MoMA PS1

Diana called me on Saturday, 6 June, and asked if I was interested in going out to MoMA’s PS1 in Long Island City, Queens.  I’d never been there, so I said yes.  She picked me up at about quarter to one on Sunday and we drove over to Queens by way of the FDR Drive and the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge (also known as the 59th Street Bridge—especially if you’re a Simon and Garfunkel fan), arriving at PS1 on Jackson Avenue between 46th Avenue and 46th Road at just after 1 p.m.  (Diana even found a parking place right in front of the museum.  Is this New York City or what?)

LIC, as the area’s known, was originally an independent city, founded in 1870, until it became part of Greater New York City in 1898 when Queens County merged with Bronx County, Kings County (Brooklyn), Richmond County (Staten Island), and New York County (Manhattan).  It’s been undergoing a transformation for the past decade or so as it’s changed over to a residential and commercial neighborhood from a largely warehouse and factory district.  In 2001, LIC was rezoned from an industrial neighborhood to residential and underwent gentrification.  

While there are many starkly modern luxury highrises, mostly combined residential and office spaces with retail businesses in the ground-floor premises, there are still the remnants of the area’s previous appearance as a utilitarian, unaesthetic area of storehouses, manufacturing plants, loading docks, truck bays, and parking lots.  

Several arts organizations have opened in the area; aside from PS1, there’s the SculptureCenter, New York City’s only non-profit exhibition space dedicated to contemporary and innovative sculpture, founded in 1928 and expanded in 2014; the Socrates Sculpture Park, an outdoor museum and public sculpture park created in 1986 and given official status in 1998; See.me, a web-based arts organization founded in 2007; and the Fisher Landau Center for Art, a private foundation offering exhibitions of contemporary art established in 1991, closed to the public in November 2017.   Sculptor Isamu Noguchi, 1904-88, established his museum in LIC in 1985 in a former plant building; his studio had been across Vernon Boulevard in an old warehouse.

The organization that became MoMA PS1 began in 1971 as the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, whose mission was turning abandoned and underused buildings in New York City into artist studios and exhibition spaces.  In 1976, founder Alanna Heiss (b. 1943) opened the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in a deserted Romanesque Revival public school building in LIC.  The building, built in 1892, was the first school in Long Island City and functioned until 1963, when it was closed because of low attendance (probably because the neighborhood had slowly shifted from residential to industrial) and the building was turned into a warehouse.

In 1999, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center and Manhattan’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art merged, a process which was scheduled to take 10 years; MoMA PS1, the museum’s new name, and the Museum of Modern Art formalized their affiliation in 2000.  Today, MoMA PS1 is the oldest and second-largest (after the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known as MASS MoCA) non-profit arts center in the United States solely devoted to contemporary art.

An exhibition space rather than a collecting institution, MoMA PS1 has no permanent holdings like its parent museum on Manhattan’s West 53rd Street—though PS1 does display long-term installations.  PS1, with 125,000 square feet of space, has four floors of exhibit space, plus a courtyard that is currently the site of a gigantic installation, Pedro & Juana’s Hórama Rama (2019).  The first and second floors have the most exhibit spaces while the third floor also houses the museum’s administrative offices and the basement includes the cloakroom and the building’s infrastructure plant. 

Within PS1, are performance spaces, rooms for art-education programs, artist-in-residence studios, and site-specific installations.  There are large galleries for expansive exhibitions and small rooms that are ideal as project spaces or for video screenings.

Visitors enter PS1 through the newly created entrance on a spur of road (unnamed, as far as I can tell) that connects 46th Avenue to Jackson Avenue.  In 1994, PS1 underwent a major renovation to repairs decades of wear and frequent ad hoc remodeling that had left the original 102-year-old building severely deteriorated.  The renovation included the creation of an entranceway and the Courtyard just beyond.  

(Unlike MoMA in Manhattan, PS1’s admission is “suggested”: $10 for adults, seniors and students $5, children free; Fridays evenings are free and since 2015, admission is always free for New York City residents.  The museum is open Thursday through Monday from noon till 6 p.m. except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Days.) 

Leaving the entrance kiosk, museumgoers cross the Courtyard to enter the old school building, which houses the exhibit spaces.  Like the entranceway, the Courtyard is constructed principally of unpainted concrete with a gray gravel floor; parts of the yard look like they’re still under construction while other areas look to be storage for equipment for Warm Up, PS1’s summer music program that runs every Saturday from July through early September.

As I said, the Courtyard is occupied through 2 September by Hórama Rama by Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo (Mexican, no date of birth) and Mecky Reuss (German, no DOB), founders of Pedro & Juana, a research, design, and architecture studio in Mexico City.  Unveiled in June as the 2019 winner of the Young Architects Program, an annual competition of MoMA PS1, the installation occupies the whole courtyard and towers dozens of feet above it.  Young architects are invited to submit design proposals to YAP for PS1’s courtyard.  The winning entry is then converted from concept to reality and becomes the architectural setting for Warm Up. 

Hórama Rama (I couldn’t find a translation for the title; it may not have one) is a large-scale cyclorama featuring a panoramic image on scaffolding that projects above the Courtyard and transports visitors into a wild jungle.  Nearly 40-foot-tall and 90-foot-wide, the structure looms over the Courtyard, setting visitors in an urban rainforest.  The exterior of the structure features protruding wood “bristles” that create a sense of movement.  

The presence of this large circular structure reconfigures the Courtyard into an immersive environment that visitors can move in and out of, contrasting with the cityscape just outside PS1 and visible over the Courtyard wall.  Amplifying the experience are bright pink hammocks handwoven in the south of Mexico and small wooden stools placed around the gravel terrain, along with a two-story, artificial waterfall. 

It almost seems churlish to say that the installation didn’t make me or Diana imagine being in a jungle.  The Courtyard, with its bare concrete walls and bland gravel ground, wasn’t inviting, especially on this hot, humid summer afternoon, and I certainly wasn’t inclined to hang out there, as it were, in a hammock.  As for the waterfall, it’s off to the right (as we entered the yard) in an area that was partially closed off and disused except as storage the day we visited, less attractive even than the “jungle.”

We didn’t linger in the Courtyard but made our way to the main museum building across the gravel yard and up some concrete steps.  There’s a terrace of sorts in front of the old school building with some picnic tables and chairs—intended, I assume, for use by patrons of the café, Mina’s, on the right side of the terrace (as you go up the stairs) that didn’t appear to be open this Sunday afternoon.

After orienting ourselves in the building—there’s a sort of reception lobby just inside the entrance from the Courtyard—Diana, who said she’d been expecting air conditioning and had brought a sweater, decided to leave it at the checkroom in the basement, so we went down there first.  It’s not truly an exhibit floor, but there are some spaces visitors can look at.  The most prominent is the lower part of a two-story installation that can also be viewed from the first floor, Maypole (2007) by Nancy Spero (American, 1926-2009). 

The space is called the Duplex gallery and contains Spero’s last work completed before her death, a 20-foot vertical steel pole from which images of decapitated aluminum heads (some with protruding tongues) are suspended by ribbons and metal chains.  Maypole (through 2 September) was created during the second Iraq War (“Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 2003-11) but was derived from Spero’s drawings from the 1960s inspired by the Vietnam war.   

Spero sees her work as simultaneously reflecting the celebratory and the grotesque.  The maypole is the universal symbol in the West of the coming of spring, recognizing the recurring cycle of nature, while the images of violence represent the recurring cycle of war.  Having watched the U.S. enter into a disastrous and destructive war in Southeast Asia based on the lies and manipulations of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and  Richard Nixon, Spero was horrified to see George W. Bush lead us down the same road in Iraq.  

In some previous incarnations of Maypole, viewers could walk around the installation, the aluminum heads hanging just above the visitors’ own heads, but at PS1, we saw the work through a sort of unglazed window into what looked like two flights of a former stairwell from which the steps had been disassembled—or maybe an elevator shaft with the car removed.

Also in the basement is a screening room running a short documentary, Autoportrait (1971-2012), on the life and work of Simone Fattal (Syrian-born Lebanese-American, b. 1942), associated with the exhibit of her work in Works and Days in a series of galleries on the first floor.  As the black-and-white film, which the artist herself edited from footage taken when she invited a crew into her Beirut kitchen in 1971 to help her make a video self-portrait, was over 40 years old, Diana and I decided to skip it.  

We also passed up the installation known as Central Governor residing in the Boiler Room of the old school building (no longer functioning) in the form of the gold-leafed furnace.  The work was executed in 2010 by Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Saul Melman (American, b. 1968) and I walked down the wooden stairs into the Boiler Room to see what was up, but Diana walks with a cane from a knee replacement, so I advised her not to venture down.

On the first floor, through another window into the Duplex gallery, I stopped to look again at Spero’s Maypole.  On the basement level, we looked out at the bottom of the pole or up at the rest of it; from the first floor, we could see the middle of the installation, look down on the bottom part, or up to the pinnacle.  For me, this was more a curiosity, seeing the work from several different perspectives, than truly revealing or artistically engaging.  (At the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2017 Biennial, Samara Golden’s multi-story installation The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes was much more interesting and engrossing; see my report on the Biennial, posted on Rick On Theater on 22 June 2017.)

The principal exhibit on this floor is Fattal’s Works and Days (through 2 September), a retrospective of over 200 of her works created over the last 50 years that includes sculpture (abstract and figurative), paintings (watercolor and oil), drawings, and collages on subjects and themes drawn from war narratives, landscape painting, ancient history, mythology, and Sufi poetry.  Fattal’s sculptures, the bulk of her oeuvre, are often tiny and frequently parts of series which tell a story when viewed together.  She works in ceramic, stoneware, terracotta, bronze, and porcelain and takes inspiration from myths such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Dhat al-Himma. 

There are simply too many pieces in this show to report on even a small portion of them.  Depending on personal taste and interest, some of Fattal’s work is more appealing than others—something that’s true of all prolific artists.  In the very first gallery however, are two pieces, both sculptures, worth remarking upon.  

Arguably the most unusual piece is the 1988 Torso Found in Today’s Downtown Beirut, Fattal’s first sculpture.  It’s a piece of alabaster the artist found and which resembled the body of an ancient statue from an archeological dig.  She added to the carving and mounted it on a simple, white-painted wooden box.  The sculpture looks like it had been pulled from an ancient ruin, but at the same time, it suggests a recovered body from the rubble of a contemporary war—a kind of artificial palimpsest.  (The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-90, was raging at the time Fattal created Torso.)

The other sculpture that struck me—solely because I liked it—is The Lion (2008).  An absolutely charming small, umber-colored stoneware statue, it’s recognizable as a little lion without being Realistic; it’s not exactly Impressionistic, either, but sort of free-form, sitting on the floor, right in the middle of the room.  Ariella Budick of the Financial Times described it perfectly: “A craggy lion with a sunlike mane and pussycat tail lolls apprehensively on a plinth.”  (ROTters will know about my mother and my “Midnight Shopping Trips” when it comes to art shows.  This is what I’d come back for out of the whole museum!)

In one of the last galleries were several small, abstract ceramic figures, including The Guard (2006) and The Wounded Warrior (2008), from the little-known Arabic epic of the 7th through the 13th centuries, Dhat al-Himma.  (Fattal made a series of figurines from this legend.  The title varies and there are differences in the narrative depending on the version and the translation.)  

In the legend, Delhemma, the heroine, is a “woman of noble purpose” (the translation of the tale’s Arabic title); she’s a warrior and a female djinn (a magical spirit, often called a genie in English) falls in love with her.  Guarded by the djinn and assisted by her son, Delhemma fights the enemies of her people and her prince   If you’re looking for a successor to TV’s Xena: Warrior Princess or the movie Wonder Woman, a feminist action hero with exotic trappings, here’s a great prospect.

In several locations around the museum, most notably on the wall beyond the reception area at the entrance to the old school building, are rectangular aluminum placards resembling no-parking signs with texts alluding to the Trail of Tears forced relocation of Native peoples from the East to Oklahoma (then designated Indian Territory) between 1830 and 1850.  The signs, white backgrounds with red lettering and a red border, bear the phrases “do you choose to walk”; “were you forced to walk”; “trail of tears 1836”; “walk to oklahoma” (Trail of Tears, 2005). 

                                                                                                                 

These are the work of Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation, b. 1954), an artist, activist, and educator known for text-based conceptual art.  (Born in Kansas, Heap of Birds is a Southern Cheyenne.  The Cheyenne and Arapaho nations, both originally from the northern Great Plains, were forced to migrate to western Indian Territory after the Civil War.)  

At PS1, his main exhibit on the second floor is Surviving Active Shooter Custer (through 8 September), a large show with over 200 works which presents new and recent large-scale prints.  By using the contemporary phrase “active shooter” to characterize massacres committed by U.S. troops against Native Americans over a century ago, Heap of Birds refers to the legacies of state violence against Native communities while drawing parallels to the present day. 

All the prints in Active Shooter are not just word-based, but words exclusively; they’re mini-texts, hand-written protest posters.  The panels are presented in groups, each dealing with a particular theme or issue, unified by the background color.  

Health of the People is the Highest Law (2019), which references the health issues that affect Native Americans, is a series of red panels imprinted with white-lettered, somewhat cryptic (if often poetic) phrases such as “dance in wheel chair drum beats circle” and “she learned well gum her food.”  In Blue Tree (2005–2017), an assemblage that seems more personal to the artist, the prints are all on shades of blue with texts like “over rated human just fine animal” and “lean close be brown to me.” 

The panels are monoprints and corresponding “ghost prints” (a second print from an original monoprint plate that’s substantially different from the original print) on sheets of paper that vary from 22" high by 15" wide to 30" by 22".  They’re assembled into panels ranging from 66" by 135" to 90" by 352".  

The passages are a collage of song lyrics, references to historical events, political speeches, and other sources.  Heap of Birds strictly limits himself to six words.  The title panel, from 2019, is the artist’s evocation of “the genocide of America inflicted on the indigenous people” and contains a print that references one of our most popular patriotic songs, “American the Beautiful”: “cities gleam foul our blood stream” (“Our alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears”).

In yet another panel on the same topic, Genocide and Democracy (2016), Heap of Birds continues the implications of America’s patriotic myth-making with prints, again in bloody shades of red, with passages like “shed grace on thee american brutality” and “indian health decay twilights last gleaming.”  Our most sacred prose phrases come in for attack as well: “poverty sadness for which it stands.”

The source of the artist’s title for the assemblage is in another print in Surviving Active Shooter Custer: “stop active shooter cadet autie custer.”  (“Custer was the main terrorist that came to our country,” declares the artist.  “Autie” was Custer’s childhood nickname among family and close friends, derived from his early attempts to pronounce his middle name, Armstrong.)  

This print and the others in this panel, also in shades of red, all reappear in another panel on the next wall in ghost form—second, paler-hued impressions made from the original plates.  Heap of Birds explains in a video interview that after the genocides, “what we have left are the ghosts of a whole culture.  These prints will be like their memory or their expression of the survivors, of the ghosts of what happened in the 1800s.” 

Another print in Surviving Active Shooter Custer, connecting the atrocities of the past to the present day, reads “indians still target obama binladen geronimo.”  It’s not entirely clear if Heap of Birds means that Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden have been targets like the 19th-century Indians, but inclusion of the name Geronimo in the print is telling for another reason.  

The Apache leader was looked on as a terrorist in the middle and late 1800s and the object of a vast manhunt.  But Geronimo was also the code name for bin Laden during the search for him and upon his death in 2011, the SEAL team that killed him radioed back the news by reporting “Geronimo is dead.”  Heap of Birds points out: “They named the most hated terrorist an Apache name, you know, when they were hunting him. . . .  They don’t see the insensitivity or the pain of the history.”

As with much of the work on display at PS1, I found Surviving Active Shooter more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging.  I have no trouble agreeing with Heap of Birds’s message, but that’s a socio-political response, not an artistic or aesthetic one.  I also have no doubt about the artist and activist’s sincerity or passion, but reading through hundreds of slogans soon gets wearing and they all blur into one undifferentiated image.  (I also must add that the constant anger, however justified, gets exhausting, too.) 

Also on the second floor is MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018–19, part of a multi-year partnership among the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1 that commenced in February.  While the Studio Museum in Harlem is closed for the construction of a new building at West 125th Street, site of its longtime home, PS1 will present the Studio Museum’s annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition.  

MOOD, the inaugural exhibition of this partnership, features work by Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984, Lexington, KY), Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, New York, NY), and Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA).  It will be at PS1 through 8 September. (Construction on the Studio Museum’s new home is expected to continue through 2021.)

According to the museum’s PR, MOOD, a four-gallery exhibition, is supposed to be an exploration of “site, place, and time as they relate to American identity and popular culture, past and present.”  The art reflects the social-media hashtag #mood, which, the PS1 press release says, “describes moments both profound and banal: anything can be ‘a #mood.’”

As I understand this (a perhaps unlikely circumstance), #mood is related to the ordinary sense of the word ‘mood,’ but its social-media incarnation is, first imagistic—that is, pictorial—rather than merely rhetorical.  It’s also sort of Yiddish-esque, if you’ll excuse the ethno-centric view, in that, like Yiddish words and expressions, an image representing a feeling or a state of being can mean dozens, scores, even hundreds of variations depending on who’s sending the image, who’s receiving it, how either of them feels at the moment, and the spin either sender or recipient puts on the image.  It’s all nuance.  (How’d I do?  Did I make any sense?  Am I close?)

Using a range of media and materials, including video, sculpture, found objects, collage, printing, painting, and photography, the pieces express the artists’ perceptions of the current moment in the United States.  This isn’t, as you might guess, an easy exhibit to characterize; each artist-in-residence works in multiple styles and means, making it hard to pin any of them down to simple or familiar (a least to me) categories.  As the press release asserts, “MOOD maps out each artist’s psychic landscape, presenting distinct snapshots that travel through and beyond the fabric of digital culture.”  

Hamilton created an installation that envelops visitors, making them wrestle with a mysterious Old South, its racial realities, and its mythic past (Metal Yard Sign with Sabal Palm Fronds I and Metal Yard Sign with Sabal Palm Fronds II, both 2019); Self’s series of eight paintings (most from 2019), Street Scenes, is a large-scale, mixed-media homage to street life in Harlem; and Smith’s conceptual sculptures and two-dimensional works examine the injustices of mass incarceration in the U.S. and calls attention to its consequences.

I must create a Master Piece to pay the Rent (through 2 September), in a second-floor gallery into which a monitor only lets a small number of visitors to enter at a time, is the first survey exhibition of the work of interdisciplinary artist Julie Becker (American, 1972-2016).  When Diana and I first stopped by, the monitor was holding people at the door, and we decided to move on and come back instead of hanging around in the hallway.  

I must create (the title comes from a phrase from one of her drawings) alludes to the kind of temporary living spaces Becker lived in in Los Angeles, where she was born.  The exhibit of 53 works made between 1993 (when Becker was still a student at the California Institute of the Arts in L.A.) and 2015 includes mixed-media installations, models, films, photographs, and drawings.

Interior Corners (1993), a series of photographs of corners of rooms, shows two wallpapered walls and a triangle of carpeted floor.  Some of the rooms are real and others are models built by Becker; it’s unclear from the photos which are which.  There are also model rooms the artist built displayed on the floors of the gallery (not necessarily the same models from which the photos were made). 

The installation Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest (1993–96) is in a separate space within the Becker galleries, and yet another monitor ushers in visitors one by one as previous viewers leave.  I entered the installation, which might be seen as a life-size model, through an office-like room with a desk, sofa, and table piled with magazines. The nameplate on the desk reads “waiting room,” but there are other nameplates—“psychiatrist,” “concierge,” “real-estate agent,” “entertainment agency,” and so on—displayed on the floor, as if the use of the office were flexible. 

Beyond the waiting room are other spaces set up diorama-like, including one that’s supposed to evoke the hotel in the 1980 thriller film The Shining—of which there’s a drawing hanging on the waiting room wall!  There’s also an artist’s studio in which miniature versions of Becker’s work hang, suggesting that the occupant is the artist herself.  There are several other room installations, leading the visitor to a workspace that has clues that this is where Becker did her research and preparation for the creation of her models and other pieces.  There are evocations all around, also, of Stephen King’s The Shining and Eloise, the 1950s children’s book series by Kay Thompson. 

I found, unfortunately, that the wonder of Becker’s work wore off after a few exhibits.  It all struck me as the efforts of an obsessive child (Becker was only 43 when she took her own life after struggling for years with drugs and mental illness)—or perhaps a mad set designer,  Yes, the work is meticulous and detailed, but it reminded me of the kind of art created by some outsider artists (who are often mentally ill or otherwise psychologically altered).  After a while, the repetitive nature of Becker’s creations, the focus on the single theme of living and working spaces, made my mind go numb.

The third floor has only one exhibit, Gina Beavers’s The Life I Deserve (through 2 September), which opened in March and is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.  Beavers (American, b. 1978), born in Athens, Greece, is known for her bas-relief (and some that are decidedly haut-relief) paintings of food, makeup, and images derived from the internet.  (At first glance, her paintings reminded me of the cafeteria and diner cakes and pies of Wayne Thibaud from the 1960s.  Besides being 3-D, Beavers’s work is darker, more grotesque, and slier—sort of Thibaud 2.0.) 

This survey of Beavers’s thickly layered acrylic paintings on canvas, wood, or linen, range from her early “food porn” pictures from around 2014 to later work that's almost sculptural.  LipBalls 3 (2018), for instance, shows a human mouth in bright lipstick with huge sports balls (basket, tennis, base, and so on), plastered all over it, protruding from the canvas way more than just bas. 

The exhibit’s title is a food reference, taken from one of the exhibit’s paintings, The Life I Deserve (Ice Cream), 2016.  Beavers explains that “it’s a foodie thing.  The photo [of a rainbow ice cream cone on social media] was just tagged with #thelifeIdeserve.  It’s this very humble subject, a soft-serve cone, but at the same time, it’s self-centered: what I deserve.”  It was curator Oliver Shultz who selected the painting’s title as the name of the entire exhibit.

One example of Beavers’s “food porn” paintings is Cake (2015), the depiction of the naked torso of a man, lying prone as if he might be sunbathing in the nude.  Out of his right buttock, a cake-server is lifting a slice, which looks like the layers of an iced cake about to be served to someone.  

Another food porn piece is Van Gogh’s Starry Night as Rendered in Bacon (2016), which is just what the title says: the iconic van Gogh painting made of slices of cooked bacon!  (The Starry Night, 1889, is one of my all-time favorite works of art—I even use it as my desktop wallpaper—and I couldn’t decide if Beavers’s take is grotesque or hilarious.)

The van Gogh parody isn’t Beavers’s only paean to renowned artists of old and their iconic paintings.  Mona Lisa Nail (2015) is a rendering of a woman’s hand with one nail painted with an image of the famous Leonardo da Vinci portrait.  In Mondrian Body, Beavers shows a woman’s nude torso, neck to knees, covered in a Piet Mondrian-like geometric design in primary colors.  She’s standing in front of a red curtain holding a gold frame hung around her body with her breasts and belly protruding out from the canvas.  (This might be another piece for my Midnight Shopping Trip.) 

I found many of the exhibits at PS1 to fall outside my area of comprehension.  I’m glad I went because I had no idea what this MoMA satellite was all about—though I suspected it was really current art, which hasn’t appealed to me since the Post-modern period began.  This isn’t an unfamiliar response for me.  I noticed my lack of engagement with the latest art when I first went over to the then-new galleries in Chelsea, which began opening in the mid-1990s, in 2011 and it was undeniable when I went to the 2017 Whitney Biennial. 

I find almost all of this art self-indulgent and hyper-personal—and I’ll try to define and explain what I mean by that in a bit.  The artists all seem to be talking to themselves or to a very narrow audience of their own group (whatever that is).  Nothing is universalized or generalized so that it speaks to me, too (old dude that I am . . . ahem).  This is true even when the point the artist is making is entirely comprehensible to me and even something with which I agree or sympathize—the artistic expression of that point just doesn’t move me. 

As you’ve read earlier, I found several of the artists’ work more curious than aesthetically stimulating (Spero’s Maypole).  Another way of phrasing this is that much of this work was more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging to me, such as Heap of Birds’s Surviving Active Shooter Custer, with its word-dominated prints.  

Still other works, like the Studio Museum artists’ creations, were so hyperlocal (and perhaps hyper-generational, if I may coin a word) that I couldn’t respond to them other than academically.  Art like that of Julie Becker felt not just hyperlocal, but hyper-personal—so focused on her own life, feelings, and experiences as to be a private communication with her own psyche. 

[A few weeks ago, I posted a report on a collection of installations at the Park Avenue Armory, Drill (15 July).  The exhibit comprised 10 separate installations and I decided to try to describe each of them in my report.  In contrast, even though I visited all but one of the exhibits at PS1, I decided to cherry-pick what I’d write about in this report, so I’ve left out several about which I find I have little cogent to say. 

[The one exhibit Diana and I skipped was the Young Architects Program 2019 Exhibition (first floor; through 2 September),  Having seen the winners’ installation, Hórama Rama, in the Courtyard, we decided not to spend time with the other contestants.  (The runners-up for 2019 are Cannibal’s Bath by Matter Design [Brandon Clifford, Wes McGee, and Johanna Lobdell; Boston], Bambot: Fufuzela by Low Design Office [Ryan Bollom and DK Osseo-Asare; State College, PA], Seriously Fun by Oana Stănescu and Akane Moriyama [New York and Stockholm], and Refugio by TO [Carlos Facio and Jose G. Amozurrutia; Mexico City].)

[In the basement, Diana and I checked out Simone Fattal’s Autoportrait but decided not to stay for the whole film, principally because, as I said above, it was so old we felt it wasn’t really relevant to the exhibit upstairs.  I looked in at Saul Melman’s Central Governor in the Boiler Room, also in the basement, but found it uninteresting and, given Diana’s disability, decided it wasn’t worth her putting herself out physically for it.

[I’ve also elected not to report on rootkits rootwork by Devin Kenny (second floor; through 2 September).  The reason is simple: I didn’t understand this show at all and couldn’t formulate anything intelligent to say about it.  That’s not a condemnation; I’m sure there are many other people who will find this exhibition engaging.  The museum promo explains that “‘rootkits’ are a form of computer virus that undetectably alter the underlying operating system; ‘rootwork’ alludes to practices of Black-American folk magic, and both reference the DNA kits that allow people to explore their heritage.”  The PS1 materials go on:

In more than a dozen works across a range of media—including some created for the exhibition—Kenny draws particular inspiration from network technologies, locating unsettling intersections of complicity and exploitation, which his work often resists.  Employing the popular cultures of memes, music, fast fashion, and viral media, the artist subtly reveals ubiquitous and often invisible structures of injustice and exclusion.

[Perhaps you can see why I was uncomprehending.  On the other hand, perhaps you can follow this description and would get something from Kenny’s work.

[One more comment: when I do a report for ROT on a theater performance or an art show, I usually do a review round-up at the end.  I like the idea of presenting a summary of the published critical response, especially if the pros have opinions that differ from mine.  This time’s a little different, though: “MoMA PS1” is a report on an entire museum, not just one specific exhibit.  I covered seven separate and distinct shows in about four hours and though many of them received reviews both in print and on line—I saw many of them while writing this report—it would be hell to track them all down, read them, and summarize them.  (It would also be a very long summary, more than doubling the length of this write-up, I suspect.)  As a result, ROTters will have to look up the reviews themselves—or be satisfied with my judgments.]

Whitney Biennial 2017

Easily one of the most important art events of the year in New York City, if not the entire country, is the Whitney Biennial, “the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States.”  From its inception, the Biennial has brought new, young artists unfamiliar to American collectors and viewers to the attention of the U.S. art scene while at the same time displaying established artists side by side with the newcomers.  Some of the best-known of the artists the Whitney Biennial introduced include Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Jeff Koons.  It’s been known as a showcase for less well-known artists, including those working in unfamiliar media and forms.  In 2012, performance art was presented for the first time.  

Since 2000, the Bucksbaum Award has been given to an artist exhibited in the Biennial “to honor an artist, living  and working in the United States, whose work demonstrates a singular combination of talent and imagination.”  Established by the  Bucksbaum Family Foundation, the award is a $100K prize, the largest award in the world for an individual artist.  (The 2017 Bucksbaum winner was Pope.L, also known as William Pope.L, a visual and performance artist known for his “interventionist” street art.  In “Art as Intervention: A Guide to Today's Radical Art Practices,” Julie Perini defines this as art that “disrupts or interrupts normal flows of information, capital, and the smooth functioning of other totalizing systems.”)

As the name implies, the exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art occurs every other year, but when it began in 1932, it was a yearly event called the Whitney Annual.  In the 1960s, the plan became to alternate each year between painting and sculpture, but by 1973, the idea evolved into a biennial show that combined both art forms and expanded to all media.  As the art world evolved over the decades and visual artists experimented with new materials and forms, the Whitney Biennial developed with it.  The 2017 Biennial, for example, in addition to  paintings in a variety of pigment types on a range of foundations beyond traditional canvas, included assemblage art and installations, films and videos, and many different kinds of computer-based creations from screen prints to digital recordings (both audio and video) displayed on monitors to kinetic assemblages programmed by computer to several pieces in which a smart phone was a key component to virtual reality creations.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a wealthy patron of the arts and herself a successful sculptor, founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931.  As an art patron, Whitney’s interest was in new American art, focusing on the avant-garde and the work of unknown artists.  By the 1920s, Whitney had collected close to 700 pieces of American art and in 1929, she offered to donate 500 works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The Met turned down the offer and, noting that both the Met and the new Museum of Modern Art, opened in 1929, were more interested in European art than American, Whitney founded her own dedicated to contemporary American art.

The museum, which began with a collection of 600 works, has been somewhat peripatetic over the years.  Its original location was at 8-12 West 8th Street, between Fifth Avenue and MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.  (Whitney maintained her own sculpture studio nearby on MacDougal Alley.)  In 1931, Whitney had three townhouses on the south side of 8th Street converted into a museum.  One of the buildings had been the location of the Whitney Studio Club, which Whitney had established in 1918 as exhibition space for American avant-garde art.   In 1954, the Whitney Museum moved to a small building at 22 West 54th Street, directly behind MoMA’s 53rd Street location, between 5th and 6th Avenues; the museum’s collection had grown to approximately 1,300 pieces at the time of the move.  (The West 8th Street space is now occupied by the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.)

When the Whitney outgrew the five-story 54th Street building, it made another move further uptown—and to the Upper East Side, the Silk Stocking District.  In 1961, the museum began looking for larger quarters and settled on a location at 945 Madison Avenue.  The museum hired Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith to design and construct a new building to house the collection and the new Whitney Museum of American Art went up on the corner of 75th Street between 1963 and 1966, a distinctly Modernist building in contrast with the understated, mostly Beaux-Arts townhouses and elegant post-war apartment buildings of the affluent neighborhood.  Nearby, however, along with the up-scale art galleries of Manhattan’s established art scene, were the venerable, city-owned Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 5th Avenue, between 79th and 84th Street on the west side of the avenue in Central Park) and the stunning, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1071 5th Avenue at the corner of East 89th Street).  The Whitney Museum established a policy at its inception that it wouldn’t sell any art by a living artist lest it harm the artist’s career; it will, however, trade a piece of an artist’s work for another by the same artist, and by his time, the museum’s holdings had reached about 3,000 pieces of American art; the museum began a collection of photographs in 1991.

The museum continued to grow in the decades it resided at 75th and Mad and it occupied a number of satellite spaces such as at 55 Water Street (1973-83), a modern skyscraper in the Financial District in downtown Manhattan, or the gallery established in the lobby of the Philip Morris International (1983-2007), the tobacco company (later renamed the Altria Group), at 120 Park Avenue at 41st Street.  (After the Philip Morris deal proved successful, the Whitney made similar arrangements with other corporations to set up galleries in their headquarters lobbies in the 1980s: Park Tower Realty, I.B.M., and the Equitable Life Assurance Society.) 

Constantly short of exhibit space, the museum proposed several plans for expanding its Madison Avenue home, but cost, design problems, or local opposition always defeated them.  Finally, in 2010, the Whitney Museum began construction of a new building in the far West Village, the old Meatpacking District that had become a trendy spot for boutiques, clubs, restaurants, and new residential highrises.  Designed by Renzo Piano at 99 Gansevoort Street at the intersection with Washington Street, the southern terminus of the relatively new and very popular attraction, the High Line park (opened in 2009; see my blog article on 10 October 2012), the striking, new Whitney Museum of American Art opened in 2015 (less than two miles from its first facility on West 8th Street of 61 years earlier, and a very pleasant 20-minute walk through the Village from my home). 

The $422 million new building rises eight stories (plus one below ground) above the surrounding structures, both the old 19th- and early 20th-century ones, former warehouses and meatpacking plants, and the new ones that have risen up in the past five or six years as the Meatpacking District has become trendy and popular with the 20- and 30-something crowd.  It also stands out for its appearance, silvery-metal clad and angular with what look from a distance like turrets and bulkheads, as if perhaps the superstructure of a great ship were being glimpsed from dockage on the Hudson a short distance away.  (Coincidentally, like a ship, the building is deemed to be water-tight, part of its flood-abatement system, designed into the plans after Superstorm Sandy five years ago.)

There are walls of windows and the ground-floor lobby space is glass-enclosed.  From a block away, the glassed-in ground floor makes it look as if the building were hovering over the street like a weirdly-shaped mother ship.  Piano told people at the opening, “The new Whitney is almost ready to take off.  But don’t worry, it won’t, because it weighs 28,000 tons”!  (I wonder if the Guggenheim had people making such comparisons when it was brand new and never-seen-the-likes-before?) 

The new museum, the first totally new museum building to open in New York City in many decades, has 50,000 square feet of indoor exhibition space and another 13,000 outdoors.  (20,500 square feet of gallery space is dedicated for the Whitney’s permanent collection.)  A staff of 300 keeps the place running.  Besides the galleries and the terrace spaces, the new Whitney houses a study center, a theater, and classrooms.  The lobby encompasses the book store/gift shop, café, and a free gallery open to the public. 

The museum’s current collection contains over 21,000 works of art.  The still-viable Mad Avenue building was taken over in 2016 by the Metropolitan Museum as the Met Breuer, a satellite museum for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art.  Over its 89 years, the Whitney Museum of American Art has exhibited the work of hundreds of artists, many of whom have become prominent.  Among these have been Maurice Prendergast (1858-1925), Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Josef Albers (1888-1976), Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), Man Ray (1890-1976), Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), Mark Rothko (1903-70), Arshile Gorky (1904-48), Willem de Kooning (1904-97), Barnett Newman (1905-70), Lee Krasner (1908-84), Franz Kline (1910-62), Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Jackson Pollock (1912-56), Robert Motherwell (1915-91), Richard Diebenkorn (1922-93), Grace Hartigan (1922-2008), Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Andy Warhol (1928-87), Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Frank Stella (b. 1936), Mary Heilmann (b. 1940), Bill Viola (b. 1951), David Wojnarowicz (1954-92), Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957), Keith Haring (1958-90), Lorna Simpson (b. 1960), and many more recent artists with whose names and work I’m not familiar.

On Thursday, 8 June 2017, I walked over to the Whitney to catch the 78th Whitney Biennial before it closed on Sunday, the 11th.  (The exhibit, the first Biennial in the museum’s new home, had opened on 17 March.  Because of the move to new digs, the Biennial is a year late, the previous installment having been in 2014.)  I hadn’t been to a Whitney Biennial since 2004 when my late mother and I went up to the Mad Avenue location because Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama was featured among the exhibitors (see my report on this fascinating artist, posted on 18 May).  When the Whitney announced plans to build  a new museum within my cruising range (Mother and I had walked the High Line twice when she came up for visits, made the rounds of the Chelsea art galleries, and shopped the Chelsea Market a couple of times), we started talking about checking out the new place as soon as it was open.  (We had made a beeline for MoMA back in 2004 when it reopened after a two-year redesign.)  Unfortunately, we never made that visit: the new Whitney opened on 1 May 2015 and Mother died on the 26th after nearly a month’s stay in a Maryland hospice.  I had made plans for an earlier trip to Gansevoort Street a few weeks before the Biennial opened to see the new museum, but circumstances scuttled those plans. 

Museum-going had been one of the activities Mom and I did together when I visited her in Washington, she came to see me in New York, or we traveled together anywhere there were museums or art galleries (San Juan, Quebec City, Vancouver, Istanbul).  ROT-readers will know about this shared pursuit from my occasional reports on art shows that sometimes accompanied my theater reports.  I hadn’t consciously stayed away because of the association with my mom—but it may have been subconscious, and it was definitely a transitory sensation I noticed when I entered the Whitney Museum building that Thursday afternoon.  It wasn’t all that strong—I had a more powerful feeling of missing something when a friend and I went to MoMA to see Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934-1954 in February 2016 (see my report, posted on 4 March 2016).  Though checking out the new Whitney would have interested Mom, she’d have loved seeing that Pollock show.  Less than a year after her death (and the first art show I’d seen since then), it was just the kind of exhibit we’d have saved to enjoy together, and I never entirely shook that underlying feeling of loss.  At the Whitney Biennial, though, the feeling passed as soon as I got up to the fifth floor to start my walk through the art. 

(I must add, though, that seeing an art show by myself like that is an experience I’m not used to.  I’ll go to a play or even a movie alone and be perfectly content, but art, while it can be enjoyed in silence, really demands to be discussed—at least for me and, as it happens, for Mom.  We would point out pieces we thought the other should see—we didn’t stick together in the galleries—or compare notes as we went along through the exhibit.  Afterwards, of course, we’d talk about what we saw and what we got from it—and there’d always be the customary plans for a “Midnight Shopping Trip”!  ROTters will know what that little private joke means: it shows up in all my blog reports on art shows.)

Filling the galleries on the museum’s fifth and sixth floors (including outdoor spaces), plus scattered pieces throughout the rest of the new building, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, over a hundred pieces representing 63 artists.  Though some of the artists are established in the art world, none is a celebrity yet and half of the participants are women or artists of color.  (Both curators are Asian-American.)  The museum identified a “key theme” of this year’s exhibit as the “formation of self and the individual’s place in a turbulent society,”  and the art on display was decidedly political, and left-leaning, making clear critical, and often strident comment on current American society and culture.  Locks elucidated:

It became apparent that the idea of ‘humanness’ or what it means to be a human right now was an energizing force for the show. Many of the works in the show address interesting questions about how we view ourselves as human beings and the forces that bring us together and the forces that bring us apart.

The museum’s own description of the exhibit stated that it “arrives at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and polarizing politics.”  (Lew and Locks actually began organizing the Biennial in 2015, when Barack Obama was still president and it was presumed that Hillary Clinton would be his successor.)  A lot of the work on exhibit in the Biennial was created within the current calendar year and, though Donald J. Trump rarely appears in the art directly (his name comes up twice), is obviously meant to reflect the artists’ response to his election and presidency and his stated and implied policies on art and culture.  The day before the Whitney Biennial opened, President Trump revealed his budget plan which includes his intention to zero out the entire budget of the NEA and NEH (the first time any president had proposed that).  Adam D. Weinberg, the museum’s director, even includes a statement on the Whitney website declaring, “The National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities . . . now face the threat of being abolished” and affirming, “As an institution specifically dedicated to presenting and discussing contemporary American culture, the Whitney Museum of American Art feels a special responsibility to speak as an advocate for the  continuing importance of the NEA and NEH.”

My general response to the show was that it was more interesting than artistically stimulating.  Part of that reaction comes from the unremittingly political nature of the art, which got repetitive in its intent after a few dozen works, and part—perhaps a greater part—because I find the latest trends in art, encompassing the 21st-century offerings, unengaging.  This is not a new revelation to me: I noticed my coolness toward the newest art when I went to that last Whitney Biennial in 2004 and it was confirmed when I first went over to the then-new galleries in Chelsea, which began opening in the mid-1990s, in 2011.  By the 21st century’s second decade, the Chelsea art scene had entered its adolescence when, as New York Times art critic Roberta Smith put it, there were

mega-bucks, big-box spaces on the same block as holes in the wall not much larger than a walk-in closet; great work within a stone’s throw of schlock; older art alongside the freshly minted; and blue-chip brand names across the street from young and emerging artists or forgotten and overlooked ones. 

I viewed early and mid-20th-century art (Picasso, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Noland) right up against work by artists whose names I hadn’t even heard yet.  There were canvases, sculptures, and installations, and the pieces to which I responded most were the older ones—it seems wrong to call them “more traditional” since they were the height of radicalism in their days; these were the guys with whom so-called modern art got started!  Still, the newer stuff mostly didn’t move me.  At the 2004 Whitney Biennial, which I explained my mother and I attended because Yayoi Kusama was one of the artists exhibited, I had the same reaction to the new works—and even the current works of Kusama, as exemplified by the 2002 mirrored-room installation Fireflies on the Water.  It left me rather cold.  I don’t have a problem with political or socially-critical art per se, but the work in that 2004 Biennial didn’t have the social and political critical component that the 2017 exhibit had, so it was even less interesting than this year’s show.  But the 2017 exhibit was unrelentingly socio-political and, as I intimated, that got enervating.

So, how do I evaluate my art experience at the Whitney Museum this year?  Well, I found myself more focused on the media and techniques, the forms, of the art on display than the content or even the point.  I noticed, for instance, how much of the art wouldn’t really work in someone’s home.  That, of course, may have been the message of some of the artists—to create works that no one could own, that could only be viewed and shared in galleries and museums and public spaces.  (Conceptual art, which started in the 1960s, was adamantly non-commercial and often transitory as well, defying both ownership and permanence.)  There were a large number of works, maybe even half of the show, that relied on technology of one kind or another, especially recorded and projected images.  That was another trend I spotted. 

I also felt that most of the art at the Biennial was, for lack of a more precise word, angry.  (That was also ultimately taxing—it’s hard to listen to people scolding, berating, and protesting constantly, even if their causes are righteous.  Eventually, it sours the artistic experience.)  Any artist  in the Whitney Biennial who expressed something positive or joyful about our present time—and there are some, rare thought they may seem—was drowned out in the cacophony of discontent and deprecation.  It also muddies the protesting artists’ messages because they just become part of the shouting.

I’m deliberately staying away from a discussion of the biggest controversy of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the painting Open Casket by Dana Schutz (b. 1976).  As most readers will know, this was the artist’s 2016 rendering of the broken and mangled body of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American teen lynched in 1955 by a Mississippi mob after a white woman falsely accused him of whistling at her, lying in his coffin.  Schutz is white and black artists and other members of the African-American community demanded that her painting, based on a contemporaneous photograph, be removed from the show and even destroyed, arguing that she could not possibly capture the true horror of Till’s murder or the feelings of his mother (who ordered the open-casket funeral so the world could see what had been done to her son).  First of all, the controversy, which turned bitter at times, has been extensively covered in the press both in print and on line—not to mention social media; besides the fact that I have no standing, I couldn’t possibly contribute anything more to this debate.  Second, my own feelings are dichotomous and confused at this point—I understand and agree with some of the points of both sides of the disagreement, but I’m also, as I’ve often stated, nearly an absolutist on the First Amendment—so I don’t know what to say in any case.  Third, my focus here is my overall artistic experience of the show, not one or two works on display.

By most critics’ estimation, this Biennial is the most overtly political since the 1993 show, which I didn’t see but which was roundly criticized for its focus on issues of the time rather than the art.  While the 1993 “political” or “multicultural” Biennial, as it was frequently dubbed, generated lots of journalistic opprobrium, the 2017 edition was met with general, not to say universal, approval and praise.  If nothing else, it’s a testimony to the turbulence of our moment in history and the virulence of the artistic response to it.  Schutz’s Open Casket was inspired, for instance, by the Black Lives Matter movement.  She has two other paintings in the show.  Elevator (2017), which appears to be a comment on Americans’ inability to get along with one another, shows a crowd of people in an elevator violently tearing each other apart.  (Commissioned for the Biennial, Elevator, which measures 12  by 15 feet, greeted museum-goers as they exit the lift onto the fifth floor.  Co-curator Lew drew a connection to the museums large art elevator, which also carries passengers.)  2017’s Shame is a depiction of a monstrously contorted woman, a comment, I decided, on  the state of female self-identity in our society today.  Women’s identities, that is, where they fit in society, has been a serious issue at least since the start of the modern feminist movement in the ’60s (with echoes reaching back to the Suffragists of the 1910s and even earlier), but in the era of Trump and his macho-posturing followers and imitators, it has clearly become much more problematic.  (By extension, Shame can be interpreted as a comment on all gender-identity issues.  I don’t know if Schutz meant that, but art can have extensions beyond the artist’s intentions.  After all, I’m a man looking at her painting, so I’m bound to see things differently from her or a female viewer.)

Among the sculpture, I found myself intrigued by John Riepenhoff’s Handler creations.  This is a series of papier-mâché sculptures of the artist’s own body (from the waist down), dressed in perfectly casual pants and shoes, holding paintings or video art by other artists in his hands.  (One was identified as a piece by Allen Ginsberg—the late poet, I presume, but I couldn’t confirm that.  He also installed The John Riepenhoff Experience, a box in the ceiling of the gallery that was purportedly a little gallery itself, but viewers has to stand in line to climb up a ladder one by one to stick their heads into the box to see the exhibit and the line was just too long for me to wait on it.  Reportedly, in the box gallery was a miniature reproduction of one of Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored Infinity Rooms.)  It’s meta-art, a theme that ran through the exhibit often as a sidelight to the other socio-political issues treated in the Biennial: Riepenhoff (b. 1982), who’s also a gallerist, is combining his two occupations by spotlighting the art of other artists.

Another project about art, but with less of an homage air, was Debtfair, an installation by Occupy Museums.  Formed in 2011 as an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, this activist  collective shines a light on the economic and social justice failings of the art world in its treatment of and dealings with artists.  Debtfair, the work of 30 artists, shows how artists have gone onto debt to the same corporations that have created the art boom among the wealthy who use art as investments.  (The installation centers on artists of Puerto Rico, an island that’s in precarious debt itself and where poverty is a continuing problem.)  While the corporate manipulators, who make up the majority of museum boards and  the art-collecting public, grow rich from buying, selling, and reselling the art at ever greater prices, the artists go into heavier and heavier debt from which they can never extricate themselves.  (The CEO’s and board chairmen of these maga-businesses that own the artists’ debt are in Donald Trump’s circle, possibly some are even his friends.  Given the art and culture proposals he’s already made, and his thin skin when it comes to protests and disagreements, it’s a chancy tack to challenge this class right now, I’d imagine.  I guess we’ll see if there are repercussions.)  Debtfair is an exhibit taking up two large walls of a gallery, one filled with illustrative images and documents of the companies in question and the other lined with three computers which visitors are invited to use to log onto one of several sites they can use to buy up some of the artists’ debts.  This is the most straightforward of several all-text exhibits in the Biennial that is not just more socio-politics than art, it’s all socio-politics.

One of the more remarkable works in the show is Samara Golden’s multi-story installation The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes (2017).  Taking a page from Kusama’s installation manual, Golden (b. 1973) uses mirrors to expand space into infinity—in this instance going up to the heights and down into the depths.  But while Kusama’s mirrored rooms were abstract and disconnected from the environment that surrounds them (that is, the museum structure), Golden’s construction is conceived to seem part of the Renzo Piano’s museum building.  His environment is a glimpse into a highrise, using the Whitney’s floor-to-ceiling windows and the view out over the Hudson River from the fifth-floor gallery, that hosts incongruously juxtaposed medical facility-cum- beauty parlor-cum-prison, penthouse, middle-class apartment, waiting room, gym, restaurant, and office space.  It’s  a vertiginous stage set—or, more  accurately, Hollywood soundstage with eight meticulously furnished interiors available simultaneously for telling a complex story we can make up ourselves.  But it’s a funhouse set, the various locations upside down and endlessly reflected in the mirrors.  Which images are reality and which merely illusions is impossible to discern, which doubles the sense of dizziness I felt.  To add to the sense of being at a great height and looking over a thin balcony or rooftop rail, Golden incorporates a soft wind and sound effects.  (I actually had to hold onto the handrails in the slight incline that leads to and from the artwork when I left.  I felt a little foolish, I admit.)  The structure looks solid, as if made from actual building materials—or, at least, movie-set resources—but the list of materials for the work of art are all flimsy and even ephemeral.  It also looks full-sized, but it’s really half-sized.  Illusion upon illusion.  Assembling The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes, a name that seems to match the fantastic vision and the improbable story that  must go along with it, surely took hundreds of person-hours.

Another installation, by Kaari Upson (b. 1972), was a collection of her soft sculptures (Supplement II, T.T., Snag, Eyelids, In Search of the Perfect Double I, In Search of the Perfect Double II, all 2016).  These look like distorted and upended pieces of upholstered furniture—I sure thought they were, like found objects Upson repurposed—but they’re mostly constructed for the work of art.  The assemblage occupies a gallery of its own, scattered around the floor as if some kids had found an abandoned room and just shifted all the left couches and chairs randomly.  The curators asserted that the pieces suggest “at once the interior and exterior of the human body.”  I didn’t see it. 

Claim (2017), the installation by Pope.L (b. 1955), the 2017 Bucksbaum winner, is  a large walk-through box constructed of whitewashed wood.  On the walls of this room-within-a-room, inside and out, are nailed 2,755 rotting baloney slices, each precisely centered in a four-inch square—more or less: there was an error in the installation and Pope.L wanted it left—forming a grid.  In the middle of each baloney slice (pretty smelly) is a small black-and-white portrait.  Pope.L claims (in a text mounted in the box) that each portrait represents a percentage of the Jewish population of New York, a figure he’s arrived at by some arcane formula.  But the artist’s figures “are a bit off”—the number of bologna slices is off by 2 and, what’s more, the photos on the slices were taken without concern for the subjects’ actual ethnicity.  Not only is this a commentary on the arbitrariness of identity, both what we claim for ourselves and what others claim for us, but Pope.L is playing sarcastically with our obsession with data and numbers, leading, perhaps to quotas (something with which Jews are more than familiar) and how identity and data can be misused for nefarious purposes such as representation in legislatures or access to the vote.

This hardly even scratches the surface of what was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and it’s not even really representative of the art on exhibit.  I didn’t even mention the works on film and video, or the computer-driven works.  I can’t even say these few works were the ones that most impressed me for any reason—though they were among the ones that I remembered most clearly after I left the museum.  The art critics were more thorough, and more impressed.  Adam Lehrer called the exhibit “stunning” in Forbes magazine and listed “10 of my favorite pieces and installations” in the show.  In New York magazine/Vulture, Jerry Saltz declared this years’ Biennial “the best of its kind in some time” and praised it for the way it shows “that artists are always addressing and channeling issues of the day. With gravitas, grace, intensity.”  Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker asserted that the exhibit “is earnestly attentive to political moods and themes,” but caviled that it “already feels nostalgic.”  Nonetheless, Schjeldahl found the show “winningly theatrical in its use of the Whitney’s majestic new spaces.”

Time Out New York’s Howard Halle made a curious statement about the very rationale on which the Biennial is founded.  Questioning why “attention must be paid,” Halle wondered “why a subjective selection by a handful of organizers necessarily constitutes a definitive snapshot of contemporary art, which is how the show has always been sold.  It doesn’t, of course, though that hasn’t stopped people from thinking otherwise, especially since the Biennial has the felicitous effect of stove-piping careers into wider art-market and museum acceptance.”  The man from TONY concluded with a back-hand compliment to the Whitney: “The museum is to be commended for showing restraint in using its facility, and for trying to strike a balance between its role as a custodian of art and the compromises that follow.  It will be interesting to see where the Biennial goes from here.”

On artnet, Ben Davis stated in his opening sentence: “Here’s a super-short, bottom-line, first-impression review of the Whitney Biennial 2017: It’s good.”  He dubbed the exhibit “a stylish and professional affair” and affirmed, “There’s enough cool painting to satisfy that crowd, but also enough new media and other novelties to satisfy that other crowd.”  Davis quibbled a tad that the exhibit “errs on the side of seriousness,” but acknowledged that “that’s as it should be.”  His one complaint was that “the Lew-Locks formula . . . feels, maybe, a little formulaic, like the show doesn’t exactly have a big hook or curatorial conceit beyond smart taste-making and the expertly executed balancing act.”  ArtNews’s Andrew Russeth called this year’s Biennial “an intensely satisfying display” and reported that he “left it feeling shaken and optimistic, with the exhilarating sense that exhausted tropes are falling away, that art is being propelled headlong into an uncertain future.” 

Peter Plagens of the Wall Street Journal, proclaiming that this year’s Biennial “offers rewards to all those groups” and “is decorously political while at the same time good-looking.”  At the end of his review, Plagens reported that he asked how much the show had cost to mount, “mentioning that movie companies provide that information.” 

The response, which came with a smile, was, “We don’t give that out, but it was certainly much less than the $300 million Disney spent on its remake of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’”  Which might be, by the way, not a bad working title for the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

In the Guardian’s U.S. edition, Nadja Sayej reported that the Biennial is “a politically charged show on the state of America but without the predictable satire.”  Indeed, Sayej acknowledged that it “feels like a graveyard of the establishment’s broken promises with glimmers of hope from some of its suffering citizens.”  Ariella Budick of the U.S. edition of the Financial Times admitted to approaching Whitney Biennials with trepidation: “I quail at the prospect of entering a bubble full of belly-gazers, recent art-school grads obsessed with arcane process, crude provocateurs and prolix polemicists.”  This time, though, she “came away shockingly content.”  Budick found, “This Biennial’s corps of artists soaks up the political energy crackling on the streets outside the museum and converts rage into creativity.”  She concluded, “The divisions that demoralise citizens and supercharge outrage also give art a bracing sense of purpose and make for a trenchant show.”

On WNYC, the National Public Radio outlet in New York City, Deborah Solomon declared this year’s Biennial “the show that everyone loves to love.”  She explained: “It goes out of its way to spurn fashion, slickness and unearned celebrity” so that “the show offers you a genuine acquaintanceship with new art, rather than just some lame buzz about who’s in and who’s out.”  In conclusion, Solomon asserted, “The show attains a high level of aesthetic quality, and proves that making fun of the Whitney Biennial has become an obsolete sport.”  Elizabeth Blair of NPR reported, “If you’ve been out of [the] loop on the American contemporary art scene, the Whitney Biennial is here to catch you up.”  She observed that the “range of this year’s contributors” included “many new works that have never been shown before.”

In the New York Observer, David D’Arcy lamented that “this edition of the Biennial was underwhelming.”  He complained, ”The purported rise of painting . . . doesn’t live up to its promise here.  And the politics of the works on view, often presented with art’s version of a megaphone, reminds us why our expectations of Biennials are low.”  Then D’Arcy added, “But there’s work to like and to admire.”  Finally, the New York Times’ Roberta Smith declared that the Whitney Biennial’s “strength and focus make it doubly important at a time when art, the humanities and the art of thinking itself seem under attack in Washington.”  Pronouncing the show “an adult affair” and “exceptionally good looking,” Smith did add, “It needs a little more edge.”  At first look, she wrote, “it has some immature inclusions”; however, “Once you really start looking, there’s edge all over the place.”  At a time when support for the arts is in danger, Smith asserted, “this exhibition makes and exciting, powerful case for art.”