ford Foundation on East 42nd Street offered a glorious respite from my minimum-wage job barely a block away. Like the Harrisons, it, too, took nature indoors and artifice into nature.

Finished in 1967, its twelve stories of offices surround a soaring atrium—a place for walking, sitting, and contemplation. Greenery blossoms out from the balconies and rises from the floor. A collaboration between Dan Kiley, the landscape architect (whose other landmarks include Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis), and Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo (who also designed the Met’s American wing), it brought a temperate environment and a seamless flow of plants, trees, pink stone, and rusted steel. It has its surfeit of good intentions, too, no doubt. It has after all, been the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice since restoration in 2019 (and I described it at greater length then). Still, by comparison, that citrus grove is a lemon.

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One thing about parenting could drive anyone crazy, but children eat it up. Who as a child could not take comfort in Disney’s “It’s a Small World After All,” the song introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair, with its lilt, simplicity, and endless repetition? And who could not identify with something small as you but still an entire world?

Wanda Gág got the message long before, and her art was equally obsessive, in prints and children’s books alike. Now the Whitney sets aside a modest room off the permanent collection for “Gág’s World,” through December 2. ” It’s a small world after all and just maybe enough.

It is also a dark world—or at least a ghostly one. Her prints are not peopled but haunted, like that of Christmas Eve, where no child dares to enter, much less to peek. If Gág troubles with presents, a ghost has carried them away. In a reader, C is for crash, with what might be a wrecking ball, D is for dash, and E is for elsewhere. An enchanter carries off, as another title has it, millions of cats—like a pied piper who cannot be bothered with motley and cares too much for rats. And you know what they say about herding cats.

Perhaps I should have said that her ghosts are her gifts. I cannot swear that her prints count as modern art rather than, as the old put-down had it, illustration. She lends the simplest of scenes enormous detail—not in what she includes, but in how she renders it. Lithographs have the sharp edges of woodcuts, in black and white, but with a greater freedom, and the strokes encroach on one another as woodcuts never could. Her subjects, too, stick to what others might mistake for calendar art, like Winter Twilight. Prewar American Modernism’s social realism, Surrealism, and formal experiment are nowhere in sight.

Does her small-town America have more in common with Grant Wood than with Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton? The curators, Roxanne Smith and Scout Hutchinson, make the case for an artist after all. It has just those two spreads from her children’s book amid prints, also from the Whitney’s collection, and they share a small wall with Christmas Eve. Still, she did not become an artist all at once. Born in 1893 to immigrants from Bohemia, Gág left Minnesota in her thirties to study at the Art Student League, when it was a touch less conservative. She mingled and exhibited easily with her peers.

Like Beatrix Potter, with whom I pair this review and an earlier report on Walton Ford in my latest upload, she was also a student of nature, and she settled in the outer edge of suburbia, with an ingenious home at that—a balcony atop a porch as a cylindrical addition to a square home, both with gabled roofing. Like Potter, too, hers is a humanized nature, but without the cuddly, intelligent animals. Plants run wild only as dangerous companions. Plain wood homes cannot rise in straight lines either, and streets cannot afford escape or access. One can only imagine the strange life within. They are observed all the same, which makes the ghosts that much stranger.

Ghosts worthy of their name require a ghostly light, and Gág’s is neither plainly natural nor artificial. It bears down on a scene face on, leaving broad areas of light and white outlines. Does it makes her an illustrator at heart, taking care for her subject more than anything? No doubt, but her idea of community is both familiar and imagined. It might not so be bad for children after all. Besides, they get to carry with them from their reading Millions of Cats. Could there be worlds within worlds?

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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.