Thursday, August 4, 2022

Biennial Cool

I headed to the Whitney as much to cool off as to see the 2022 Biennial, "Quiet As It's Kept." Ninety degree plus temperatures outdoors increased my patience for watching videos in a museum setting, too.  In this mind-blowing work by Alex Da Corte, a cross-dressing Marcel Duchamp meets Brancusi and the Joker in "ROY G BIV."  There's more than a dash of Charlie Chaplin, too.




"Ecstatic Drought of Fishes"
by Ellen Gallagher  (2022)
What commuters once used to ride the subway for free has become art 19 years later.

"64,000 Attempts at Circulation" by Rose Salane (2022)
"Sutter's Mill," a sprawling mixed media installation by Jason Rhoades, was oddly compelling.



Duane Linklater uses techniques he learned from his indigenous grandmother, including natural dyes, to create abstract teepee covers.



Project Row Houses: If Artists Are Creative Why Can't They Create Solutions
 by Rick Lowe (2021)
"Between a Rock & a Hard Place" by Veronica Ryan (2022)

Matt Connors (2021)
"Wopila/Lineage" close-up by Dyani White Hawk (2022)

"Vibratory Cartography: Nepantla" by Lisa Alvarado (2021-22)
North American Buff Tit by Eric Wesley (2022)
"Long Low Line (Fordland)" by Danielle Dean stitches together animation, illustration, sound and archival material in a mesmerizing 16-minute long scroll. 


"CARGO:  A certain doom" by Andrew Roberts (2020)
"La horda (The Horde)," an  eight-channel video installation by Andrew Roberts implicates viewers as part of the capitalist exploitation machine as soon as they enter the gallery.


Buck Ellison has tapped into something that has been pestering my subconscious ever since I became aware of the formerly hunky Erik Prince, one of America's darkest knights, and brother of Betsy De Vos, the far right-wing former Secretary of Education.  How can such a good looking, wealthy family be so clueless?  Ellison stages large photos of the Prince family lifestyle using models to examine assumptions about America's upper class from an insider's point of view.

"Fog In His Light We Shall See The Light"(2021)
"Kitchen" by Emily Barker (2019)
"A Clockwork" (partial) by Sable Elyse Smith (2021)
"Save Time" (partial) by Jane Dickson (2020)
Look through the dangling viewfinders in "Juarez Archive" and see Google images of Alejandro "Luperca" Morales's hometown in a unique installation that evokes political commentary from homesickness during the Covid 19 pandemic.  Despite the anachronistic creativity of the work's execution, it's hard for me to imagine anybody being homesick for the city across the Rio Grande from my birthplace.



Charles Ray is definitely having a moment in 2022.  First the Met retrospective and now a roof gallery all to himself at the Whitney.

"Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall" (2021)
"Burger" (2021)
Here's "Jeff" (2021) and Jeff bonding in the sun.  Shortly afterward, while I was standing in line for another installation, a woman complimented me on my shirt.  "Would you mind turning around so I can look at the back?"  Little known secret of the Pines:  clothing left behind by other shares can get you noticed by people in art museums!


Collage by Ralph Lemon
"ishkode (fire)" by Rebecca Belmore (2021)

"Palm Orchard" by Alia Farid (2022)
Can you guess who Daniel Joseph Martinez is impersonating in "Three Critiques*, his sci-fi take on human evolution?


He's no Michael Fassbender, that's for sure.


Beyond The Biennial


"Head" by Elizabeth Catlett  (1947)
Some white male artists--the gay ones, that is--finally seem to be getting their curatorial due. Multiple "deep cut" paintings by Marsden Hartley and Paul Cadmus are currently on view.  Hooray!

"The Old Bars, Dogtown" by Marsden Hartley (1936)
"Fantasia on a Theme" by Paul Cadmus (1946)
"Sailors & Floosies" by Paul Cadmus (1938)
Archibald John Motley, Jr. reminds me of Thomas Hart Benton.  

"Gettin' Religion" (1948)
With full frontal on the roof, the Whitney has gotten braver since the trustees rejected a nude statue of Huck and Jim by Charles Ray that was commissioned to adorn a fountain outside the museum.


Even if you were born long after the Kennedy assassination, the date of this painting by yet another artist whose work is completely unfamiliar to me should fill in the blank identities. 

"Madonna & Child" by Allan D'Arcangelo (1963)
For more than a few minutes, I thought this immobile couple might have been super-realistic sculptures.  Tell me they don't look like gaudy Trumpers!  She had a full back tattoo.


This must be among the most photographed water tanks in the world.


The Studio Bar was new to me.  That simple question on the wall was one of many asked by another artist in the Biennial that also included a superb "you-are-there" multimedia installation by Alfredo Jarr recreating the terror "Black Lives Matter" protesters experienced as a military helicopter hovered about them in Lafayette Square in June 2020.  


"Flight" from the Emperor Jones series
by Aaron Douglas (1926)
If you ever visit the Gillette Castle in Connecticut--HIGHLY recommended--you'll see a wonderful series of caricatures of the man who helped popularize Sherlock Holmes by the same artist who designed this deck of tarot cards.

Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck
by Pamela Colman Smith (ca 1920-30)
Florine Stettheimer has certainly come into her own since the Jewish Museum retrospective put her on the map five years ago.

"Sun" (1931)


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