The Whitney Biennial is Not Good
"Quiet as It's Kept" is the pungently curated 80th edition of a show that ostensibly marks the moment in art.
“Quiet as It’s Kept”
Curated by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards
The Whitney Biennial
April 6 - September 5, 2022
The 2022 Whitney Biennial, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” is the pungently curated 80th edition of a show that ostensibly marks the moment in art, this time around a year later than planned following pandemic disruptions.
On the chaotic fifth floor of the museum all the walls have been removed and the artworks are scattered and scaffolded about willy nilly. A moody sixth floor with graphite colored walls presents works in the orbit of a mostly empty gallery the curators call “the antechamber.” There is an abundance of time-based art installed in the galleries, some of it good enough, that far exceeds an average visitor’s time commitment. The installation, particularly on the fifth floor, is overwhelmingly hostile to the art and seems at no point to have considered the viewer. Labels are difficult to locate. It’s unclear where one installation ends and the next begins. Other critics have, in various degrees of gritted teeth, discussed this arrangement at length. The degree to which it must be discussed is indicative of this Biennial’s primary failure: it’s not about the art.
Some of the artworks are good. Most are unremarkable. Sean Tatol of Manhattan Art Review has written the most clarifying review thus far, which ought be read in full, but I will excerpt briefly here:
Most of the work in the Whitney presumes that the interiority of an imposed significance is where the value of an artwork comes from… Significance is only created through the surface of the work and that meaning must operate within the art. Meaning cannot be sutured onto a work by simple facts such as the artist's biography or identity, because such things have no inherent tie to the quality of the work. The entire objective of art is to represent affective phenomena, and if it becomes possible to experience that representation through background details about the artist then art becomes effectively useless. It would be akin to replacing art in a gallery with people telling the story of their life and calling the act of listening to them the same as art. Some may find the two experiences comparable, but those people do not love art… At least in our society, normativity is synonymous with mediocrity, and while artists are under no compunction to make work in any particular mode, they must at least pursue their mode of working with a singular intensity to achieve an emotive specificity that makes the work unique. Without that, the affects within the art will remain conventional and unconvincing. This is why so much of the biennial concerns itself with sentiments that have nothing to do with the work, because activism, nostalgia, and identity are agreed upon as safe topics for emotion, easy outs that are reinforced by the arts establishment.
It is sadly necessary to remind the postmodern nihilists (who have entirely abandoned the concept of art) of the aesthetic heft art discovered when modernity burned bright and exploded into crisis in the 19th century. Yes, the useless character of art, its appeal to the senses, and the unique possibility and desirability of the beautiful are historical concepts. To cast them aside is to assume that we have resolved the problem that is modernity, which we most decidedly have not. As this Biennial makes abundantly clear, no one is achieving freedom or happiness via deconstruction, certainly not the deconstruction of gallery walls. And yet people say I’m a grump.
Two artists really break through the din: the James Little paintings on the sixth floor and the Woody de Othello sculpture on the fifth are very good. Little’s three paintings form geometric (nearly) patterns from two tones of black paint. They dare you to ignore them, to see a wallpaper pattern and look away. But they soar upon closer inspection, where the lines don’t meet up and the pattern break. Then step away and they’re perfect again. The dance could go on for hours. I’m reminded of a melancholy line from a story I read in childhood by Ray Bradbury: “The cogs miss, and the wheels turn.” De Othello’s ceramic and bronze assemblage The Will to Make Things Happen (2021) is bent and wobbly in all the right places. In place of pedestals de Othello sculpts the things you’d find in a vacated apartment: a radiator, a step stool with an abandoned mug, an old tube television, abandoned shoes. On top of these he perches pots embraced by the hands that made them: dead labor groping its way back to life.
The problem is that rather than taking up the task of display, the museum, voiced by the curators, fancies itself an artist: “It felt like a responsibility for us as a museum to take on what change or precarity could look like and not just ask the artist to do it,” said Breslin. Having no faith in their own selections the curators have decided to babble — at length — on their behalf. The poor artworks are just material appropriated to the exhibition’s totalizing (il)logic.
All of this might be worthy of comment if it was at all novel, but it is not. It does not even invent new ways to be bad. Much like the British monarchy, the Whitney Biennial has outlived not only its reason for existence but also its salient critiques. What’s the point of inscribing the art of the present every two years when the art of the present, if such a thing exists, is a repetition of the art of the 90s (or 60s or 1860s, and so on)? What is the point of complaining that the effort fails? Hating the Queen is as pointless as she is.
The best critique of “Quiet as It’s Kept” was written in 1990 by Rosalind Krauss, and there is not much I can say to improve or expand upon it:
We are having this experience, then, not in front of what could be called art, but in the midst of an oddly emptied yet grandiloquent space of which the museum itself — as a building — is somehow the object… [The] industrialized museum will have much more in common with other industrialized areas of leisure — Disneyland say — than it will with the older, preindustrial museum. Thus it will be dealing with mass markets rather than art markets, and with simulacra experience rather than aesthetic immediacy… The industrialized museum has a need for the technologized subject, the subject in search not of affect but of intensities, the subject who experiences its fragmentation as euphoria, the subject whose field of experience is no longer history, but space itself…
At least Disneyland is, ostensibly, enjoyable.