The Whitney Biennial ‘s 2024 edition, Even Better Than The Real Thing, presents a large group of artists, working in different mediums, with many pieces directly dealing with social and political issues. The show does have a certain heaviness to it, but with all of the issues currently happening in the world it would be impossible for that not to be reflected in the artwork.

From the museum-

The eighty-first edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features seventy-one artists and collectives grappling with many of today’s most pressing issues. This Biennial is like being inside a “dissonant chorus,” as participating artist Ligia Lewis described it, a provocative yet intimate experience of distinct and disparate voices that collectively probe the cracks and fissures of the unfolding moment.

The exhibition’s subtitle, Even Better Than the Real Thing, acknowledges that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is complicating our understanding of what is real, and rhetoric around gender and authenticity is being used politically and legally to perpetuate transphobia and restrict bodily autonomy. These developments are part of a long history of deeming people of marginalized race, gender, and ability as subhuman—less than real. In making this exhibition, we committed to amplifying the voices of artists who are confronting these legacies, and to providing a space where difficult ideas can be engaged and considered.

This Biennial is a gathering of artists who explore the permeability of the relationships between mind and body, the fluidity of identity, and the growing precariousness of the natural and constructed worlds around us. Whether through subversive humor, expressive abstraction, or non-Western forms of cosmological thinking, to name but a few of their methods, these artists demonstrate that there are pathways to be found, strategies of coping and healing to be discovered, and ways to come together even in a fractured time.

There’s a lot of great work to see. Below are just a few selections and some documentation from the museum.

For Lotus L. Kang’s In Cascades, (pictured above), the artist has hung sheets of photographic film from steel joists suspended from the ceiling that are gradually changed by the light inside the gallery. She refers to the exposure process as “tanning” and, like our skin, the film is changing over time with its environment. On the floor are little sculptures, as well as a a suitcase, all suggesting movement and change.

Kiyan Williams eye-catching outdoor installation Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House, has the White House is sinking into the ground with an  upside down American flag at the top.

The description of Maja Ruznic‘s painting from the museum-

Ruznic has said that The Past Awaiting the Present/Arrival of Drummers “looks at how multiple things can be true at the same time: birth, violence, pain, suffering, joy, and music.” She has described the horizontal format of the painting as inherently linear, implying a past, present, and future. The movements suggested by the figures’ feet—some in profile and others pointed toward the viewer—collapse these temporalities into a single symbolic image.

From the museum about Mary Lovelace O’Neal–

Mary Lovelace O’Neal began the series that included Blue Whale aka #12 (from the Whales Fucking series), after two whales caught her imagination as she walked on a beach near San Francisco. “And watching them, I thought, imagine the tons and tons of water they must displace when they’re fucking!” It is this sense of excitement and desire on a grand scale, the energy of the light in their spray, that she worked to capture in paint—more than the image of the whale itself.

Such a dynamic, independent, sometimes slightly outrageous point of view has driven Lovelace O’Neal throughout her sixty-year career, which has unfolded alongside heated debates about what painting should or should not do and prescriptive views of Black artists and abstraction. While Lovelace O’Neal was deeply involved with the civil rights movement on a political level, she resisted calls to make representational paintings that would illustrate or inspire the struggle, insisting that forging her own path in abstraction—as she does in each of the paintings on view here—was equally relevant to Black life.

 

Isaac Julien’s immersive video installation was really absorbing. The sculptures added an extra dimension to what was on screen.

From the museum-

Unfolding across five screens, Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) reflects on the life and thought of Alain Locke (1885–1954), philosopher, educator, and cultural critic of the Harlem Renaissance (played by André Holland) who urged members of the African diaspora to embrace African art in order to reclaim their cultural heritage. The installation includes sculptures by Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) and Matthew Angelo Harrison (b. 1985), opening up a conversation about Black artists’ legacies that extends across modern history. Julien has described the work as a form of “poetic restitution,” speaking to the ways museums have collected African art. The artist refines this critique by creating a visual and sonic meditation as a “diasporic dream-space.”

In the work, Locke contemplates the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford—where he was the first Black Rhodes Scholar—and the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, founded by one of Locke’s interlocutors, Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951), played by Danny Huston. Barnes also debates a skeptical Locke on his heritage, a sequence that distills many of the questions that the installation raises: Who gets to define Black modernism? Who has the authority to speak? How do men negotiate power, or queer desire?

From the museum-

Cannupa Hanska Luger proposes: “This installation is not inverted . . . our current world is upside down.” For the artist, upending our grounding in time and space makes way for imagined futures free of colonialism and capitalism, where broader Indigenous knowledge can thrive. The work here, Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (a Lakota phrase meaning “the fat-taker’s world is upside down”), celebrates Native technologies by using the shape of a tipi—a word that the artist has also turned into an acronym, standing for Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure (TIPI). Luger looks at the complex structure as an example of the innovations created by his ancestors of the Northern Plains tribes. Luger’s materials, such as deadstock fabric, found objects, and clay, reflect the artist’s commitment to sustainability and reuse.

From the museum about all of the unique creations by Suzanne Jackson–

Suzanne Jackson made these suspended paintings without canvas, slowly building up many layers of acrylic, detritus, gel medium, and objects from the natural world, including seeds from her garden in Savannah, Georgia. Jackson has been experimenting with acrylic paint since the 1960s. “It’s painting another way,” she explains. “I don’t call it collage because it’s not another material. It’s all paint—acrylic on acrylic. And it’s suspended: paint suspended in space. . . . The paint becomes an armature for itself.” This “armature” is not fixed, however; Jackson thinks of the paintings as living things and is very open to the fact that they are malleable and will reshape. The layered paint seems to have a kind of agency and an ability to change independently. Looking at its iridescent quality up close creates an afterimage—a lasting mental image that continues even when a viewer has shifted their gaze away.

From the museum-

These three paintings are part of Eamon Ore-Giron’s Talking Shit series, in which he reimagines deities from ancient Peruvian and Mexican cultures. Reflecting on a famous sculpture of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, the poet Octavio Paz (1914–1998) traced an evolution from “goddess to demon, from demon to monster, and from monster to masterpiece.” This line of thinking resonated with Ore-Giron, who recognized that symbolic figures are continuously reimagined as cultures shift and collective and personal identities are redefined. The series title Talking Shit reflects the artist’s desire to explore this idea and a living ancestral past in ways that are open, informal, and personal.

In these works, Ore-Giron focuses on Andean folklore. He has pictured Amaru, a powerful, protean creature related to water and the underworld, as a zigzagging abstracted dragon. To depict the mythological rainbow made by the creation god Viracocha, Ore-Giron represented the celestial phenomenon as a double-headed snake moving through the sky.

From the museum about B. Ingrid Olson’s photographic and sculptural installation-

This installation intermixes two series, Dura Pictures and Indexes. Each work in the Dura Pictures series presents one photographic image physically embedded within another, what the artist describes as placing a “moment in time within a different moment in time, just like memory does of the past in the present.” The photographs were made in the artist’s studio and record B. Ingrid Olson’s own performative interactions with handmade props and assorted materials, such as mirrors or printed matter set within constrictive ad hoc spaces. The images alternate between showing a first-person vantage point with a torso or toes breaking into the picture plane, and offering a mirrored reflection of the artist, often only partially seen.

Proto Coda, Index is a single artwork with thirty constituent parts—each is a replica of one of the thirty reliefs made by the artist between 2016 to 2022. With concave interior surfaces and irregular hanging heights, the forms each suggest a container for a specific body part, like a piece of armor or a casting mold. The reliefs mark the entire length of the wall, serving as placeholders for an absent body, both fractured and multiplied.

 

Ser Serpas’ large sculptural installation, assembled from found objects, grew more interesting when seen at different angles.

From the museum-

Describing sculptures like those included in this exhibition, Ser Serpas has said that “the act of making is a choreographed performance, of which the assemblage is the aftermath.” The performance begins in a city—in this case, New York, and specifically Brooklyn—with the artist collecting discarded objects that speak to her through their color, the ways they have become worn or torn, and their structural openness to being combined. Then she works with the objects’ orifices, odd junctures, and gravity to combine them into provisional sculptures. This process yields a feeling of potential energy just at the moment before an object’s collapse. The resulting sculptures become a kind of dual portrait: first of the city as seen through its cycles of consumption and decay, and then of the artist herself through the expressive choices she has made.

It’s often difficult to see many of the videos that are part of the exhibition due to time constraints. This year the museum partnered with MUBI and you can watch eight of the films for free on their site for a limited time.

On Sunday 8/11/24, the last day of the exhibition, the museum will be free all day with events that include making creature collages with Eamon Ore-Giron (whose work is pictured above).