“The Master and Form,” by Brendan Fernandes, 2018.
Biennial delivers, despite birth pains
BY NANCY ELSAMANOUDI
The Whitney Biennial, co-curated by Rujeko
Hockley and Jane Panetta, opened last Friday
and is up until Sept. 22. So, there is plenty of
time to see it, see it again, to like it, not like it, or to
pointlessly vacillate between indecisive, mixed feelings
about it. That being said, there is plenty to like
at the Biennial.
There are some serious knockouts in the Biennial
that shouldn’t be missed and are worth the trek to
the Meatpacking District.
Nicole Eisenman’s imaginative, swoon-worthy
sculpture pavilion of oafi sh misfi ts and absurd, prostrating
circus freaks is spectacular. Brendan Fernandes’s
magnifi cent installation/performance piece
“Master and Form” (picture ballet dancers performing
in a basketball court-size S&M jungle gym) is
elegantly nuanced in connecting gender and sexuality
to the disciplining of the body through countless
small acts of both pleasure and pain. And Jennifer
Packer’s “A Lesson in Longing” is an impossibly lush,
drop-dead gorgeous, unapologetically pink grandscale
painting, with a great presence in how it holds
up the wall and unequivocally commands space in
the gallery.
I was also rather taken by Olga Balema’s visibly
fragile sculpture “Leaf” — extending from fl oor to
ceiling — which broke in half on Sunday. Granted,
no one is happy this happened, but the aftermath of
the sculpture lying half-broken in the gallery and the
Whitney staff frantically surrounding it, strangely
felt like some sort of impromptu performance piece.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MONIQUE MELOCHE GALLERY, CHICAGO. PHOTO BY BRENDAN LEO MEREA
I didn’t like it, though, when I got the sense that a
particular artist or particular piece had a specifi c role
to play in the show. And I got that sense with Eddie
Arroyo’s paintings of Little Haiti, because they didn’t
quite seem to hold up. They seem a bit bland.
I found that some work that seemed to align more
closely with the stated curatorial intent of the show
to focus on sociopolitical issues (whether gentrifi cation,
gender, identity, sexuality, race and class) felt
predictably didactic — too on message, or had a déjà
vu sense of familiarity.
For insta
instance, I think
Elle Pé
Pérez’s portraits
are e
extraordinary.
But
I wonder
if
maybe they
might be a little
too easy to like
mi
too
an
sh
and whether
she might be
giving us what we kind of expect to see from a queer
artist — namely images of mostly masculine women
who are already more visible, valued and accepted in
the L.G.B.T. community.
But I found the “Dyke” piece, in particular, interesting,
in part, because it seemed a rather inelegant
nod to a much more nuanced work by Catherine
Opie, but also because that kind of marking of the
body in unmistakable, defi nitive terms still seems so
necessary.
Yet Pérez’s photographs are far more interesting
and, for me, much less problematic than, say, Heji
Shin’s “Baby” series.
The more I looked at Shin’s images, the more I
disliked them. The “Baby” series are a series of photos
taken at the moment of crowning, when the newborn’s
head is poking out of the vagina. Crowning
is typically the most painful part of labor. And yet,
when we look at these images, it is diffi cult to register
that what we are looking at is a body in pain.
The child’s head is the images’ central focus. Meanwhile,
the body of the woman giving birth is severely
cropped — hardcore porn style. The cropping is very
similar to close-up, penetration shots in Hustler.
I see these images as cold, toxic and not at all
harmless. In these images, the subjectivity of the
woman giving birth is negated, her pain is muted and
all that really matters is the purple head emerging
out of what could be described, for all intents and
purposes, as a host body.
The Biennial, at the Whitney Museum of American
Art, 99 Gansevoort St., runs through Sept. 22.
For more information, visit whitney.org.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SUSANNE VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES
PROJECTS
“The General,” by Nicole Eisenman, 2018.
Bronze, stainless steel, paint and cloth, 30
x 33 x 19 in. Collection of Eric Green.
22 May 23, 2019 TVG Schneps Media
/whitney.org