While the Whitney Museum of American Art’s webpage still defines the Whitney Biennial as “the longest-running survey of American art” (emphasis added), this year’s eighty-first installment will expand its reach well beyond the United States. The show includes artists from Chile, Britain, Korea, Indonesia, Canada, Hong Kong, Germany, Switzerland, Lebanon, Singapore, Mongolia, Finland, Sweden, Croatia, India, Mexico, and China. This mad dash for inclusivity is consistent with the theme of the 2024 Venice Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere,” but, whereas Venice’s has always been an international affair, the Whitney’s has always been national, making it a radical departure.
The transformation is an emphatic political statement on the part of the exhibition’s organizers, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli. As reported by The New York Times, their “focus is less on the state of American art, than on America itself.” By opening the exhibition’s borders to international artists, the organizers removed the most basic guardrail of geography: twenty out of the seventy-one participants live and work outside the United States.
This year’s second significant departure from the Whitney Biennial’s traditional format concerns its manner of categorization. Instead of organizing the work “by medium, with painting alternating with sculpture and works on paper” (as the Whitney website puts it), the 2024 edition features “a constellation of conceptually adventurous artworks that challenges even the biennial format.” In a statement to ARTnews, from which the above formulation is taken, Iles and Onli emphasized the importance of new media genres:
Film, sound, and performance are such significant mediums for both of us, and we look forward to sharing with our audiences an incredibly robust film program that raises questions about the porousness of boundaries and identities, along with a thoughtful curation of live performance that offers a sensorial experience centered around embodiment.
Iles and Onli have been supplemented with five guest curators who add their skills to the project’s film, sound, and performance offerings: the Bangkok-based multidisciplinary artist Korakrit Arunanondchai; the Inuk filmmaker asinnajaq; Greg de Cuir Jr., the artistic director of the Kinopravda Institute in Belgrade; the New York experimental musician Taja Cheek (known professionally as L’Rain); and the Los Angelino multimedia artist-activist Zachary Drucker. The emphasis is on inclusion, dismantling traditional genre categories, and, as Rolling Stone put it, “subverting art institutions with sound.”
The final blow to the Whitney Biennial tradition is that the exhibition now has a theme. Worse still, that theme is declarative. Although much of the work at the 2022 biennial curated by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards did allude to the pandemic and the racial-justice uprisings, which were both culturally ubiquitous events that loomed large in every American’s life during the two years covered by the last exhibition, the curators explicitly rejected the idea of a “unified theme.” Instead, they endeavored to “pursue a series of hunches.” Their tentative suggestion was “that cultural, aesthetic, and political possibility begins with meaningful exchange and reciprocity.” Their approach used intimations, not proclamations. The Whitney Biennial of 2024 is not so subtle. Its subtitle, “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” optimistically asserts that the old “real” is overhyped and should be set aside in favor of some new, pseudo-Baudrillardian hyperreal. Having spent a year visiting some two hundred studios, as well as exhibitions such as Documenta 15 and Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Iles and Onli zeroed in like guided torpedoes on the topic du jour: alternate realities.
“A Note from the Curators,” posted on the Whitney Biennial webpage, confirms that the duo “have built a thematic Biennial that focuses on the ideas of ‘the real.’” It claims that “society is at an inflection point around this notion, in part brought on by artificial intelligence challenging what we consider to be real, as well as critical discussions about identity.” In their conversation with the Times, the curators went further, discussing their fears of apparently widespread “efforts to impose social and bodily conformity.” Translation: seventy-one “visionary” and “incredible” artists and collectives will visualize—or perform—art other than the boring old tangible stuff like painting and sculpture as it’s has been traditionally understood. Naturally, they will do so from the high ground of alternative identities meant to improve on the tired gender binaries of the past. This biennial is also the first in which the listed names and geographical information of the participants are followed by their preferred pronouns.
We have yet to see the formal curatorial statement due once the exhibition opens on March 20, but we can glean additional details from statements contained in the January 25 New York Times interview with the curators. The article both confirms and clarifies “A Note from the Curators,” emphasizing that its theme rose in reaction to “high uncertainty and anxiety with the U.S. election looming,” “ambient pressure everywhere,” and “the spread of laws undermining bodily autonomy.” Onli identified it as “a turbulent period, leading to another turbulent period.” Her conclusion was that under these conditions “the show had to be politically charged,” and that its title reflects the “queer playfulness” of a “multipronged retort to the culture wars over what is ‘real.’” The Times article continues with multiple descriptions of individual works that did not strike me as made in jest or imbued with irony. Yet immediately prior to the discussion of the art, there is a sentence noticeably at odds with the works as they are described: of the offerings, Onli said there is “an ironic humor that insists: ‘Of course we’re even better than the real.’”
Will this prove to be true? The question cannot be definitively answered before the previews, but I will venture to guess that we will witness one of two possibilities: either something we might call a “Dave Hickey scenario” or an “Ernst Bloch scenario.” The late critic and provocateur Hickey, forever skeptical of what he called the art world’s “therapeutic institutions”—moralizing museum boards, for example—scorned both professional curators and group shows. For him, “Even Better Than the Real Thing” would stand condemned simply by being a curated museum group show. Hickey believed that such shows are good for neither artists nor viewers, because they do not prioritize art, serving instead to pamper curatorial egos and pad resumes. On his somewhat theatrical “retirement” from the art world in 2012, Hickey reiterated this sentiment to the Observer:
With regard to biennials, I have a plan. When they make me president, I’m going to ban all group shows. I’m tired of going to dinner and only getting the hors d’oeuvres table—of seeing exhibitions that emphasize the least interesting aspects of the works in the show and demonstrate the vaulting “intellectual” ambition of some preening curator.
Hickey’s dream (he was once writing a book about it, until he realized it was a pipe dream), was of what he called “Pagan America”—a “large, secular, commercial democracy,” united by shared icons across all cultural strata. He was against cultural orthodoxy of any persuasion, and against the rule of virtue-promoting therapeutic institutions. So a “political” group show in which curators claim insight into what is “real” would epitomize everything Hickey loathed.
The “Ernst Bloch scenario” is named for the German philosopher and utopian thinker. In his three-volume magnus opus, The Principle of Hope, published in the 1950s, Bloch imagined a dystopian future not dissimilar to the “high uncertainty and anxiety” and “ambient pressure everywhere” described by the curators of the 2024 biennial. He wrote: “Many only feel confused. The ground shakes, they do not know why and with what. Theirs is a state of anxiety; if it becomes more definite, then it is fear.” Bloch may have been a Marxist, but he did not propose a merely negative, ideological criticism whose sole purpose was to dismantle the aesthetics of the oppressor. His antidote to this fear was Hoffnung (hope), a utopian projection of an alternative future:
It is a question of learning hope. Its work does not renounce, it is in love with success rather than failure. Hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness. The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them, cannot know nearly enough of what it is that makes them inwardly aimed, of what may be allied to them outwardly. The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.
If the curators of this biennial were to follow Bloch’s blueprint, they could, potentially, succeed in their mission of presenting an alternative by imparting hope as a solution in the face of fear. But this can only happen if the curatorial handwringing about the evils of the status quo turns out to be a less prominent theme in the exhibition than hope. We shall see.