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The 2024 survey focuses less on American art and more on the United States itself, in a raw, modern age.
By Siddhartha Mitter
The last time the Whitney Biennial came around, in 2022, its production had been extended an extra year by the Covid pandemic, and the curators had to plan the exhibition and meet artists in virtual visits over Zoom.
To prepare for the 2024 Biennial, the newest iteration of the landmark exhibition of recent American art, which opens March 20, this year’s organizers, Whitney Museum curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, hit the road. They have made some two hundred visits to workshops across the country and far beyond. They have visited many art exhibitions and events, from the German mega exhibition Documenta 15 to Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
So this cycle has been, in a sense, more general. But the general is stopping here. The drastic phase of the pandemic, with its restrictions, would possibly have receded. But the resulting picture is a landscape of unfolding crisis, and for artists, as for everyone else, an era of wondrous uncertainty and anxiety in the run-up to the U. S. election.
As they moved, Iles and Onli said in a joint interview at the museum that they feel environmental tension everywhere, whether they smell the smoke from wildfires that wafted onto Los Angeles freeways (a reflection of overuse of land and climate change) or hear first-hand, from women and LGBTQ artists, the effect of overturning Roe v. Wade and the spread of legislation that infringes on physical autonomy.
“We understand we’re in a turbulent period, leading into another turbulent period,” Onli said. To make an exhibition under these conditions, she said, “the show had to be politically charged.”
On Thursday, the museum revealed the names of the artists who will participate in the biennial titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing. “It’s compact, with 69 artists and two collectives spread across the gallery’s exhibition, accompanying films and functional systems, and The Global Map: 20 of the artists, many of them filmmakers, live or work outside the United States.
For Iles and Onli, it’s less about the state of American art than it is about the United States itself, in a raw and vulnerable time. They were baffled by artists exploring how other people carried and coped with society’s wounds in their bodies and minds, and what artistic regeneration that triggered.
As for the title, it is a kind of multipronged retort to the culture wars over what is “real” — from the rise of artificial intelligence to efforts to impose social and bodily conformity. “There’s a type of queer playfulness there,” Onli said of the offerings — an ironic humor that insists: “Of course we’re even better than the real!”
Siddhartha Mitter writes about the arts and crafts communities in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere. Previously, he wrote for The Village Voice and The Boston Globe and was a reporter for WNYC Public Radio. Learn more about Siddhartha Mitter
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