The turn toward abstract art in this show continues a trajectory begun by the 2019 Whitney Biennial. When it comes to painting, abstraction is the order of the day. In other words, the work is designed to do exactly what the entire rest of the show, with its focus on fragmentation, indirection, and hard-earned reflection, is meant not to do: Give you a visceral, clear, and easy-to-grasp political epiphany. Jaar has said that he knew he had to create an experience that was under five minutes, because of the vanishingly short attention spans of the contemporary art audience. ![]() Jaar has implanted the ceiling with industrial fans that come on as the onscreen helicopters descend, intensifying as the action mounts. It’s as if you are watching an invisible spirit searching for an avatar to inhabit, but never coming to rest, discovering instead how broken and corrupted digital reality is. Jacky Connolly’s Descent Into Hell creates a dream narrative, shifting between aimless, surreal vignettes starring mostly female background characters from the famously ultra-violent video game Grand Theft Auto, then cutting briefly to AI-augmented deepfake footage of Harry Potter actress Emma Watson spliced into an adult film. What you see are just the effects of cataclysmic force that you don’t see. Blast waves slowly unfurl across the image, in super-slow-mo. In Lucy Raven’s video, you are shown a sequence of nondescript desert landscapes. This archive was made under Covid restrictions that kept Morales from his home, so the images are from Google Street View-real memories strained through found images. It’s true in another way of Alejandro “Luperca” Morales’s Juárez Archive, which lets you see important sites in his hometown of Juárez, Mexico, inset in little plastic view finders that you have to pick up to peer into. The text also relays the story of the odd object-Henry Ford admired Edison so much that he had a friend bottle his dying breath-without explaining why it is here or what it means.Ī visitor interacts with Alejandro “Luperca” Morales, Juárez Archive (2020-ongoing). It is “Thomas Edison’s Last Breath,” per a wall label (the vial is on loan from the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan). What I will talk about is the centerpiece of the show on the 6th floor: an empty black gallery that serves as a riddle for its deepest themes.Ī vial is shown beneath a spotlight in a clear display box. This works too, since another point of the show is the need for commitment, care, and attention. On the 6th floor, by contrast, everything is painted black and there’s lots of video. This device has drawbacks in terms of audio works, but it works symbolically, since one point of the show is to free art up from some fixed habits of seeing. On the 5th floor, walls have been removed, with paintings shown on free-sanding partitions scattered around the space, in a slightly disorienting way. This Biennial’s major touchstones range from wryly didactic conceptual art (Rayyane Tabet, Emily Barker) to practices of ritual mourning (Coco Fusco, Mira Na), and from melancholy sci-fi surrealism (Daniel Joseph Martinez, Andrew Roberts) to an awed, hour-long documentary honoring a Civil Rights spiritual leader (Adam Pendleton’s Ruby Nell Sales). recently, its dominant tones are reverent and restrained, its themes ethical and memorial. The Biennial has its weird moments (most notably a characteristically gnarly Pop Surrealist video installation by Alex da Corte). It’s a striking quote, mainly because, well, you’d never guess that this is what they were shooting for. It needs to be authentic and genuine to an aspirationally wild mind.” “There’s a phrase that we toss around a lot: ‘buck wild,’” Breslin says. ![]() In an official interview about the 2022 Whitney Biennial, David Breslin, who co-curated this show along with Adrienne Edwards, explains the duo’s overall ambitions.
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