There are ideas and concepts that were revolutionary for its time. These are the ideas that were counter to the prevailing cultural or political trends. Sometimes exhibitions signal changes that were about to happen. The 1993 Whitney Biennial was one of those moments; a bell weather of the emerging culture wars and the rise of identity politics. The 2024 Whitney Biennial "Even Better Than the Real Thing", is a biennial trying to recreate that moment in time. The curators consisted of Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes. The performance program is organized by Iles and Onli, with guest curator Taja Cheek. The film program is organized by Iles and Onli, with guest curators Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker. From this committee of curation, the 2024 Biennial became the biennial about decline and redefinition of what is real within the context of the current political, cultural, and social climate of this time. Curators sought to recreate the 1993 Biennial for the 21st century. What resulted is an underwhelming exhibition trying to be relevant in an art world that is dominated by race, class, and gender politics. However, despite the uneven and stale curatorial approach, the art is what saves this biennial.
This year's Whitney Biennial is replete with exceptional art from artists who have a clear sense of the zeitgeist of this age. Maja Ruznic polychromatic paintings, which is one of the best of the biennial, presents a subjective world of emotion and empathy. Ruznic seeks to translate form, color, and composition as a means to heal and recover from the traumatic world around. Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio speaks of objects in encasing them in amber. Aparicio, who is based in Los Angeles and recently had a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, uses amber and objects as way of creating a material narrative that speaks to both immigrant community and the politics in connection with that community.
Pippa Garner, a Los Angeles based artist who was also featured in the recent Made in LA Biennial at the Hammer Museum, is also concerned with objects. However, Garner is interested objects in the context of emerging consumerism that arose in the post war late twentieth century. Rebellious and biting in her criticism, Garner mines and exposes the hypocrisies of American culture. Lotus L. Kang explores the consequences of American greed and disregard for the environment by creating an installation of photographs showing dark and smog filled atmosphere as a result of climate change. Kang photographs are menacing and seeks to immerse the viewer in both the perilous present and an apocalyptic future.Some artists address the past as a prologue to the future where indigenous cultures are recreated and disseminated as a futurism and a decolonized present. Eamon Ore-Giron's paintings reimagine ancient Mexican and Peruvian gods and places them in the context of contemporary ideas and society. Clarissa Tossin film, 'Before the Volcano Sings" contemplates the recreation of an indigenous culture and uses modern interpretations of Pre-Columbian architecture as a launching point to address what has been lost as a result of colonization and a way to re-establish lost indigenous societies.
Some artist focus on the current condition of a society on the verge of being lost. Kiyan Williams’s outdoor sculpture "Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House", one of the most provocative works in the Biennial, places the White House, and democracy as symbols of white supremacy. Holly Hendron and Mat Dryhurst, "xhairymutantx Embedding Study 1", 2024 is an AI generated painting of a woman with red hair and long uncontrollable hair. The work is a product of text to image generation through AI. The painting explores the conflict between human and machine generated creativity. In a AI generated art, the distinctions between human and non-human is complicated. The breakdown of purity is also reflected in the paintings of Santa Monica-based painter Takako Yamaguchi whose works takes form from the recognizable to the abstract using cues from Mexican muralism to Japanese decorative art. Yamaguchi's work is poetic in its beauty and lyricism.
Isaac Julian's poetic and moving installation "Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die)" is clearly the best of the Whitney Biennial. Focusing on the debate between Alain Locke (1885–1954), philosopher, educator, and cultural critic of the Harlem Renaissance, and Dr. Albert Barnes (1872–1951), the collector who is known for the Barnes Foundation and Collection in Philadelphia. Barnes collected African art and adapted the notion that African art as primitive where modern art used it as a venue of civilizational purity. Locke rejected this idea and that the West's idea of primitive art ignored the complexity and intellectual depth of African Art, which was not "primitive." Walking throughout the installations, the screens, mostly in black and white, portray the intersection of modernism and African Art as way to recontextualize that relationship. In the scenes with Locke and his lover, there is connection between a liberation and reassertion of Black Art and Queer engagement. The screens converge and overlap each over in poetic dialogue of culture, class, race, and the relationship between the Black diaspora and notions of collecting and coloniality. Julian's installation is masterpiece in video installation where engagement leads to an understanding of the past, present and future.
