⁰¹ Moyra Davey (b. 1958), Darling, 2011, chromogenic print, 10.2 × 15.2 cm (4 × 6 in). Collection of the artist. Courtesy of the artist.
⁰² Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965), Untitled, 2011, mixed-media monotype, 62.9 × 50.2 cm (24 3/4 × 19 3/4 in) each. The Hall Collection. Courtesy of Leo Koenig Inc., New York.
⁰³ Wu Tsang (b. 1982), WILDNESS (production still), 2012–, HD video, colour, sound. Courtesy of the artist.
⁰⁴ LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982), Paper Magazine Ad, 2011, from the portfolio Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital), 2011, 12 photolithograph and screenprints, 43.2 × 35.6 cm (17 × 14 in) each. Printed by Rob Swainston, Prints of Darkness. Collection of the artist.
⁰⁵ LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby and U.P.M.C., 2011, from the portfolio Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital), 2011.
⁰⁶ LaToya Ruby Frazier, Health Care Not Wealth Care, 2011, from the portfolio Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital), 2011.
⁰⁷ LaToya Ruby Frazier, Urban Pioneer, 2011, from the portfolio Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital), 2011.
⁰⁸ LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jenny Holzer’s Truism, 2011, from the portfolio Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital), 2011.
⁰⁹ LaToya Ruby Frazier, Go forth where? We Don’t Have Horses in Braddock PA!, 2011, from the portfolio Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital), 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Exhilaratingly indeterminate as well as annoyingly unfathomable upon first or even subsequent encounters, due to a rich but changing and rigidly scheduled program of films and performances — which, while an essential part of it that shifts its experience, edits out a great part of the general audience and arrogantly multiplies admission proceeds by necessitating many returns — the 2012 iteration of the Whitney Biennial has been one of the more challenging ones. Having seamlessly embraced performing arts and performance art genres, it will always be remembered for having emptied the fourth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, turning it into a proscenium-free stage for events that included dance and music performances, theater rehearsals and video screenings by pioneers such as Michael Clark, Sarah Michelson, Alicia Hall and Jason Moran, and Charles Atlas. Remarkable for its potent, though perhaps anachronistically, expanded view of art, modified by a curatorial focus on synergies and collaborations between creators of all media, this year’s Whitney Biennial first and foremost managed to energise the museum through a nearly festivalic program of performances and screenings, an evocative overlap of images and sounds, numerous artists’ talks, and an insightful engagement of the museum’s building in, perhaps, an early farewell to the historic home of the Whitney, or in welcome of its future successor near the High Line.

The exceptional celebration, however, of this biennial by the influential critic Roberta Smith of Τhe New York Times, if not merely suspiciously flattering, betrays New York’s curatorial conservatism, allowing Smith to hail the 76th Whitney Biennial as a novel curatorial model. For it is with inconspicuous subtleties, rather than curatorial novelty or radicality, that the 2012 Whitney Biennial has distinguished itself in a New York season rich in mega-exhibitions, including fairs and curated shows. It may lack, for instance, the timely political agenda of the New Museum Triennial, The Ungovernables — an admittedly rare, in my opinion, sympathetic effort by the new New Museum to capture the ‘élan’ of the contemporary protest culture as reflected in international art manifestations. But it is an idiosyncratic ‘ungovernability’ underpinning its own conception, curatorship and experience, along with its emphasis on the performative and the permeable borders of the art practices and collaborations that it maps, in which the critical importance of the 2012 Whitney Biennial lies — a subjective yet fairly non-dogmatic celebration of contemporary art making in America, and of its plurality, that nevertheless allows for a critical lament over the conflicted aspects of the system by which it is nurtured.

Emphatically titleless, this year’s Whitney Biennial has no theme; it restores instead a quasi-romantic belief in the artist as ‘total’ creator, and — yes — as author, rather than a specialised professional within a saturated market and a well-versed ventriloquiser of an overgrown post-post-modernist art discourse. Neither constructing a concept to be illustrated by a roster of emerging or hyper-successful artists, nor aiming at showcasing new talents or trends to serve up the New York galleries program, both its house curator Elisabeth Sussman and her external collaborator Jay Sanders have been unapologetically up-front; finding it hard to think beyond the singularities of the artists, as Sanders put it, they were drawn by artists with deep and thoughtful underpinnings to their practice, as Sussman adds in their contribution to the catalogue that unfolds as a conversation. And if, in all the potential for disagreement with their preferences and taste, they are commendable for something, it is certainly not the radicality of their curatorial model but their adoption of the pious curator position that Sophie Pagé has identified with that of the supplicant — ‘forgetting everything you think you know and even allowing yourself to get lost’ [i] — guiltlessly redressing wonderment in art’s experience. And even though the aggregate effect is not always as fortunate, they tried to bestow both experiences to their viewers, offering enough space and time within the biennial — a difficult task in and of itself — for the experience of each work, whether by allowing sufficient space for the unfolding of each artist’s contribution, or by polemically resisting looping films and videos whose screenings they have scheduled during designated hours and in a special screening room. Further unleashing the ‘ungovernablity’ of encounters with the artists they chose, they have strategically dismissed the deadening grip of typical art writing in the catalogue, replacing the stereotypical unpacking of artists’ contributions and bios with an assemblage of poetic ruminations and art illustrations — often proposed or curated by the artists themselves — which effectively turn the exhibition catalogue into a polyphonic art book that expands upon rather than accompanies the exhibition.

Seeking to relieve it of the theoretical burdens of art discourse, especially of postmodern ‘appropriation’, one of the associations emphatically proposed by the curators’ selections is the variety of ways in which contemporary artists ‘inhabit’ the work of others — perhaps another ‘supplicant’ position nurtured by various artists and with distinct concerns metaphorised by at least three major ‘homage’ installations by Robert Gober, Werner Herzog and Nick Mauss. Gober pays homage to Forrest Bess, an outsider 20th-century American artist known for paintings of his dream visions, as well as for having sculpted himself into a semi-hermaphrodite by operating on his own genitals according to his theorising of the transcendent potential of the union of feminine and masculine. Fulfilling Bess’ lifetime wish, declined by his acclaimed dealer Betty Parsons (who showed his work in New York, though Bess lived as a recluse fisherman in Texas), to exhibit his work alongside his now-lost illustrated thesis, Gober has curated a mini show of Bess’s paintings along with archival material that illustrates his theories on hermaphroditism, in effect foregrounding the role of sexuality and the body in (modernist) abstraction. Functioning also as a curator as well as an artist, Nick Mauss, one of the new talents of the biennial, conjoins his own work — a velvet and appliqué replica of the antechamber of cosmetics company Guerlain’s first Institute de Beauté spa in Paris, designed by artist, stage designer and fashion illustrator Christian Bérard in the late 1930s — with a constellation of works selected from the collections of the Whitney Museum and the Smithsonian Archives. Disrupting the entry to the third floor’s exhibition space, and confounding the viewer, Mauss’ installation is one of the most indeterminate works in the biennial, metaphorising the ungovernable limits of contemporary art practice and its curatorial dimension, while also reinforcing his homage to modernism’s marginalised elements of craftsmanship and decoration by the (formerly?) marginalised sexualities with which they have been aligned in patriarchal societies. For the works he has arranged on the walls and within the space of his installation feature homoerotic scenes, refer to “women’s work” — such as the stitches in Warhol’s Cyclist, 1976 — or are made by gay and women artists.

The most unorthodox as well as the most immersive ‘homage’ is perhaps Werner Herzog’s exploration into the work of 17th-century Dutch artist Hercules Segers, a multiscreen digital projection of the neglected master’s landscapes paired with music by cello player and composer Ernst Reijseger that, by Herzog’s account, transforms ‘images into music and music into images.’ [ii] Pronouncing Segers’ landscapes to be forerunners of modern abstraction, and, more importantly, ecstatic whispers of the soul, Herzog invites both artists’ ‘ecstasies morphing into each other.’ Speaking volumes about the ways in which a filmmaker can ‘inhabit’ the art of other artists, a visual artist and a composer with whom he has collaborated for his award-winning documentaries, in his own search of authenticity, Hearsay of the Soul stages, above all, a religious experience of art, that iconoclastically and unapologetically foregrounds the ecstatic underpinnings of art’s production and consumption. Not that the 2012 Whitney Biennial re-proposes the artist as genius, or privileges expressionist models of production. How could it, when the only artist consistently encountered in the museum is performance artist Dawn Kasper, making art, performing or lounging in her studio — itself housed on the third floor in a literalised Museum residency — or better yet, in an occupation of the Museum space for lack of a studio, after losing the job that helped her sustain it, foregrounding the material conditions and restrictions of art making? [iii]

Despite any associations loosely foregrounded in the catalogue, such as that of artists’ ‘inhabitation’ of other artists, the concise assortment of works in this biennial samples a variety of traditional and new media, and above all disparate and often opposing sensibilities; while often underpinned by a poetic mood, they bring together various kinds of the most polarised process-based and conceptual art practices, along with their post-medium hybridisations. Contemporary painting, for instance, is sampled by several of Andrew Masullo’s lively ‘conversations’ among shapes, textures and high-keyed colours on canvas. And the melancholic alienation of Nicole Eisenman’s figures, custom-painted with signature grotesque virtuosity, whether on canvas or printing plates, cast commentaries both humorous and dark on the contemporary human condition, especially under the reign of technology and mass culture. Conversely, Jutta Koether’s (Painting for All) The Seasons, 2011, updates Poussin thematically and technically for a contemporary audience — in a gesture of appropriation that David Joselit theorises as ‘travesty’ in the exhibition catalogue — while ironising painting’s traditional role as a window, with its site-specific installation against one of the Brauer building’s signature windows.

Process plays different roles also in the sculptural displays of this exhibition, marked by the hybrid (both bodily and semi-mechanical) convolutions of mass and surface in Vincent Fecteau’s gypsum cement and resin clay painted objects, or by Matt Hoyt’s heavily reworked, overworked and subtly texturised miniature objects of various materials, which he has clustered in variable groupings like vaguely familiar artifacts of an unknown civilisation. Alternatively, process shrinks in Michael Smith’s found objects, which sneak themselves into the exhibition space camouflaged (by oat flakes for instance), even though essentially detritus of the everyday consumer and industrial culture found in Detroit. This impoverished industrial centre of the contemporary US is timely, and is repeatedly thematised in this biennial — whether directly or indirectly — in the works of artists who are Detroit natives. In addition to Mike Kelly’s film, Mobile Homestead, Detroit appears for instance in the sculptural installation of Kate Levant. An awesome arrangement of materials (sheets of insulating foil, cardboard, etc.) scavenged from a fire-gutted Detroit home, it hints at the material disintegration resulting from the foreclosures that have plagued Detroit, historicising the angst and desperation emitted by several works, and thematising the contemporary socioeconomic crisis itself. Conversely, process is displaced, if not disguised, by the ‘wasted labour’ of Cameron Crawford’s conceptual constructions, the making of which combines ‘uselessly’ belaboured surfaces, structural details, and linguistic riddles, and which, at times, forges intriguing explorations of the relation between painting and sculpture, as in making water storage revolution making water storage revolution, or becomes eloquent memorials and negotiations of loss, as in Sick Sic Six Sic ((Not)Moving): Seagullsssssssssss sssssssssssss, 2018.

An interesting gamut of concerns and effects is covered by the works of the three photographers included in this exhibition, which certainly, in my opinion, rank among its highlights. Confusable with a minimalist sculptural object or silver monochromatic paintings, Liz Deschenes’ photographic contributions to the 2012 Whitney Biennial are easy to miss. In the past couple of years, Deschenes has gained acclaim for the minimalist results of her explorations of the apparatuses, properties and processes of photography by means of large-scale photograms. Essentially self-reflexive photographs that are produced by a camera-less process, they feature tone variations captured on photosensitive papers exposed to outdoor light under disparate conditions, and which are often turned into lustrous mirror surfaces whose spatial arrangement and titles expand upon photography’s relation to architecture. Elaborating on a previous evocation of the architectural view camera’s tilt-shift lens, the framed, tilting photogram of Deschenes’ darkest piece in the biennial evokes the angled windows of Brauer’s building, while the spacing of the silver triptych invokes the museum’s signature inverted ziggurat façade. Such ephemeral site-specificity isn’t, however, just a courteous gesture to the host institution of the biennial by one of its participants, but a significant meditation on photography, architecture and writing consistent with the artist’s exploration of the relationships between them, due to the ‘signal bearing’ [iv] of sun and shadow on all the above.

Conversely, the suites assembled from Latoya Ruby Frazier’s photographic work spotlight hot sociopolitical issues through a personal lens that does not diminish their impact as documentaries of sociohistorically specific and class-based suffering, or the artist’s astute critical exposure and indictment of dominant ideologies, classed power relations and racism in today’s America. As a form of radical documentary, indeed Frazier’s photographs offer a powerful answer to her inquiry about the nature and feasibility of radical social documentary, and its relation to activism, as addressed to Martha Rosler in a previous discussion reprinted in the catalogue.

In the most personal series, Homebody, 2010, Frazier herself poses in the house in which she grew up with her grandmother and step-great-grandfather, in Braddock, a now-poor working-class suburb of Pittsburgh that thrived in the first part of the 20th century due to its proximity to an Andrew Carnegie steel mill. Also paying homage to Francesca Woodman’s ‘wearing’ of a house, Frazier’s conflation of her own body with that of her childhood home transpires through her self-shrouding with her grandpa’s blanket, or by her wearing his pajamas as a personal, performative memorial to a man whom the artist designates as a symbol of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to work in the steel industry in the North, and who died a deplorable death in that home, suffering from a chronic occupation-related illness endemic to steel workers. Politicising the personal as such, the suite also makes public both the ill fate of those working-class pillars of the American economy, and the economic crisis that aggravated Braddock’s demise following the collapse of the steel industry in the ’70s.

Focusing, however, on the recent closing of Braddock’s Community Hospital, its bogus redevelopment, eventual demolition and replacement by a branch of the U.P.M.C. in an affluent neighbourhood of East Pittsburgh, the rest of the photographs drive Frazier’s point home with poetic indirectness and the timely polemic force of an activist (this group of photographs was dedicated to the activist group Save Our Community Hospital, which the artist supported). At the same time, they present a sensitive convergence of personal investment with an empowering and self-representing engagement of the voices of victims of contemporary inequality, pressing photojournalistic realism out of its comfort zone of lying truths. In the diptych Epilepsy Test, Frazier ominously associates the deterioration of the community hospital’s body with the black and working-class bodies of its patients, who would be left without a hospital, by juxtaposing a close-up of the demolition site with a close-up of a patient’s back on an exam table and in a hospital robe. In Campaign for Braddock Hospital, Frazier castigates both visually and verbally (with a printed statement and captions) the disappearance of the community hospital as a source both of health services, for a run-down community of impoverished and senior citizens, as well as of income. Captioning images that document her grandma’s life in Braddock (her grandmother having recently died in the aforementioned community hospital) with personal memories, and above all pairing images of Braddock and its citizens with their poignant protest comments, Frazier quasi-photojournalistically gives voice to the marginalised residents of Braddock and unveils their desperate situation and its causes. Interspersed are found images from a recent Levi’s jeans photographic ad campaign staged in Braddock, whose bogus American egalitarianism — marked by slogans such as “Everybody’s Work is Equally Important” — Frazier cynically exposes by sneaking handwritten counter-messages into their dark backgrounds, and through captions that unveil the misleading cultural assumptions upon which they are based and the inequalities their lies help hide and perpetuate. ‘How can we go forth when our borough’s buses and ambulances have been cut?’ is Braddock’s citizens’ response to Levi’s’ ‘Go Forth’, written in Frazer’s personalising handwriting. And Frazier goes on conveying their cries by coupling, for instance, Levi’s’ message “We Are All Workers,” emblematised by a worker tilling the earth, with the astute observation: ‘This representation of the “urban pioneer” omits the fact Braddock, P.A. is a 19th century industrial town that has been abandoned by our government since the Reagan Era. The landscape is dominated by the United States Steel Corporation. The U.S.S. produces toxic waste on top of land where a majority of elderly, poor, sick, under employed working class reside.’

If Frazier destabilises the lies of fashion photography by injecting the harsh truths about the predicament of Braddock’s residents, which fashion advertising dismisses or sugar-coats while Levi’s privatising activity in Braddock itself worsens, then K8 Hardy, in her photographic and sculptural installation, cunningly uses the tropes of fashion advertising photography to critique fashion and its commercialisation. Capitalising on the legacy of celebrated female photographers’ radical self-posing for the lens, and on the subversive — whether critical or empowering — uses of pop culture by others, K8 Hardy also manages to performatively confuse easy assumptions about fashion, as well as race, gender, class and economics. What she presents the viewer with, at first glance, is an exhilarating photographic gallery of a variety of shoes, prime objects of sexual and commodity fetishism, including a vintage Channel pump hung on the wall. But while the installation appeals to him/her with the eye-catchingness of colorful and shiny glam shots reminiscent of Marilyn Minter’s mass-media sources, the viewer is confounded  by riddles of originality, dysfunctional fashion scenarios and misleading identity clues — after all, it is K8 Hardy who performs all of them — which celebrate fashion’s empowering potential to craft identities that transcend a plethora of boundaries, while raising critical questions about its trappings, gender or class connotations, commercialisation and economics.

Reporting per medium is not a fair way to ruminate on a biennial that defies borders and categories between artistic practices, disavows singular experience, and at times actively changes. From my first to my third visit, for instance, Kai Althoff’s multimedia installation had substantially changed, with its enormous see-through silk screen that cut across the second floor gallery, finally forming a corridor-like structure framing a ladder-like construction that must have functioned as stage for the artist’s participation in Yedidya Oelbaum’s play, There we will be buried, 2012. Alternatively, Sam Lewitt has participated in the biennial with a constantly changing installation that contemplates the ominous omnipresence in our life of technoproducts such as ferrofluid (a versatile material consisting of a mixture of magnetic particles suspended in liquid, invented by NASA and now widely used in military aircraft and daily life, from hard drives to audio speakers). Weekly renewing the liquid that holds the ferrofluid’s moving particles, themselves further manipulated by magnets and fans, Lewitt kept enhancing, throughout the exhibition, its changing semi-sedimentation into a sinister landscape of black viscous mass, an installation evocatively titled Fluid Employment.

There were, of course, works like these installations, whose post-medium nature slips more easily through the already open media categories discussed thus far — such as painting, sculpture or photography — or artists who simultaneously participated in both the galleries and the screen or performance spaces, and installations whose indeterminate character further foregrounds the metaphorical fluidity of the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Joanna Malinowska’s, for instance, interest in cultural anthropology and art history is materialised with a potent ‘travesty’ of Duchamp’s Bottle Rack, a totem-like structure made of replicated tusks of walruses and mammoths native to the arctic region, as well as a video in which the artist has visions that enact comparable juxtapositions of art and indigenous cultures by Hugo Ball and Joseph Beuys, in another idiosyncratic ‘inhabitation’ of 20th century masters. But Malinowska also ‘decorated’ the space around the outmoded TV set that emits her video, with paintings by Leonard Peltier, the imprisoned activist hero of the American Indian Movement, in an interventional gesture that questions the absence of Native Americans from the Whitney’s collection and adds one more meditation on under-represented and suffering others to this exhibition. Richard Hawkins’ perhaps overwhelming participation consists of two paintings and a series of collages that complement each other as practical and archival explorations of sexuality and the ‘obscene’ body in the history of art, and define him as a painter of the expanded field. While his Salome painting series derives from his contemplation of the darker sides of Gustave Moreau’s treatment of the body, their conceptual and painterly concerns are echoed by his collages, which, replicating or based on Tatsumi Hijikata’s ‘butoh-fu’ collage notebooks, prove the origins of this Japanese dance to be the perverse distortions, erotic acts and transgressions of the body as observed in masterpieces of western art.

Collage aesthetics are also found to underpin such distinct bodies of work as those of Luther Price and Tom Thayer. The latter has filled a room with fragile cardboard assemblages and relief paper paintings made of colored cardboard, a nostalgic microcosm of mythic creatures that also function as props in performances and animations shown on outdated computers. Though Luther Price’s acclaimed Super 8 and 16 mm films from found documentary footage are amply sampled by the biennial’s film program, he is also included in the galleries with a first-time showing of his famous handmade slides, produced as original representations of his films. Masterful studies of a dying technology, like his films, Price’s slides originate in found footage, cut and reassembled, variously materially altered, soiled, stained or antiquated upon burial or addition, while they often feature random images compressed between the slides’ glass plates; their projection, indeed, amounts to haunting visual poems that often veer to abstraction.

While the nostalgic vibe and handmadedness of the above two installations reinforces the curators’ infatuation with studio process and materials, which seems to have ruled out post-media electronic production, for instance, the exhibition includes works that contextualise our digital-era existence. Especially since an emphasis on artists’ networking — another word for collaboration — and the way it unfolds in the catalogue seems to rhyme with online social networking today, adding layers to the latter’s consumption. After all, dealer, artist, and critic John Kelsey in the catalogue contemplates upon the immaterial cyber-context of contemporary art production, explaining a return of the handmade, not as resistance to digital colonisation of art production and communications, but as another aspect of its success, marked by what he defines as the JPEG-ness of contemporary production. And his poems Depression and Impotence, culled from fragmented and purposefully misspelled spam emails — products of the hyper-productivity of digital communication that rules our lives — comment on the end and rebirth of literature in the era of digital communication, as well as ironically point out its threats to our well-being. Helaine Reichek’s canvases, conversely, multifaceted visual and literary homages to the myth of Ariadne appropriately produced with thread, fool us as homages to the handcrafted and a poor compensation for the limited number of women artists in the biennial by means of their crafty hybridisation of painting that seems to honor work traditionally associated with women. Yet the digital production of stitches in most examples in the exhibition — via computerised looms and embroidery machines — twists their significance, drawing conceptual parallels about ‘the way in which stitches and pixels construct images’, as well as ‘the place of textiles at the foundation of modern computing.’ Electronic production also enters the domain of sonic art, an important constituent of contemporary art production and this exhibition that makes, to me, regrettable the neglect of many more exciting sound art endeavors, such as the masterful and iconoclastic ‘music films’ of New York based installation artist Sophia Petrides, which would have particularly served the curatorial penchant for sound, film and the ‘inhabitation’ of other artists, while also gendering the experience of space and listening. Questioning the relationship between analog and digital sound production, instead, Lutz Bacher’s Pipe Organ, a clumsy transformation of an early electronic Yamaha organ — with organ pipes operated by a computer program — provides a hypnotic yet inconsequential soundtrack for the second floor visitors, while Lucy Raven’s player piano periodically performs three arrangements of a song composed by fellow biennial artist and piano player Jason Moran. Last but not least, a Skype camera allows viewers to converse with members of rock band The Red Krayola, overcoming the physical boundaries of the walls of the Museum and expanding their contribution of live performances to the biennial, along with those that can be consumed online, through their communication with the viewers.

A favourite, for its politics, contribution that also brings the outside in, while taking viewers outside the museum’s walls — though more indirectly than a web cam — is Wu Tsang’s Green Room, 2012. Intended as a dressing room for the biennial’s performers, as well as a shell of a two-channel video installation, Green Room not only fills an ambiguous function as private and public space as well as art piece, but places its visitors inside Silver Platter, a landmark East Los Angeles gay bar founded in 1963 which has become, in the artist’s words, ‘a safe space for a group of immigrant transgender women — to earn a living, create community and to form a chosen family.’ [v] With its furnishings, carpets and mirrors replicating elements of Silver Platter, and with the projection of touching interviews of transgender women of colour recounting the significance of Silver Platter in their newfound, yet difficult and constantly dangerous, lives in LA, interspersed with shots of the bar itself, Green Room aids Tsang in continuing his portraying of Silver Platter as a ‘safe space’, something he first explored in his film Wildness. The latter also portrays Silver Platter as an intimate refuge for marginalised people by documenting, however, Tsang’s own experience of the performance art party Wildness, which he co-organised with other queer artists of color at Silver Platter every Tuesday from 2008–10, an event which, in and of itself, actively pursued the construction of a community ‘safe space’. In the catalogue, the artist critically questions both the film’s potential to endanger Silver Platter’s safeness, and the conflict between his own desire to ‘give voice to an underrepresented movement (critical trans resistance)’ and the usual limitations and dangers of documentary representation of others’ experiences. Quite significantly, he also sums up the challenges and failures of two community organisations he was inspired to organise by Silver Platter’s role in the community, seeking to create egalitarian community spaces of safety where poor immigrant people of variant gender and color could network and find a family, get legal and clinical services, fight for their right to determine their gender and for all sex-change procedures, as well as create conditions in which to live their lives as equals and without violence. Foremost among these is Imprenta, which is housed next to Silver Platter, and Lets Go Liberation (LGL). The latter is a more selectively community-run collective — with its membership strictly reserved for poor and transgender immigrant women, in avoidance of the discrimination that the lowest members of Imprenta confronted within a typical hierarchy that elevated its straight, white lawyers and kept down the community members who offered their services on the grounds. Despite his disappointment from the obstacles to making such communities as successful, safe and welcoming egalitarian spaces as that afforded by Silver Platter, Tsang’s essay ends with a pro-activist and pro-community-building message, stating that he privileges community formation and action as the only means of change toward greater safety in such a world. ‘My experiences’ Tsang says, ‘taught me that real change comes through building coalitions which are often painful and never safe.’ [vi]

Tsang is only one of the visual artists whose work in film or video is reserved for screening in a special screening room within the museum, along with a series of better or less-known filmmakers, including Luther Price, Michael Robinson, Jerome Hiler, Nathaniel Dorsky, Laida Lertxundi, Thom Andersen, Moyra Davey, George Kuchar, Kelly Reichardt, Matt Porterfield, Mike Kelly, Kevin Jerome Everson, Laura Poitras, and Frederick Wiseman. Arranged by artist, and changing throughout the exhibition, the film/video program itself, co-curated by Light Industry and paying homage to the Whitney Biennial’s historic investment in experimental filmmaking, has a multigenerational and multifocal interest. While paying particular attention to old and new documentary experimentations, it also embraces cinematic formalism and narrative cinema, and seems to combine self-reflexive contemplations on the medium’s history and melancholic penchant for its most outmoded technologies. A portrayal of often underrepresented aspects of life in America, especially far from New York and under the recent sociopolitical situations and economic pressures, seems to underpin the choices of narrative or documentary genres, along with a revision or closer look at cities that define American experience such as LA and Detroit.

One of the most fascinating discoveries, to me, was Moyra Davey’s Les Goddesses, 2011, a poetic, filmic autobiographical essay, and a rigorous questioning of literary autobiography and photography. Throughout the greater part of the film, we watch Davey, walking around her apartment or repetitively performing ordinary tasks, while listening through ear phones to a recording of her essay, Wet and Dry, which she recites aloud, tuned to the meditative rhythm of her walk or acts. Wet and Dry is a powerful interlacing of Davey’s research on 18th century radical heroine Mary Wollstonecraft and “les Goddesses,” her daughters, the most prominent being Mary Shelley, with autobiographic parallels or references to her own past and present, and above all to her rebellious and quite broken sisters, whom she also portrays with a series of photographs, taken by the artist in the early 1980s, and employed for their portrayal as her own Goddesses of different achievements, vices, and personal ailments. Davey also intersperses thoughts on the drive and limits of autobiography, the narcissism of which this anti-narrative compendium of notes attempts to exorcise not only with the combination of lives lived and learned, memories and research, but with structuring strategies—such as travel—drawn from her own life upon its recognition in the work of masters such as Goethe and Mary Wollstonecraft. The film’s coda takes us out of Davey’s apartment, in a car of the New York subway where the artist takes photographic notes of subway travelers who are taking their own notes on paper, bringing full-circle her thoughts on the relationship of photography, writing, and autobiography to the real, and turning the whole piece into a meditation on photography, Davey’s medium of choice.

Davey’s literary monologue complemented, somewhat interestingly, Georgia Sagri’s body monologues that were taking place the same day I saw Les Goddesses on the fifth floor mezzanine, where the Greek performance artist’s installation, consisting of a desktop-like working surface of prints and video installations and a background of sculptural props, existed throughout the exhibition. The dialogue I hint at is not based on any formal or thematic elements, but on the convergence of both artists’ interest in pressuring the limits of their genres and shattering linear narrative with their antilinear story-telling. In a hermetic yet political exploration of the revolutionary notion of ‘no work’, in her Working the No Work, the performative events of which are considered ephemeral pages of a living book, Sagri manically performed, and often re-performed, found body movements and sounds. Drawn from a variety of sources ranging from political episodes (such as the hunger strike of prisoners in Greece) to depression-era silent films, these painstaking ‘articulations’ [vii] of found movement — essentially quoted documents of our culture, spontaneously recomposed, and tuned to soundtracks that are mostly produced by the live recording and transmission (through her laptop) of the inchoate whispers, howls, crying and all kinds of sounds performed by the artist — aid Sagri in redefining the performance artist from a body artist expressive of the authentic Cartesian subject to a composer or DJ mixing found, ready-made, performative elements circulating through our daily lives and culture. In effect, Sagri’s approach to performance destabilises the curatorial penchant for artistic practices that seemingly evoke anachronistic artist models, or what the system discards as such, for Sagri enters her installations, by her account, as a ‘criminal’ rather than as the authentic artist — as an artist performing the performance art, as she puts it. Her false undressing for the viewer, indeed, her actual disguising of herself as the naked artist in front of her audience, by wearing outfits with exact photographic replicas of her body in the nude, amounts to a telling send-up of the artist’s denuding for the audience, and the penultimate nudeness of many a body artist.

Sagri’s installation is considered by the artist an intrinsic, rather than auxiliary, part of her performance; most of the performance art events in the biennial, however, took place within exhibits by the performers or other artists. This might support the expansive view of their art practices in line with the curatorial agenda, but pressures the autonomy of performance art as such; despite the exhibition’s embrace of the performative, its experience is somewhat further diminished by the very spottiness of the scheduling of the performances themselves, threatening to turn them into, alternatively, missed encounters or cheap triggers to instigate just another trip to the biennial. Scheduling and exclusivity, in the case of ticketed events, also made problematic the role of the fourth-floor performance stage in the perception of the biennial; it at times disappeared from the map due to sold-out events, such as Michael Clark’s, or reemerged as a limbo of circulation, viewing, participation, and confrontation with the performers as well as performance, indeterminately opening up the works and the viewers’ experiences to positive directions, or collapsing them. But it must be also said that, though derived from the upper echelons of avant-garde experimentation in dance, music, theatre, video, etc., the performances and performative interventions hosted in the fourth floor, through residencies and performances, remain products of cutting-edge stars. And though entering the museum as samples of artistic dialogues, collaborations, and networks, and self-reflexively contemplating or updating indigenous performing art avant-gardes, in essence they remain illustrious examples of total art that trace a precarious relationship with the world of spectacle, which, at times, sabotaged the radical parochialism of the curators’ choices in the galleries.

The event that unleashed some of the most potent and timely political associations, along with that critical indeterminacy that the curators have invoked in the catalogue with suggested connections of works and artists, was an external one, the Occupy Wall Street movement’s objection to the biennial itself. The Arts and Labor working group of the OWS movement, a group consisting of artists, interns, writers, educators, art handlers, designers, curators, students and other art workers, decisively contested the biennial on its eve, publishing a letter that called for its termination, in support of Sotheby’s recently fired art handlers. Proposing its cancellation in 2014, 100 years after the founding of the Whitney Studio, the Arts and Labor group analysed the altered ‘raison d’être’ of the institution of the Whitney annuals and biennials, from one that promoted American art when it had little financial and critical support to one that ‘upholds a system that benefits collectors, trustees, and corporations at the expense of art workers’. Arts and Labor castigated the way in which the biennial forces artists to incur debt in the prospect of a misleadingly defined professional career in the arts, while they also exposed the way in which the museum’s ties with real estate (in light of its upcoming move to the meatpacking district) and sponsorship (especially Sotheby’s) support the capital interests of its trustees and corporate sponsors, benefitting the 1% and deepening economic inequality. The protest was followed by a practical hoax, whether by Arts and Labor or Yes Men, which announced, with press releases and web sites that looked identical to those of the Whitney, the Museum’s break with two major sponsors of the Biennial — Sotheby’s, because of the lockout of unionised art handlers, and Deutsche Bank, because of its involvement with the mortgage fraud scandal — while apologising to the participating artists ‘for allowing them to be exploited by their former sponsors’. Although few reporters wondered about the curators’ response to such a political joke, fewer art critics still remembered such protest in the aftermath of the biennial’s preview. But despite any official reaction, the Arts and Labor protest was already preempted by an exhibit, Andrea Fraser’s critical apology, There’s No Place Like Home.

Under the influence of the OWS movement, Fraser, who is known for her acidic critique of institutions, had prior to the biennial already unveiled the complicity of the art world with the recent economic crisis in an article tellingly titled L’ 1% c’est moi, published in Texte Zur Kunst in September 2011. By exposing the ties between financial elites responsible for the economic crisis and the success and profits of the top art world, she convincingly proved ‘that what has been good for the art world has been disastrous for the rest of the world.’ Fraser did indeed reveal in detail the corrupt profit sources of the world’s richest people, who did not just happen to also be top collectors or museum trustees; discussed the rise of the art investment industry and studies that have shown the direct effect of equity market returns on art prices, arguing that art booms reflect greater economic inequality rather than the financial betterment of the society as whole; illuminated the role of HNWIs in the proliferation of museums, publications, biennials, etc., and exposed the conservative anti-tax and anti-government policies that underlie such thriving, private, non-profit initiatives and their relationship to private excess wealth and artwork slavery. Arguing that there is no escape out of the US market model of the art world in favour of the endangered model of direct public subsidy of the European museums, Fraser concluded with a desperate admission of the ethical dilemma of how to participate in the art world today, despite the existence of a political art discourse. Diagnosing its neglect of the social and economic conditions of art as a form of ‘negation’, she eventually called for a withdrawal of curators, artists, art historians, critics, etc., and a switch in art discourse in order to ‘split off’ the market dominated subfield of the art world.

But instead of withdrawing from the biennial, Fraser contributed to it a sequel to the previous article — exhibited as a published article on a podium and available as PDF through the biennial’s site — in which she further elaborates on the ‘negation’ of art’s social and economic conditions. Describing how ‘unbearable’ most forms of engagement with art have become today due to the “ever-growing disjunction between art’s legitimising discourses … and the social conditions of art”, [viii] There’s No Place like Home first and foremost expresses Fraser’s personal difficulty with contributing to this exhibition because of her increasing alienation from the art world by its own hypocrisies and the very conflict of her desire to participate in the Occupy Wall Street movement and her personal and professional allegiances with the Whitney Museum, its International Studio Program and its sponsors.

Summarising the findings of her previous article, once again Fraser captures the schizophrenic contradictions of the contemporary art world, explaining on one hand how the recent art boom is fueled by (while it also fuels) the economic crisis and current unprecedented economic inequality, while on the other hand she highlights the rise of a multiform interest in social justice coming from artists, curators and critics whom she exposes as equal, though perhaps indirect, beneficiaries of the private wealth of past decades, whether channeled through private, non-profit or for-profit initiatives. Although Fraser distinguished artistic ‘subfields’ that maintain a qualifying distance from the world of art as luxury — that is, she discerned ‘the art world that revolves around commercial art galleries, art fairs and auctions’ from ‘art worlds that revolve around curated exhibitions and projects in public and non-profit organisations’, or around academic institutions and discourses and even ‘community based activist and DIY art worlds that aspire to exist outside all these organized sites of activity’ — she exposes their nonetheless inescapable submission to the market rules of the ur-field art world, even for artists as critical as herself. Last but not least, she foregrounds the centrality of discursive, rather than physical, art spaces (those of artist statements, art history, criticism and curatorial texts) as the prime sites of barriers between art and life, between art’s symbolic systems and economic relations. Yet, most importantly, she laments the impotence of the most critical art discourse in its inescapability from the art world, adumbrating as a deceptive fad the rise of a radical political art discourse, “delusional in the grandiosity of its claims for social impact and critique, particularly given its often total disregard of the reality of art’s social conditions.” As Fraser categorically put it, out-powering Arts and Labor’s critique of the biennial with a subtle critique of its most political works: ‘The broad and often unquestioned claims that art in some way critiques, negates, questions, challenges, confronts, contests, subverts, or transgresses norms, conventions, hierarchies, relations of power and domination, or other social structures — usually by reproducing them in an exaggerated, displaced, or otherwise distanced, alienated or estranged way — seem to have developed into little more than a rationale for some of the most cynical forms of collaboration with some of the most corrupt and exploitive forces in our society. Even more perniciously perhaps we also often reproduce in art discourse the dissociation of power and domination from material conditions of existence that has become endemic to our national political discourses and has contributed to the marginalization of labor and class-based struggles … ’

In There’s No Place like Home Fraser also further revisits the Freudian notion of ‘negation’, originally used by Pierre Bourdieu to account for art and art discourse’s essential ‘denial of the social world’, yet in light of contemporary art discourse’s obsessive focus on social and psychological functions and effects as ‘more and more artists, curators and critics endeavor to escape the boundaries of the artistic and aesthetic and reintegrate art and life, to serve social needs, to produce authentic emotional relationships, to embrace performativity, to liberate the spectator, to act in and on urban space to transform all manner of social, economic and interpersonal structures’ — a parataxis of artistic aims that in their majority critically reverberate with works in the biennial and its curatorial aims, despite its privileging of process based art making over relational aesthetics. Updating Bourdieu’s claim that art discourse speaks of the social and the psychological world ‘as if it did not speak of it’, to her belief that, despite the fact that ‘art discourse today speaks incessantly of the social world in its economic aspects yet “so as not to speak of it”’, Fraser considers negation a defensive mechanism that distances and ‘splits off’ our complicity with ‘the economic domination — and spreading impoverishment — that the enormous wealth within the art world represents’: ‘Much of art discourse, like art itself today, seems to me driven by the struggle to manage and contain the poisonous combination of envy and guilt provoked by that complicity and by participation in the highly competitive, winner-take-all market the art field has become, as well as the shame of being valued less-than it its precipitous hierarchies. To the extremes of symbolic as well as material rewards within the art field, there corresponds an art discourse that swings between the extremes of cynicism that disavows guilt, and a critical and political position-taking that disavows competition, envy and greed; or between an aestheticism that disavows any interest in the satisfactions such material rewards might offer, and a utopianism that ascribes to itself the power of realizing them by other means; or between an elitism that would tame envy and guilt by naturalizing entitlement, and a populism that would mollify them with often highly narcissistic and self-serving forms of generosity, from traditional philanthropy to proclamations that “everyone is an artist”. Increasingly it seems that these positions do not represent alternatives, but rather are only vicissitudes of a common structure … [that serves] to distance and disown aspects of that world … our activities in it.’

Best, yet not only, pertaining to the US art world and despite generalisations, Fraser’s cynical psychoanalysis of the multifaceted symptoms of ‘negation’ is a painfully astute indictment of the global art world and the unavoidable impasses for radical political art. It perhaps explains Sagri’s desire to keep her considerable participation in the OWS movement separate from her art in order to maintain the ultimate effectiveness of both, saving perhaps (the politics of) her art from art discourse rather than from activism. Capturing the hypocrisies and limitations that underpin radical political art discourse, perhaps also justifies the curators’ decision to not politicise the biennial — unlike direct contemporary biennalic responses, as in Berlin, to the current crisis and global ramifications of the OWS protest movement — instead allowing indirect evocations of the crisis and protest to contextualize its poetics. But Fraser’s article inevitably also ironises the political bridging of art and life that the 2012 Whitney Biennial’s expansive view of art and embrace of the performative purports. For her essay not only undermines the institutionalisation of institutional critique by coupling the institutional critique it indeed conducts with the critical disbelief in its own effectiveness, but it shatters the belief in the effectiveness of political art in general.

Yet, her conclusion twists the apologetic desperation resulting from the unresolvable conflicts of the art world she illuminates. Proposing a psychoanalytical understanding of ‘negation’, not only as a defense mechanism but as a ‘step in overcoming repression and reintegrating split off ideas and affects’, central to the development of thought by providing a distance that makes the trauma tolerable, Fraser distinguishes negation from negative judgment, and reconstitutes belief in art discourse. Whether seen as a retreat from her previous call for withdrawal, justifying her contribution to the biennial; a joke bringing in full circle the vicious circle of the inescapable complicities that doom the art world in capitalist societies, as she analyses it, or a positive reformulation of her desperation, Fraser rescues the potential of change. Embracing the dream as affirmation of that which was dreamt in psychoanalytical terms (for those remembering my pun in a previous exhibition review of radical concerns) [ix], above all she re-infuses faith in what we say about art. ‘Indeed it may be that the way out of the seemingly irresolvable contradictions of the art world lies directly within our grasp, not in the next artistic innovation — not, first of all, in what we do — but in what we say about what we do: in art discourse’, says Fraser, modifying her harsh critique of the art world and institutions like the biennial with a justification of the 2012 Whitney Biennial’s disregard for novelty, even though with an optimism critically undermined by her own analysis. ‘While a transformation in art discourse would not, of course, resolve any of the enormous conflicts in the social world or even within our selves, it might at least allow us to engage them more honestly and effectively’, Fraser wisely adds, justifying the existence of the many of us who painfully cross the contradictory and inassimilable subfields of the contemporary global art world, still believing in art’s multifaceted importance as well as honing its potential for social impact, while knowing full-well that the art world itself isn’t getting better any time soon, or faster than the rest of the world.

[i] See Daniel Birnbaum, ‘The Archeology of Things to Come’, in Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating, Zurich, JPR/Ringier & Les Presses du reel, 2010, p. 236.
[ii] See Werner Herzog in exhibition wall labels and catalogue.
[iii] Since 2008, when she lost her day job, Kasper begun using art venues, where she was invited to perform as her studio, as part of the ongoing project On the Exposure of Process: A Nomadic Studio Practice Experiment. A part of the latter, her contribution to the 2012 Whitney Biennial is titled This Could Be Something If I Let It and was complemented by a series of performances.
[iv] See Mathew S. Witkonvsky, ‘The Eyes Bear the Load’, in Whitney Biennial 2012, exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012, p. 92.
[v] Wu Tsang, Whitney Biennial, p. 293.
[vi] Ibid., p. 297.
[vii] According to the artist. Special thanks to Georgia Sagri for her conversation with me about her work.
[viii] The rest citations from Andrea Fraser’s ‘There’s No Place like Home’, purposively quoted in length for reinforcement of its points and importance, derive from its reprint in the catalogue of the Biennial.
[ix] Minioudaki, ‘Don’t Complain, Unless you never Fantasised a Revolution: Afterthoughts about the 11th International Istanbul Biennial’, kaput, issue 7, 2010, https://kaputarchive.online/00701.