I maintain listening to individuals name the Whitney Biennial “protected.” It’s normally art-world individuals and critics, who are inclined to say it each two years, as if the museum has ever deliberately sought controversy or embraced radical politics. That’s by no means been the case. For that motive, there’s nothing safer than calling the Whitney Biennial “protected.”
This 12 months particularly, the moniker is ill-fitting and glib. The 2024 Biennial locations a placing emphasis on video work, vastly distinguishing itself from earlier iterations. I discovered this basic distinction refreshing. And as a curatorial resolution, I dare say it’s decidedly unsafe. Essayistic, performance-based, and contemplative, most of the video works right here demand time, and excess of cursory consideration. This Biennial is just not for the informal walk-through customer, and positively not a present your younger children will get pleasure from.
Head Curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli even employed 5 further curators for movie, sound, and efficiency works. As I walked by means of the exhibition, the prominence of those media had me questioning if portray was “lifeless” once more and I’d simply missed the memo. And the place’s all of the pictures? There’s hardly any.
However that’s not the one motive we are able to’t so simply name the Biennial “protected.” One other is that it undeniably touches on each pressing political subject in American society at this time, from replica rights in Carmen Winant’s photograph collage of abortion clinic staff and LBGTQ+ struggles in Sharon Hayes’s interview with a bunch of queer elders to race and colonialism by means of glorious video works by Isaac Julien, Clarissa Tossin, and others.
Nor can we declare that it fully prevented the P-word, as Demian DinéYazhi’’s clandestine, flickering “Free Palestine” neon textual content in some way managed to catch curators abruptly and keep away from elimination from the present. Positive, the assertion is fairly gentle. However does anybody anticipate beginner Whitney Director Scott Rothkopf, who entered the job simply 5 months in the past, to bang on the desk throughout a board assembly and bellow at his billionaire trustees, “We should discuss Palestine”? Not in one million years.
In late 2018, in response to a workers letter calling for the resignation of the Whitney’s then-vice chair and tear-gas industrialist Warren B. Kanders that was first published on Hyperallergic, then-Director Adam Weinberg declared the museum as a “protected house for unsafe concepts,” with the instant caveat that the “Whitney is before everything a museum. It can not proper all of the ills of an unjust world, neither is that its function.” It was a public admission that some concepts are nonetheless too unsafe for the Whitney.
The identical holds true at this time. And the curators of this 12 months’s Biennial definitely appeared to favor quiet reflections on the problems of the day over confrontational artwork. Nothing right here needs to punch you within the intestine, shake you up, or encourage you to run exterior and burn down a police station. It’s as quiet because it will get, to paraphrase the title of the 2022 Biennial.
As a survey of American artwork — or, at the least, of what American artwork galleries promote — the Whitney Biennial holds a mirror to society. If this 12 months’s works are “protected,” it’s as a result of they replicate the tameness and resignation of our tradition at giant greater than that of the Whitney alone. When the most effective we are able to do is a repeat of Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, perhaps we deserve this whisper of a Whitney Biennial. Disunited, frightened, and worn out, it’s us preferring to play it protected.