The Quiet Parts, the Loud Parts, & a PDF
Today for TCT, co-chief art critic John Vincler reviews Pippa Garner at Matthew Brown, Lee Mary Manning at CANADA, and Matthew Barney and Alex Katz at O’Flaherty’s. Friday, John and I will publish a list of our favorite art books. And next week, two guest critics will sum up the year. (It’s fine to ask me for free links—I get it—but, if you like what we’re doing and can afford to subscribe, please do. Or give TCT as a gift. Here’s the plea I posted when the paywall came crashing down on Halloween.)
In the ongoing discussion of Dean Kissick’s Harper’s piece, which was extended—in my text threads, anyway—first by Ajay Kurian’s response for TCT, and then by Kissick’s podcast conversation with Helen Molesworth, I’m struck by one refrain in particular. I’ve seen, in a few places, some version of the argument that no one, in their critique of “The Painted Protest,” launches a defense of the exhibitions that Kissick singles out. While I hope it’s obvious that we’re not faced with a binary choice between thinking the 2024 Whitney Biennial was really good and accepting Kissick’s diagnosis of what ails contemporary art, here’s my review for 4Columns in which I choose neither. (Free Palestine.)
But the critical response to the Biennial more generally had me thinking—again—about the gentle tenor of much “political” artwork from recent years, and the strategic huddle it seems to settle into when gathered together in group shows.(Check out Momus reviewing the reviews.) I mention the phenomenon or trend or turn here, at the beginning of season, when I visited the BODY FREEDOM box-truck exhibition in Times Square, and considered its murmuring contents vs. its loudmouth Barbara Kruger exterior (“The shifting modes and registers of ‘socially engaged’ art, for lack of a better, newer term, were on my mind as I left the press preview, walking through the former redlight district now home to the desexed wonders of the M&M’S Store...”)
My interest in the “shifting modes” dates back (at least) seven years. In the January 2018 issue of Artforum, I wrote about the New Museum exhibition “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” noticing, with some disappointment, that it “curiously lacks the guns-blazing, burn-the-house-down energy you might expect—particularly given the title—in the first major survey of LGBTQ+ contemporary art under Trump…Here, if gender is a weapon, it’s a ceremonial one—unsuited to the front lines…” The piece, “Fully Loaded,” appeared as the #MeToo movement crested, in the first issue after David Velasco had taken over as editor-in-chief of the magazine, and takes the vernacular use of triggering, ca. 2018, as a motif to consider the representation of sexual violence in art.
Funnily enough, reading it after so many years, I realized it aligns in certain ways with Kissick’s polemic. He begins his article with his mother’s catastrophic accident; in mine, I make a play for the reader’s horrified attention with an account (and reproduction) of Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene, 1973. He ends his with a jejune exhortation for unreason; I say something more sophisticated and specific, I hope, but I’m perhaps similarly dissatisfied and starry-eyed. Here’s a PDF.