The Dash column features creative nonfiction writing about art and its social contexts. The dash separates and the dash joins, it pauses and it moves along. The dash is where the viewer comes to terms with what they’ve seen. In what follows, writer, curator, and artist Aria Dean recalls her experience of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, its surrounding discourse, and its fallout. (For coverage of the Biennial, see the Whitney Biennial 2019 Round-Up on artnet.com, and for a summary of the protests and resignation of Warren Kanders, please see Robin Pogrebin and Elizabeth A. Harris in the New York Times.)
Nicole Eisenman, Procession, 2019. Mixed media. Photo by Aria Dean.
I only took four photos during my visit to the Biennial. The above was one of them. This square wheel, part of Nicole Eisenman’s teargas-fart parade (Procession, 2019), was the best and most important thing in the entire show.
As I wandered through the exhibition, I forgot that I might want to refer to some record of what I’d seen at a later point. I don’t know if this makes me a bad critic, or if this makes my experience pure and unmediated, but in either case it’s rendered a number of forgettable artworks totally forgotten. In my memory, the museum’s fifth- and sixth-floor galleries are mostly just a blur of figurative paintings, curiously retro and often assemblage-y sculptures, and the occasional elegantly minimal arrangement—the aroma of conceptualism wafting from an empty kitchen. Some materials hold smells longer than others.
Dean Kissick wrote a review of the show right after it opened in which he deemed it very American in that the artists, more than usual, all seemed to be trying to grapple head on with this concept of “America,” “being American,” and so on. Seeing the show for myself, I thought that maybe Dean was right, but in another way. The curators’ statement warned that the works within would “[emphasize] the artist’s hand, suggest[ing] a rejection of the digital and the related slick, packaged presentation of the self in favor of more individualized and idiosyncratic work.” But isn’t this “individualized and idiosyncratic” method really just letting the great, self-maintaining American machinery run its protocol, stringing us up over the void, chained on one side to “I”—to individualism, to freedom—and on the other to “We”—to identity, to community? It’s certainly very American that the people in this group show are desperately trying to distinguish themselves from the crowd while at the same time remaining captive to whatever conditions, historical or otherwise, dictate the appearance of their “hand.” What’s more, I’m not really sure what the actual difference is between the “artist’s hand” and a “packaged self”; both are all about style, signature, and coherence.
A second, master American protocol runs in the background of this year’s biennial: dirty money. That tug between the “I” and the “We” faced genuinely by every artist is cast in the harsh light of Whitney Museum board VP Warren Kanders’s Safariland teargas fortune that, you’d think, none of us knew about until now (???). This tension, often mobilized as critical inquiry, becomes a caricature of itself, with artists asked to situate themselves somewhere on a spectrum of the careerist “I” and the amorphous “We” of real collective organizing. What results is a fantastic exercise in micropolitical exceptionalism. “Not I,” whispers the painting of southern chain gangs. “Not I,” groan the photographs of abject small-town poverty under the weight of their own hypocrisy and historical irrelevance. “Not I,” soothe the pseudo-anthropomorphic sculptures of black women. Like a game of “hot teargas canister,” the biennial’s artists shunt the responsibility of material political reality off on one another, until it lands steaming in the nowhere that is the artworks themselves.
Since July, the Kanders affair has ignited and expired. Hannah Black, Tobi Haslett, and Ciaran Finlayson published an incisive letter, “The Teargas Biennial,” on Artforum.com, weaving calls for a boycott into airtight criticism of artists’ continued complicity with the museum and with Kanders. The three writers of this letter situated their argument—importantly, I thought—historically and materially. They treated the biennial as a “[moment] when the disembodied, declarative politics of art are forced into an encounter with real politics, i.e. with violence,” and so scraped off the symbolic coating that masks the actual mechanisms of the whole situation.
Of course, artist Michael Rakowitz withdrew from the Biennial in February, prior to the opening, citing Safariland. After the Artforum piece, a few more artists quickly pulled out of the show, Eisenman included. Then a few others took to Instagram to defend their continued participation. But before either gesture could truly be carried out, and before any artwork was removed, Kanders resigned from the Whitney’s board with a really salty letter. People on Instagram and Twitter were like, “We did it!!” But I felt empty and nervous. Kanders stepping down was definitely A Win, but it didn’t resolve a more confusing issue: not the question of whether dirty money can or should do “good” things (I think, begrudgingly, the historical record shows that yes, it can—but we should strive to keep our hands clean nonetheless), but rather the question of whether art can do—well, anything. Money, in all of this, has been the occasion for all our finger-pointing, and with good reason, but in the process, art itself has gotten off scot-free.
§
I’d spent the evening before I saw the exhibition with N and J talking about art world politics in general, including the biennial teargas debate—which was, so many content-cycles ago, proving to be a lot less politically activating than many had hoped. N said that he liked the Forensic Architecture video, Triple Chaser, the only artwork in the show that approached the Kanders issue directly, narrating the group’s quest to make a machine-learning tool that could identify Safariland canisters in images. N specifically liked it because he thought that, for a random summer tourist, the documentary might be eye-opening. J was less impressed and was critical of this metric, the work’s ability to open someone’s eyes, especially when Safariland’s particular moral infractions were already well known. I agreed with J, though I did see N’s point. I offered that maybe the problem is that this Kanders thing is not a problem for public interest; it’s between the art world and our god: private investment from inevitably questionable sources.
The FA video itself confirmed my opinion on the matter. It’s a great example of what Rahel Aima recently called “the bankruptcy of research art.” There were some sexy drone shots that I tried not to be fooled by, and some interesting stuff about 3D modeling and using something fake to find something real, but overall it was a snooze. I pitied Forensic Architecture and their apparently religious faith in humanism, evidence, and sight. The video told us that they’d handed their research over to the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and it looked like there would be an investigation into the use of Safariland “triple chasers” for deeds that could be classified as war crimes. People in the audience did not seem to be having their worldview rocked. One couple in the viewing room whispered loudly through the whole film. Some guy kept heckling the screen like, “Yeah, good luck with that!” Good luck with that, indeed.
Near the fifth-floor elevators, a series of Josh Kline photographs of sites of American power (a statue of Reagan, the San Francisco skyline, the flag, etc.) were installed in little wall-based sculptures, frames flooding with water, Rx bottle-colored plastic between us and the mini-image-biomes. A spare rendition of the National Anthem, the soundtrack of a nearby, unfortunately quaint video featuring a watercolor animation of the events surrounding NFL player Colin Kapernick’s protest, wormed its way toward Kline’s works: it played on as the country drowned in front of me. Kline’s wall text insisted that the future is ours to shape, but the works were dirge-like—funereal, and pessimistic. The images, the music, the medicinal tints—the whole thing felt narcotized in a way that was impossible to deem cool or massively not-so-cool. Kline’s installation simulated in miniature the demise of the American project and all its violence, yet it itself was a widget in the very same project, quietly churning toxic chemicals, hot takes, sweat, hope.
These days, people like to say that “representation matters.” I think they often mean “diversity,” which is a less sexy and more annoyingly liberal word. Representation is betrayed by its own nomenclature, which alerts us to the fact that it is not real and it does not make it its business to intervene into material conditions. Representation is a gloss. Artists represent their social, historical, emotional conditions. Artists represent their race, gender, class at the Big Show, and with this condemn themselves to bouncing these representations around galleries and museums for all of eternity (or until the artist wises up and skips town, so to speak). Much worse, through some capitalist hoodoo, many are convinced that this simulacral process is the apotheosis of art’s political potential. However, in the crushing majority of cases—throughout the biennial and elsewhere—the gap between what an artwork does and what we’re being told it can do is more like a crevasse. I suppose, in this light, it can feel triumphant to throw up a flare, to signal, “I am here!!!” Or, if you want to get wild, “I believe in something!!!”
This is all to say, quite simply, that while we all must tell ourselves certain lies to justify participating in our industry, this massive and ongoing myth that art serves an inherent public good—which justifies the means to its end—has crumbled under its own weight. The scales, having been tipped overwhelmingly toward the symbolic in terms of where we do our politics, are in the process of being re-balanced. This is an opportunity not only to proceed with a stronger sense of ethics in practice but also to reevaluate what it is that we want from art, and what it can give us; to ask genuinely, for once: what are the conditions of art today? They aren’t what they used to be, and we need a language for what they are. Until then, it’s better to believe in nothing than to worship false gods.
§
Before leaving the museum, I went upstairs to catch Carolyn Lazard’s piece, a hospital TV apparatus displaying a live feed of inpatient programming. I watched people mill about the Eisenman parade just outside the window. I looked at the square wheel again, and remembered to check out the wall text. There was some stuff—canned text, however undoubtedly true and deeply felt by many—about marginality, queerness, fighting for rights, and things being hard. I was annoyed because the square wheel had felt like the funniest comment on the art world’s politics over the last three or four years. If symbolism must exist as such, I’d taken it as a gesture toward the futility of the present affair. It’s a song and dance; it’s a protest; it’s a procession; but no one’s checked to make sure that the goddamned wheels are even turning. x
Aria Dean is assistant curator of net art at Rhizome, New York. Her writing appears in X-TRA, e-flux journal, Real Life Magazine, and The New Inquiry, among others. She formerly directed the artist-run project space As It Stands LA.