BY TESS THACKARA
“Irony, be gone,” said the
Whitney’s director Adam Weinberg this morning, as he inaugurated the 2017
Whitney Biennial—the first to take place in its Meatpacking District location.
The phrase was uttered
softly, without emphasis, but the words can be seen to summarize the 78th
edition of the biennial, curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks. The duo’s
show is direct and unapologetically concerned with the state of American
society and the individual lives of American citizens, without being drawn into
sentimentality or ever becoming too noisy or polemical to lose its impact.
A vivid example of that
earnest, poignant engagement with the country’s socio-economics and identity
politics can be found at the show’s very entrance, in the ground floor’s John
R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Gallery.
L.A. artist Rafa Esparza’s
Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field (2017), an adobe brick construction, has
been installed within the dark gallery space. It evokes the rudimentary
structures of agrarian civilizations, even a bare-bones, pre-modern space of
worship, and it conveys both a sense of the hard realities faced by individuals
of color in America, rooted in a complex, loaded history, as well as the
possibility of transcendence.
Esparza created the
structure collaboratively with “a group of Brown, queer-identified individuals”
and with bricks and water transported from L.A.—a kind of reverse colonization
from West to East, as the wall text notes.
In a gesture of community,
he also invited other artists to place works within the installation. They
include Beatriz Cortez, who installed a ritualistic heap of volcanic rock on
the floor of the structure; Eamon Ore-Giron, whose site-specific painting on
its inside wall, in gold, blue, and red, suggests a sun deity; a reconstructed
artifact by Gala Porras-Kim that explores the fraught concept of cultural
authenticity; and photographs from Dorian Ulises López Macías’s “Mexicano”
series, large-scale, striking portraits of Mexican men, hung on the wall of the
adobe. Hold your ear up to a gap in the bricks and you’ll hear a sound work by
Joe Jiménez.
“Some of our bodies are
always under attack” are the words I heard emanating from beyond the brick wall
via a recorded male voice………..
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-2017-whitney-biennial-pitch-perfect-survey-art-today
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario