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Moreover, if you’re not entirely in sympathy with its formal progressivism, you may find yourself more alienated by the relentlessly straight-faced wall labels than impressed by the art. These appear to have been created from a faithful checklist of issues including indigenous rights, race, abortion, disability, ecological destruction, gentrification, and gender fluidity. Issues are important and often urgent. However, their presentation in their works is almost always weak, perfunctory, and completely unreadable without complex and brain-consuming sentences.
Some of these turn into self-parody. Carolyn Lazard’s Vaseline-filled medicine cabinet is said to be the product of an “artistic practice.” [that] It tracks the everyday encounters of black people, disability, and opacity, and focuses on the daily maintenance practices that those for and against the privatization of life itself hold in common. ”
Lessons like these permeate the exhibition. It’s as if curators Chrissy Iles and Meg Onli can’t imagine looking at art without the lens provided by museums designed to bend our perceptions toward social justice. But what if 1970s-style consciousness-raising isn’t why we came to museums today? And what if a model of the White House sinking into the ground doesn’t strike us as edgy? What about that?
Titled “Better than the real thing,” the show features video artists, painters, and sculptors. Spread across his two floors of the museum, and extending into spaces on other floors, their works evoke a response that is more visceral and psychological than ideological. They are the work of artists who understand the weight of things. They pay attention to materials, dynamics, and the different ways objects and images charge the space around them.
Isaac Julien’s multi-screen video installation is reason enough to see this biennale on its own. Julianne is British and she lives in California for part of the year. His 31-minute film, Once Again… (Statues Never Die) stars Andre Holland and Danny Huston, and also features the great singer and songwriter Alice Smith.
Similar to Julien’s 2019 film Lessons of the Hour, in which he portrayed Frederick Douglass, the film unfolds in a cubist format across multiple screens. The work is about the dialogue between Alleyne Locke, a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and Albert Barnes, an intellectually curious but fastidious founder of what is now the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
Julien navigates a series of tumultuous and ongoing debates over European modernism, African art, colonialism and reparations in just a few deft strokes (artistic intuition is very efficient!) Synthesize and distill. The editing and casting, the use of music, and Julien’s poetic imagery all imbue his dizzying themes with a rich humanity, involving lofty ideas and connecting them with lustful bodies and believable psychology. Masu.
Julian’s work is cinematic. It comes from a cleaner, more beautifully illuminated universe. Ser Serpas, on the other hand, created installations that were dirty, dull, and even devoid of dignity, let alone favorable lighting. Serpus scavenges discarded mattresses, medicine balls, collapsible tent frames, old carpets, and broken mirrors.
She combined them into a sculptural environment laid out on a plastic tarpaulin in a large gallery at the museum’s entrance level. Several half-inflated glossy balloon letters are scattered on the floor. A mirrored disco ball sits atop an overturned shopping cart, balanced on gym equipment.
What is this place?We may be standing in the corner of a parking lot where the contents of the basement of an evicted person’s home have been sorted out. to a temporary camp. Or maybe you’re looking at the ham and cloves set from Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame.” (“Everything happened without me. I don’t know what happened.” Pause. “Do you know what happened?”)
Either way, it’s not a very good environment from a feng shui perspective. But after a minute in Serpa’s room, I noticed that her frail ensemble was beginning to glow with a fractured elegance. Her clean-cut – almost lyrical – arrangement of trash took on the quiet charisma of a disgraced outlaw. Serpas made me think about the preciousness we project into art, and the outrageous level of pride most of us need to get through the day. She gives us a glimpse of what life would be like with all that removed.
When I stepped out onto the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace to see Tolkwase Dyson’s giant abstract sculpture, a fierce gale was blowing. Trying to stay upright while avoiding these leaning, towering shapes caused vertigo. Dyson wants visitors to touch and sit in these pieces, which combine smooth painted wood and rough stone. I love the boldness and freedom of her work. All I wanted at that moment was some handles.
I also admired his sculpture, which was created by 3D printing CT scans of Jess Huang’s knees, hip muscles, and spine. He combines these organic-looking shapes with blocks of transparent hand-blown glass. Fans are aroused by displacing their bodies. B. Ingrid Olson and KRM Mooney do something similar. Olson has a perfectly crafted form, like a container for body parts. Mooney with an attractive wall sculpture made of silver-plated steel. The steel and silver react with each other, causing the piece to change color and texture over time, like skin exposed to the sun.
Lotus L. Kang also uses chemical reactions to evoke presence through absence. Her Kang installations use wide strips of intensified photographic film, which she considers “skins,” which are hung from joists suspended from the ceiling to separate rooms. It looks like a glossy Rothko painting that changes subtly in response to light. On the floor between these “screens,” Kang placed tatami mats and cast sculptures that evoke various preserved vegetables. The resulting environment is both empty and full, full of mystery.
The exhibition includes a number of ambitious, large-scale paintings, some of which are expressive and painterly, while others are cleanly finished with taut designs.
Mary Loveless O’Neill’s paintings belong to the former category. The best of these were painted over 40 years ago and were inspired by whale sightings off the coast of San Francisco. Loveless O’Neal, who was active in the civil rights movement, has long created racial politics embedded in her work, even in her abstract works. But the whale sighting provoked a different kind of reaction. It prompted her to “imagine the tons of water they produce.” [whales] Must move when mated.
It’s an interesting idea, but it also goes something like this: wonderful! Her paintings have her own unique rolling energy and bravado, a joy not only in color but also in touch. She also enjoyed the work of Loveless O’Neill and her contemporary Suzanne Jackson. Lacking traditional supports, Jackson’s “paintings” are literally sculptures made of paint, suspended from the ceiling like laundry hanging out to dry.
But the most beautiful painting in the show is By Maja Ruznic, who was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1983 and currently lives in New Mexico. Ruznić’s “Deep Calls to Deep”, with its arrogant melancholy, was inspired by the artist’s childhood memories of living in an Austrian refugee camp after fleeing the war in Bosnia. . Its palette evokes Odilon Redon’s luminous dreamworld, but translated into a larger scale, Redon’s mystical intimacy becomes sublime and dizzying.
Mavis Pusey and Eamon Ole-Giron’s paintings are more tightly choreographed. Pusey, who passed away in 2019, came to New York from a small village retreat in Jamaica in her early 20s. Her stunning work is inspired by the crowded, vertical energy of New York. As parts of the city fell into disrepair, Pusey found a way to suggest the tension between demolition and renewal.
Meanwhile, Ore-Giron’s playful abstract works continue to counteract the urge to settle for symmetry. Ore-Giron, who is also a musician and DJ, treats changes in color and tone like musical scales, rising and falling like a walking bass line in jazz. His designs incorporate mid-century Latin American modernism, Incan jewelry, and Peruvian textiles. Despite his pulsating rhythms and vibrant colors, he maintains an uncannily austere elegance.
Like I said, a lot of the rest of the show is thinly political. Isles and Onri hope the biennial event will help us “come together in divisive times.” But their vision of “us” doesn’t extend very far. The problem isn’t just the show’s predictable, preach-to-the-convert politics. That said, Isles and Onri hope to utilize “coping and healing strategies” in their exhibition. This kind of therapeutic language, which is gaining ground in the art world these days, sounds good. But it collides with the unpleasant reality that many elements of social idealism are solidified as sticks with which to beat the “unreconstructed.”
If you’re like me, identity-based, scolding “activism” has given way to a reactionary impulse toward populist authoritarianism, a dynamic epitomized by the changing usage of the term “woke” over the past decade. If you think that you are encouraging this, you may not feel that way. This Whitney Biennial humor.
But please go anyway. Check it out. There are many great artists participating, and their outstanding work is worth seeing in its own right.
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