As the longest-running institutional survey of contemporary American art, the Whitney Biennial never fails to create “discourse.” Each iteration makes a claim about the cultural moment in which it lives, generating a buzz that rings louder in some years than others. And critics are regularly the people at the center of it all, advising against the “pitfalls of politically inclined art” as former New York Times critic Roberta Smith did in her review of the 1993 Biennial, or pushing back against other critics, like Zadie Smith did in her response to the 2017 Biennial, in which she rejected calls to remove Dana Schutz’s Open Casket from the exhibition. At times, the criticism of the show eclipses the exhibition itself.
In 2022, when the discourse and controversies around Documenta 15, the first to predominantly feature Global South artists, resulted in exactly this dynamic, Momus editors Rahel Aima and Catherine G. Wagley reviewed the event’s coverage and criticism. Their conversation was a chance to find a path through the controversy (particularly regarding criticism of Documenta as antisemitic, at first for including Palestinian artists and BDS supporters and later for a caricature in a collectively made mural) and to dwell on those valuable perspectives—both from critics and the exhibiting artists—that had been overshadowed by coverage focused on flash points. We imagined this as the start of a series, titled Reviewing the Reviews; now, two years later, we are back with a second installment.
After the opening of the 2024 Whitney Biennial Even Better Than the Real Thing, our editors Jessica Lynne and Catherine G. Wagley were struck by how the criticism seemed to overdetermine the experience of the exhibition—in this case, through the shared disappointment critics expressed in the reviews. Here, Lynne and Wagley examine several reviews of the Biennial, mostly published in mainstream papers and magazines, tracing their throughlines and asking shared questions: How do the tone and style of these reviews grapple with this large, unwieldy biennial’s nuances? Can a close read of their reviews help us understand criticism’s role in relation to pulse-taking shows like this one?
Jessica Lynne: It’s the nature of biennials to always prove vexing subjects of interest for critics. They cannot, by design, “win” everyone over. In the US, no show seems more vexing than the Whitney Biennial to me. Critics always want more from it than it is ever able to give. Reading several reviews of this year’s iteration put that point into sharp relief for me. I should admit, as someone who has never reviewed the Biennial, that I know it is not an easy task. Where does one begin? How does one begin?
Still, some of the reviews and musings this year simply make me cringe. I’m convinced that if I wasn’t already a person who worked as a critic or read criticism regularly, most of these responses wouldn’t endear me to the idea of reading criticism at all. For example, I actually hollered when I read these two sentences by Jason Farago in the New York Times: “Love the earth, says the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and decorate accordingly. … Two decades on, the millennial glisten has given way to organic austerity; the dominant tones are now ocher and umber, turmeric and coffee.” It’s an observation made in service of his argument that he finds many of the included artists to have made tepid, timid, hesitant works that bore him. And then, over at the New Yorker, Jackson Arn is less emphatic about his boredom but he is, still, bored. For example, he describes Harmony Hammond’s textile assemblages as a “menagerie of bodies, from pimply-shiny to aged and chalky.” In both instances, I yawned at the attempt at wit and wondered, broadly: why do these critics write about art in a way that almost reads like a bad apartment-therapy Instagram ad? What do you make of this all? Is it something you noticed?
Catherine G. Wagley: It is strange, the extent to which reviewing a show like the Whitney invites broad strokes, and how those broad strokes take on the reductive quality of, as you said, ad copy! Or, this standout line from Jerry Saltz reminded me of a cranky Yelp review: “The show isn’t for people like me.” As I read, I kept wondering who these critics, especially those at major national papers, are writing for. A friend recently reminded me of an idea art critics have floated before, about how there’s so much pressure to make the arts pages more accessible, but the sports pages are just as inaccessible to anyone who is not steeped in the inner workings of whichever game. To continue that metaphor, it felt like multiple of these reviews were written by and for the art-world equivalent of a Dodgers fan who still follows the team out of a sense of obligation, even though they have long since stopped finding pleasure in baseball.
JL: This tussle over “accessibility” annoys me, especially because I find that the word is used, in this context, as a kind of sneer. Those writers imply that if a reader can’t keep up with the critic then it’s the reader’s fault, rather than a reflection of what the critic isn’t doing on the page. I think that criticism can and should be full of difficult, complex ideas and can also be written in a manner that is clear, imaginative, and rigorous. But most importantly, criticism needs to be clear. I trust my readers enough to meet my ideas in good faith, and I hope my readers trust me enough to know I’m not interested in obfuscation for the sake of obfuscation.
CW: Yes! It’s a worthy challenge, a privilege even, to distill complexity for a reader who is not an insider. Speaking of what critics are doing on the page, multiple reviews of this Biennial make an overlapping argument for why this show isn’t as pleasurable or exciting as it should have been: the fault lies in the risklessness, or the sedateness, or the quietness of the art. To quote Farago again, the show is “resolutely low-risk, visually polite, and never letting the wrong image get in the way of the right position.” Here he’s doing what multiple other critics did too: connecting aesthetic quietude to political timidity. Perhaps it’s worth asking before we go further. Did the show feel sedate or riskless to you?
JL: I do find it to be a quiet show, though this isn’t a pejorative for me, nor does it mean it’s a show that lacks excitement or high points. Terence Trouillot writes in the opening of his review for Frieze that Meg Onli and Chrissie Iles’s curatorial choices were a refreshing break from the “chock-a-block” arrangement that characterized the 2022 edition. I agree with him. In fact, as someone who has had the pleasure of seeing many of Onli’s shows while she was a curator at the ICA Philadelphia, I immediately recognized her impulse to prevent a museum’s exhibition spaces from overpowering a work and appreciated the way this show is not overcrowded as a result.
There are works that do more for me than others. I was enthralled by Suzanne Jackson’s suspended, canvasless acrylic paintings or Seba Calfuqueo’s film in which she performs a ritual carrying a bright-blue fabric to a sacred site; whereas Demian DinéYazhi’s text-based neon installation, which has garnered much attention for its righteous call to “Free Palestine” that was revealed only after the show opened, is a work I’m very much politically aligned with but does not offer much to me as an aesthetic experience. Still, I read the critique of the “quietness” of this show, or whatever we call it, as a critique informed by a white, liberal desire for those of marginalized experience to perform political subjectivity in a way that appeases this white, liberal imagination. And that is why an indictment like Farago’s feels unearned to me.
CW: Certain reviews definitely criticize the art’s “flimsy politics” (I’m quoting Sebastian Smee in the Washington Post here) while engaging in flimsy politics of their own. And we aren’t the first to call this out: Emily Watlington’s Art in America review points to the “various white men whose names happen to start with the letter J”—Jackson, Jerry, Jason—who “have called the show ‘tepid’ … ‘bland’ … , and ‘low-risk,’” and Terence Trouillot generally agrees that the show was quiet, and even riskless, but finds the critique “somewhat pedantic, even tiresome,” and observes that the “severity of the Biennial’s media coverage feels disproportionate” given how moderate much of contemporary art criticism is. Both Jackson Arn and Jason Farago take a dig at Carmen Winant’s wall of photographs from abortion clinics, many now closed (it was Watlington’s review that called my attention to these digs!). I am a fan of Winant’s work, and found this wall of images enthralling, but I would have been able to accept Farago’s point about the work’s resemblance to an Instagram feed if he hadn’t framed Winant’s project as also indirectly critiquing the politics of its viewers: “And you, if you find the accumulation as formless as a social feed, are guilty of minimizing threats to women’s health.” I understand that Farago perceives Winant’s work as didactic in an uninteresting way, but is the work truly riskless, or is it actually too confrontational?
JL: I appreciate how Watlington’s point led me to another question that remained top of mind for me as I read other reviews. For as much as reviews often serve as a declarative stance on a work/show/artist, can they also be texts that lead both writer and reader to new positions? I’m getting at another question about style, tone, and craft, which is what’s lurking underneath the surface of everything we’ve been talking about.
Reading Ben Davis’s review for Artnet, for instance, felt like I was being invited into the thinking process with him. He argues that this year’s iteration is full of ambiguity as the included artists “both claim art as a form of resistance and feel all resistanced out.” In this way, he more or less agrees with the larger critiques of the show. However, as he goes on, he reveals for his readers that his stance on the show evolves just like it did with the 2022 iteration, Quiet as It’s Kept. Ultimately, there’s a wholeness to his argument that takes into account the previous iteration of the Biennial in relation to this current one that I am willing to sit with because this review doesn’t make any effort to condescend to me.
I’m thinking here, as another example, about the opinions on the place of film in the Biennial (characterized as “blessedly few” by Davis, whereas Hrag Vartanian of Hyperallergic notes that this Biennial is full of “very strong video work.”) I found myself energized by the inclusion of video work and, for me, those were some of the highlights of this year (and expected on my part, again, given Onli’s and Iles’s curatorial interest in film and moving image). How have you been thinking about the way folks responded to the video work in particular?
CW: I was struck by how critics really loved Sharon Hayes’s video installation, which was more integrated into the space of the exhibition than other film and video work. Hayes’s film Ricerche: four (2024) comprises interviews about sex and love with three groups of older LGBTQIA people. Her subjects sat in circles and we, the viewers, are invited to sit in a circle too. Hayes propped two flat screens up on top of chairs and a bench, and then mismatched chairs surround those screens. I don’t think there are even headphones—so you could sit down, or lurk just outside the circle (which isn’t always a circle, as I recall, because people move the chairs), and immediately be pulled in. Even the crankiest critics liked it! Jackson Arn thought it was “slow going at first,” but that “it generates a startling amount of warmth.” And Emily Watlington saw it as an argument in itself for “a softer approach” to exhibition-making and to politics. Isaac Julien’s film and sculpture installation, Once Again … (Statues Never Die) (2022), was also a favorite and also immersive—you had to move behind and in front of screens. Critics met the films and videos that were installed more conventionally—and beautifully, likely thanks to Chrissie Iles’s long engagement with the medium—with less enthusiasm. Hilariously, Jerry Saltz did not include a single video or film work in his list of what to see or skip at the Biennial. Perhaps this raises valid questions about whether it’s possible for critics to really fully engage this much film—how many can afford to spend that kind of time, given the low pay and tight deadlines?—but I also suspect that greater engagement with the film work would have complicated this general consensus about the show’s quietness. While there is an aesthetic hush to dark, carpeted rooms, I didn’t find the majority of the film work quiet in terms of its content. Kite’s film, Pahá kiŋ lená wakháŋ (These hills are sacred) [2017], starts as a puzzlelike op-art animation and then gives us a prolonged view of Standing Rock protests, with police in riot gear facing off against people who show no aggression back.
JL: A part of me thinks that to review the Biennial and not fully engage with the films in a substantive way is doing the job of reviewing poorly (shout out to Mubi for streaming some of the films). I will also acknowledge that the machine of publishing leaves little room for most critics—especially those at legacy, mainstream publications—to return to a show or sit with their thoughts for longer periods of time before having to make their conclusions public. On the other hand, I think to myself, How can I expect any close attention to the work if some of these writers are falling over themselves at artists’ pronouns?! I mean, I still can’t believe the first sentence of Martha Schwendener’s review is a real first sentence: “When the artists and collectives selected for the Whitney Biennial were announced in January, next to most of the artists’ names, in parentheses, were gender pronouns. I started reading the list—and immediately got distracted.”
CW: The whole first graf of that review treats pronouns as a woke novelty. Schwendener goes on to describe the show as one “in which identity was showcased” and ultimately calls for “a world in which no demarcating ‘identities’ are needed at all.” It reminds me of points critic Rosalind Krauss and artist Silvia Kolbowski made around the 1993 Whitney Biennial when they were both participating in a conversation October published. They were critical of the inclusion of artists’ statements in the show and the way curatorial essays privileged artists’ voices. Krauss didn’t like reading about how Lorna Simpson’s work Hypothetical (1992) was about Black rage, when she felt that her own interpretation was more nuanced: “It is partly about black rage,” Krauss said, “but it is partly about how she made it, the fact that she is invoking the grid.” It’s clearly still worth pointing out that it’s artists who have historically been excluded whose identities seem most “distracting.” It also feels a little disingenuous when critics frame the inclusion of an artist’s intention, or the demarcation of an artist’s identity, as a barrier to having the conversation they want to have about the work. Krauss, of course, managed to get in her points about the grid back in ’93, and Schwendener is able to, for instance, contextualize Pippa Garner’s smart, funny work in relation to the ongoing prominence of installation art without even mentioning that Garner is a trans artist. But Schwendener’s complaint about the inclusion of pronouns next to artists’ names reminds me of how many of the reviews of this year’s Biennial singled out exhibition didactics, especially the mention of AI in the main curatorial statement, which is printed on the wall at the start of the show.
JL: The subject of AI has occupied a large part of the “discourse” this year and is, to me, connected to arguments about the political position the show attempts to articulate. The curatorial statement asserts that artificial intelligence is “complicating our understanding of what is real, and rhetoric around gender and authenticity is being used politically and legally to perpetuate transphobia and restrict bodily autonomy.” I believe many viewers anticipated an exhibition full of work made by AI, and yet, that is not what this show is at all. I appreciated Lauren Klotzman’s consideration of how one might treat the show’s conceit even though AI is not explicitly utilized in the making of much of the work on view. “Is the digital world ‘even better than the real thing’ in terms of both fidelity and the increasing dystopia of our society’s devolution?” they ask in Boston Art Review. This question, which suggests a tongue-in-cheek subtext of the Biennial title, feels aligned with my own experience of how this show attempts to think about the body, fluidity of gender experience and expression (even in the absence of a figure/figuration in a given work) and the sociopolitical systems that legislate and punish transgressions against what has been categorized as “normal.” I’m curious what you make of their stance. Did you want more from the show in this regard?
CW: I definitely think Klotzman’s question reflects one of the most generous readings, and perhaps the most accurate, of what the curators were trying to convey by mentioning artificial intelligence. Jackson Arn, on the other hand, found the AI mention misleading, since so few works explicitly deal with artificial intelligence, and used this to argue for “a show purged of wall text” which “wouldn’t tease you like that.” And though I don’t share his frustration, I do think there’s a pressure to use buzzwords in museum didactics, as if using these terms is equivalent to engaging the zeitgeist. Maybe omitting the term artificial intelligence would have precluded some of the more reductive takes. But I thought certain works, like Lotus L. Kang’s installation of abstract, earth-hued photographs that unfurled from overhead, did a really effective job of bridging the gap between what it feels like to live in a body in a world made more rigid by screens and images. So no, I don’t think I wanted more from the show in regard to the bodily and its relation to socioeconomic structures. But also, I don’t know if I want much from these shows to begin with. I want to see artists I haven’t seen before in these kinds of museum spaces, and I want to be able to follow some kind of logic, however loose. What about you? Did you want more, or anything different, from this Biennial?
JL: The longer I sit with my thoughts, the more I come back to Watlington’s description of the show’s anchoring idea: the friction between corporeal experience and oppressive norms. That is, again, the friction between how a person asserts their subjectivity and how others—the state, even—reject that. While this may not inherently be a difficult idea to understand on its own for some people, it can be difficult to engage with or confront the specific ways this friction shows up across experiences. With more time, I can appreciate how the show’s artists create an environment for reflection in this regard, one that asks me as a critic to move as slowly as possible. I think we make language after this point of tension, not before it. I want to be challenged by difficult ideas in this way that I believe Iles and Onli are trying to offer, and I want to contribute to the creation of this new language, which is what we are doing with this exercise. So maybe what I’m saying is that, ultimately, I don’t need more from the show even if every work is not a standout for me.
CW: Speaking of the friction between bodily experience and oppressive norms, I recently watched I Don’t Know (1970) by Penelope Spheeris over lunch. It was one of the films in the exhibition I had to skip due to time constraints. Of course, it would have been better in the space of the show, but I still found it extremely pleasurable to watch on a tablet—it’s a playful and dark meditation on the fluidity of gender and sexuality in a world violently structured against that fluidity. Its politics are far from flimsy. Every scene pushes against or pillories norms (for example, Linda, one of the protagonists, is always topless around her emphatically straight brother, though this is never acknowledged in dialogue). Anyway, I looked back through the reviews we talked about here to see what any of them had said about it. The answer is: nothing! I wonder how many critics watched it? Certainly, the absence of Penelope Spheeris from the critical conversation underscores for me how difficult, maybe impossible, it is for criticism to impose a tight argument on a show like this. I love a good argument, but throughout this whole conversation we keep coming back to this long-standing problem in our field, where the pretense of authority too often limits the critical narrative. I guess that’s the value of a conversation like this, though. We got to sit with the experience of the art itself, other critics’ thoughts about it, the thoughts of our friends and colleagues, and then we could, to borrow your phrasing, recognize the need for more language formed after the point of tension.
