Hilton Als on how the artists in this year’s survey do or, more often, don’t acknowledge those who paved the way for them.
It’s true that, nearly from the beginning, postmodern art challenged the notion of originality, or, more specifically, the weight of originality—often with great joy and wit and not a little fear. Think of Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing” , or Andy Warhol’s version of the Mona Lisa, titled “Thirty Are Better Than One” , or almost all of the conceptual artist Elaine Sturtevant’s significant œuvre.
But, once you start to believe that production alone justifies the work, you’re in trouble, especially when there’s little acknowledgment of the artists who paved the way for your kind of production. To stand in front of Mo Costello’s dark, textured photographs in the Biennial is to see James Welling’s profound pictures about darkness and texture from 1980 and 1981. And to take in Aziz Hazara’s piece “Moon Sightings” is to see Wolfgang Tillmans’s experiments in color and abstraction. To be in the room with Isabelle Frances McGuire’s “Symbolic Birth Cabin Unit” is to once again feel the power of Nayland Blake’s “Feeder 2” . And, as much as you may appreciate Jasmin Sian’s beautiful lacelike cutouts and drawings, they make it impossible to get Elaine Reichek’s samplers, from the nineteen-nineties, out of your head. Nour Mobarak’s audio and resin-and-pigment works, which contribute to her dreamlike atmospheres, draw so much on Pierre Huyghe’s genius that you can’t make out what exactly is coming from Mobarak herself, except that Huyghe’s brilliance is about gestures rather than definitive statements, while Mobarak privileges the weird over the difficult. Part of why Sherrie Levine’s 1981 series “After Walker Evans,” based on the great photographer’s 1936 images of Alabama tenant farmers and their families, remains so poignant is that Levine is not just making a picture of a picture; she’s evoking the flatness and complexity of history, in general and in Evans’s original photograph, and now in hers. The drama of Allie Mae Burroughs’s face is something that Evans could capture but not reach, with his photograph “Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife”: Burroughs is resolute within herself, her poverty, her Southernness, her femaleness. By retaking or remaking that photograph, Levine asks, Can I get any closer to this image than Evans did? And how does the forty-five-year difference between my “I” and Evans’s “I”—let alone Burroughs’s—affect what I see? Or what the viewer sees? A lot of the artists whose work is presented in the Biennial circumvent this Borgesian labyrinth of perception and history—if they’re aware of it at all. What replaces it is a garbled rhetoric that is supposed to further substantiate the work, but what if the work just isn’t there? Although Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s simultaneously austere and sensual handblown glass sculptures—which are light-bulb-shaped and affixed to steel rods—bear no visual resemblance to Machado’s softer edges, she also knows something about art history and the humor to be found in the grand narrative. A thirty-three-year-old Los Angeles-based artist, Bermúdez-Silverman embraces the fun and danger of Dadaism—for instance, when she encloses one of her glass sculptures in iron sheep shears, in “blister iii” . Bermúdez-Silverman knows something about texture as well, pairing the fragile with the hard, and making comic use of the latter word and concept throughout. Her work is partly fuelled by the fact that she is a female artist dealing with male-centric art history; it’s a kind of intellectual and visual romp around such work as Marcel Duchamp’s “50 cc of Paris Air” and Jasper Johns’s unforgettable “Light Bulb I” . Johns’s light bulb is molded from Sculp-metal, and the mark of the artist’s hand is visible in the roughly sculpted base that it rests on, like a body in a coffin. Bermúdez-Silverman’s glass pieces can be similarly anthropomorphic. They resonate because—like the work of the Hawaii-born Sarah M. Rodriguez, whose otherworldly, elongated aluminum sculptures in the Biennial remind one of the stripped trees, shattered structures, and devastated people seen in newsreels about Hiroshima, life poking through devastation—they are evidence of what happens when artists don’t make art synonymous with a desire for capital. Guerrero and Sawyer’s Biennial, which includes the work of fifty-six artists, duos, and collectives, comes to us at a terrible time in American history, when rhetoric is used to distort reality and to evade the complications of subjectivity and nuance in narrative. One afternoon, as I was taking notes at the Whitney, I wondered why, although there were some terrific paintings and drawings by young artists in the show—Johanna Unzueta’s unusual color sense and fascinating biomorphic shapes are the real thing—I kept returning to the sculptures. Kainoa Gruspe’s small, exquisite objects made with materials—stones, fabric scraps, fishhooks, nails, cowrie shells, and so on—that he gathered from military bases, resorts, and the like in Hawaii, his home state, are particularly effective. That afternoon, I realized that it was in the sculptures that I saw, most glaringly, the vast divide between the artists who had worked to find a new vocabulary and those who were centered squarely in a language that was not their own. It doesn’t take long to see that David L. Johnson, a New York-based artist in his early thirties, is working in a vernacular that has made Cameron Rowland, a few years his senior, one of the more sought-after artists of his time. Like Rowland, Johnson is a minimalist who challenges our idea of beauty while framing language as his primary “art,” language that taps into the idea and reality of the prohibitive: what constitutes “correct” behavior among, presumably, correct people. Johnson’s work “Rule” , which makes use of signs announcing the rules of conduct for privately owned public spaces, is clearly the start of something, but I don’t want him to get caught up in what are by now received ideas. I want him to foster his own voice and listen to where it takes him. Although there are layers in his work, there is no postmodern grappling with the father, as there was in Rauschenberg’s take on de Kooning, or Warhol’s rethinking of Leonardo da Vinci; instead, Johnson picks along the edges of Rowland’s work, and considers that nourishment. But it isn’t. You can never fully enter another artist’s process—or subjectivity—and that’s partly what makes the Nigerian American Precious Okoyomon’s stuffed-animal and baby-doll sculptures so troubling. Okoyomon’s most obvious influence is Mike Kelley, whose incredible evocation of childhood in his “Arenas” pieces, from the nineteen-eighties and nineties, continues to haunt us and grows ever more powerful with the years. Kelley used stuffed animals to engage with the passage of time, the commodification of emotion, what we discard in order to “grow,” and what no adult can entirely leave behind: the tattered, perhaps not so innocent inner child. To that, Okoyomon, who is nonbinary, adds the issue of race. includes many stuffed animals hanging from nooses.) In the catalogue, all the Biennial artists are asked about their practice; reading through these interviews, we discover the ways in which theory has become a performance. “I think I’m always thinking through a noncoercive rearrangement of desire,” Okoyomon says at the start of their interview. But what are they trying to represent in their work? A self? And which self? The racial self? The nonbinary self? Or what the world makes of each and all of those things? Elaine Sturtevant told us a lot about how the artist’s self can become distorted or buried in the patriarchal art world—and can then reëmerge, not whole but remade into something that questions and challenges the patriarchy that buried it, or thought it had. Okoyomon seems, in their work, to want to remake themself in Kelley’s image, by appropriating aspects of his surface kink, but without knowing what it meant and what it took for Kelley to become himself in the first place. ♦
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