Art as a Revolutionary Tool: Reflections on the Whitney Biennial

Last week, I talked with several people about the Whitney Biennial.  To my surprise, they weren’t sold on the exhibition, dismissing the artwork and roster as random.  When a museum chooses 63 artists that fall outside rockstar status to represent their biannual extravaganza, casual art fans act disappointed.  Of course this seeming lack of an arc would perturb them — it’s the embodiment of our cultural arc’s upending, which perturbs and disturbs us.

The Biennial isn’t helped by the fact that many of the works are jarring and disorienting, as they’re supposed to be.  This is the Biennial of the Trump Era, where strong works of art revolutionize and stand for something as well as against something else, while allowing plenty of room for gray area in their visual declarations.  In his write-up for Vulture, Jerry Saltz called it “the first, last, and only Hillary Clinton biennial.”  “Trump barely appears in this show. Although when he does, it’s strong” is true, though the politics he promotes are what each artwork fights against.  This is the Biennial of the revolution, where every piece is part of the resistance, where the show’s chaotic, disorganized thematics mimics the chaos, disorganized politics of American life.

Claim - Pope.L, 2017.

Beside, what’s happening in society is complete baloney — if Pope.L has any say.  It smells and looks weird and falsely compartmentalizes us, reducing us to small pieces of big data and facts and figures that group us together.  The powers that be, in the words of Johnny Rivers, have “given you a number and taken away your name,” as is the case in Pope.L’s Claim, where approximately 2,750 slimy bologna slices sit attached to a pepto-bismol pink and bright blue grid.  The slices reflect one percent of New York’s Jewish population; Pope.L took photos of Jewish people (or people who looked Jewish) and tacked them on each slice, raising the question of what qualifies as representation in modern society, since the abstraction of defining characteristics seem secondary to the desire for neatly placing people and things into a neat, organized box that reduces their essence to part of a group.  As co-curator Mia Locks noted in her essay for the Biennial catalogue, “This live social process of destabilization, or disidentification, is activated by and through the installation—which reeks of bologna (or its homophone, baloney)—serving up stereotypes only to shatter them, “to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from.””  

With the rise of Trump and Trumpism, our country is destabilized.  So is our world in the post-Brexit age, a time where nationalism is resurgent and the far right National Front candidate made it to the runoff in the French elections (though Emmanuel Macron is not great, his views are democratic and not regressive; furthermore, his victory over the xenophobic isolationist Marine LePen is a rare triumph of rationality over fear in the age of alternative facts).  Pope.L’s Claim, then, speaks for the Biennial as a whole in its manifestation of our current world.  We are more than our sex, race, class, intelligence, religion, ability or any other demarcator that differentiates us from one another.  These terms help us align our identities, but humans are more complex than that.  We’re not meant to be put in boxes; like the art at the Biennial, we’re meant to break free of them and recycle them for better use.  As Sly Stone sang in “Everyday People,” “You love me you hate me you know me and then/You can't figure out the bag I'm in.”

The most radical gesture, however, would have been to make the exhibition free.  While the Whitney needs operating money and the artists need bread for survival (considering the significant debt they’re in), strong-arming wealthy donors is a future idea to reduce entrance fees.  At the end of co-curator Christopher Lew’s essay in the Biennial catalogue, he declared that “we must come together, on our own feet, hands at the ready, speaking our minds, purse first.”  The double meaning in this reference to RuPaul’s Drag Race is a plea, a declaration that art is not free.  Art can’t be free, but it can be more accessible for all.  If the Whitney operated on a Pay What You Want basis for the Biennial’s duration, the gesture would reinforce the exhibit’s democratization of art and the inherent truth behind Marx’s declaration “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” which many of the works promote through their destruction of constructs.

Vokzal - Leigh Ledare, 2016.

This misstep doesn’t change the fact that the 2017 Biennial is what’s next in art.  Art is turning a corner.  Art is no longer about celebrity.  The past two years have thrust upon us a sense of political urgency, provoking artist response.  We might not like this art at first, but it demands a second, third, fifth or twenty-fifth viewing before it sinks in.  Art must challenge us, destroy our perceptions and cause us to question our beliefs.  We can no longer accept bad art.  

We need censorship:

“Censorship of the arts, whose special status of immunity from culpability explains and excuses the degenerate ideology that makes all this “freedom” possible.”

Not censorship in its traditional form, but censorship as depicted by Frances Stark in her eight-paneled painting of Ian F. Svenonius’ essay from his book Censorship Now!!  Art has meaning when censorship exists in order to push all bounds of propriety.  Art should unsettle, to be “beyond beyond good and evil.”  Glenn O’Brien knew that, and you’d better get hip to that, because he championed boundary-breaking artists.  It’s our imperative to his legacy, because they’re leading the revolution and they’re all over the Biennial.  Kamasi Washington sets the soundtrack to the Black Lives Matter music, both in his lyrical jazz and his contributions to Kendrick Lamar’s albums.  Henry Taylor creates simple, blunt paintings that depict the horrors that Black people (and, therefore, all minorities) endure day in and day out.  Dana Schutz courted controversial coverage from the New York Times because she, a white woman, sympathizes and empathizes with the pain Black bodies go through.  People demanded her painting Open Casket — which depicts the corpse of Emmett Till — be removed from the Biennial due to such issues of agency.  Yet Schutz and her contemporaries challenge us to develop such empathy, a radical empathy that spurs us toward revolution, a revolution crucial to our betterment and survival.  The revolution will not be televised.  The revolution will be live, in an art museum near you.