Rachel Wetzler on the Whitney Biennial 2024

THE 2024 WHITNEY BIENNIAL begins and ends with invocations of decay. Arrayed on paint-spattered plastic tarps tacked to the walls and floor of the lobby gallery are vaguely anthropomorphic assemblages constructed from detritus that Ser Serpas collects from the streets around her Brooklyn neighborhood: An upturned shopping cart and a disco ball adorn a vertically standing exercise bench; a fire hydrant reclines on a rusty utility cart; a yoga ball is precariously suspended within a battered metal scaffold. Wedged in one corner, a sectional seat with exposed plywood innards serves as the base for a threadbare American flag haphazardly tossed over its back as if it were a bit of dirty laundry. This emblem of empire in decline reappears in blunter form on the museum’s sixth-floor terrace, where Kiyan Williams erected a lopsided replica of the White House’s facade made out of dirt, an upside-down flag projecting from its crumbling portico. Exposed to the elements, the edifice will wear away over the course of the exhibition, the ruined monument seemingly sinking into the ground. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ser Serpas, taken through back entrances subtle fate matching matte thing soiled . . . , 2024, found objects, plastic tarp, tape, oil paint. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. From the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Photo: Ron Amstutz.
Such is the overarching tone of this Biennial, largely defined by material precarity and conceptual obliqueness. With a few notable exceptions—among them Carmen Winant’s The last safe abortion, 2023, a wall of archival snapshots from the 1970s to the present depicting staff and volunteers at abortion clinics in the American South and Midwest as well as photos of these clinics shot by Winant herself following the overturning of Roe v. Wade—themes and ideas are elliptically gestured toward, evoked through a gauzy veil. For his installation Paloma Blanca Deja Volar/White Dove Let Us Fly,2024, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio embedded an assortment of found objects along with copies of archival documents relating (per the wall text) to the actions of white activists in Central America in blocks of modified amber, which fragment, shift, and settle over time. Dala Nasser constructs a skeletal approximation of ancient ruins in Adonis River, 2023, draping bedsheets bearing charcoal rubbings of the Adonis Cave and Temple in Lebanon over spindly wooden columns. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta, 2024, draws on the form of a tepee, presented here as a cone of repurposed pink and orange crinoline suspended upside-down and anchored to ceramic horns on the floor by taut lengths of nylon cord. It is one of many works in the show that hangs down from the ceiling instead of sitting squarely on the floor or wall, as if refusing the stability of the ground.

The Biennial includes many formally and physically ambitious works, characterized by their large scale, unwieldy materials, and laborious production. Yet in aggregate, the effect is curiously muted, even sedate. Particularly given the relatively modest size of the exhibition itself, which includes 119 works by forty-five artists and collectives in the galleries (another thirty are included in the performance and film programs), the sardonic grandiosity of its title, “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” betrays a kind of confusion, or perhaps indecision, over what kind of aesthetic and theoretical terrain the show is really mapping. In the introductory wall text, the curators bafflingly cite AI and its reinscription of the real as a key point of reference for the exhibition, though only a single work—Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s xhairymutantx, 2024—actually makes explicit reference to, let alone use of, such technology, and even this is presented in the galleries as conventional framed prints hanging on the wall. In fact, the show seems almost symptomatically avoidant of technology, instead implicitly holding up ancestral tradition, communal experience, and embodiment as bulwarks against its incursion into all facets of contemporary existence. nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq nsq

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