Whitney Biennial Research Articles

The Transformers

Research Article| June 01 2023 The Transformers: How Chan Is Missing Led to Better Luck Tomorrow Led to Everything Everywhere All at Once Renee Tajima-Peña Renee Tajima-Peña Renee Tajima-Peña is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker who has chronicled the Asian American experience as showrunner/series producer of Asian Americans, producer/director of Who Killed Vincent Chin? and My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha, and co-founder of the May 19th Project. Her films have screened at Cannes, New York, Sundance and the Whitney Biennial. She was founding faculty of the UC Santa Cruz Social Documentation Grad Program and is a professor and endowed chair of Asian American Studies at UCLA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2023) 76 (4): 32–34. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.32 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Renee Tajima-Peña; The Transformers: How Chan Is Missing Led to Better Luck Tomorrow Led to Everything Everywhere All at Once. Film Quarterly 1 June 2023; 76 (4): 32–34. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.32 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search During the past forty years in Asian American cinema there have been three premieres that took my breath away: Chan Is Missing in 1982. Better Luck Tomorrow in 2002. Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022. Twenty years apart, all signaled that the earth had shifted on its axis and the creative landscape of Asian America was on a collision course with the old, retrograde images of the past. Something gloriously new and essentially Asian American was on the horizon. Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing, about two San Francisco cabbies on the hunt for their missing friend and their missing four thousand dollars, was the first. I was just out of college and working as the first paid staff person at New York’s Asian Cine-Vision, back in a time when a clueless twenty-one-year-old could run an Asian American arts center. ACV put on the Asian American International Film Festival,... You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars, by Jill Godmilow

Review: <i>Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars</i>, by Jill Godmilow

Also Reality

Also Reality Michelle Renee Hoppe (bio) All I wanted was everything. —Rosebud Ben-Oni Determinant meaning within the English language exists through the electric glue of our conjunctions. Sticky tiny words like "but" and "also" define the psyche's trajectory in a story, and stories determine our relationships and behaviors. "And" and "also" are some of the least glamorous of the transitions and are often overlooked for the more forceful usages of the contrast conjunctions and consequence arguments. I have outgrown my usages of the more convoluted ways to join together thoughts, people, and events, abandoning most of my contrast and consequence statements in favor of additionals, which is to say the simplest math of meaning. Our American legal system depends upon the either/or contrast. Both defenses and prosecutions rely on consequence conjunctions, too, and they use them with abandon. Making the argument that any action is only a consequence, that it is inevitable, is to remove all agency and responsibility from the state. To remove any agency from the majority is to encourage the imprisonment of the marginalized. There is no separate law school needed for prosecution and defense. Lawyers switch sides in any argument, thus the syntax used in today's courtrooms means nothing. The US Constitution starts with a justification, the subordinating conjunction "in order to," which is meant to be a very long reason. It is an eloquent excuse: WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. The remainder of the US Constitution is a series of "and" and "also" statements made along with a few "but" exclusions. Consequence and contrast statements are what direct and enforce our laws [End Page 657] today, and they are not the origins of America. Irene Villaseñor, indigenous author and artist, completes erasure poems of colonial documents, reading most recently at The Whitney Biennial.1 And, like me, Senor identifies as on the autism spectrum. __________ I have come to call my own world of "also" and "in addition" an Also Reality. Also Reality is my personal attempt of making sense of dissociative fugue and amnesia, which is to say I've experienced more horror in my nearly forty years on this terrifying globe than my brain is altogether capable of holding, rationally. There are times when I think flashbacks are speaking to me again. I have delusional thoughts and irrational beliefs that summarize all the narratives of my past traumas—a type of PTSD that has congealed and amalgamated into what I consider a chaotic benevolence. I break. Cognitively. I am wholly disjointed. Within. Art helps. So do essayists. When it comes to insanity, I am of the CIA-is-spying-on-my-thoughts proclivity. That's because my maternal grandfather was a military intelligence service agent/spy and a Mormon ecclesiastical leader who was also very against LGBTQ rights and who also did a favor for President Hoover, which got him into Stanford Law. This man, Gardner Hale Russell, also tried to make out with me when I was twenty-three years old and told me to be quiet about my father's domestic violence. He warned me that, should I persist, we'd be on the news and have no money to eat. In addition, Cannon Air Force Base was named for the other side of my family, my father's side. General John K. Cannon taught Lindbergh to fly and was thanked by Churchill for ending World War II. My former fighter pilot father, Captain Bruce Hoppe, was directly involved in deescalating 9/11. He also came home to break my nose in his kitchen. My family could stop international wars, and they could not help themselves from beating the shit out of children. Once I gained some degree of emancipation, during the Palestinian conflict in May 2021 and after major surgery, I got stuck in Amman, Jordan. In 2012, I was also in a domestic violence relationship with...

(M)Othering Like Us

Black artist-activist Parker Bright’s three-day protest of white artist Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial ignited a debate concerning “historical witnessing” versus “cultural appropriation,” artistic freedom and freedom of speech, and institutional agency in affording socioeconomic value to white artists over artists of colour. While intended to evoke an empathetic response “across race,” Schutz’s painterly reproduction of the iconic photograph of 14-year-old murdered Black boy Emmett Till perpetuates and participates in white violence on Black life. Schutz’s own response—“I don’t know what it is like to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother”—suggested an empathetic connection with Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, whereby abstract notions of heteronormatively defined white motherhood transcend the reality of everyday Black and Brown life. Schutz’s claim resonates with a statement made by Robin Kahn, a white artist whose installation-performance Dining at Refugee Camps (2012) at dOCUMENTA13 relocated a community of Sahrawi women exiled to the Tindouf Refugee Camps in Algeria since 1975 to Kassel, Germany, as “a symbol of peaceful refuge.” Kahn identifies as a “mom of color” (her adoptive daughter is African American), suggesting a universal/izing point of reference to the refugees that elides the disparity in privilege and precarity. Schutz and Kahn deploy white feminist—in particular, white motherhood—tropes to deemphasize damage done to Black and Brown people that the artists’ work reproduces. This article is about the cultural collateral white motherhood assumes in its own gendered, racialized, and economic privilege (as well as the assumption thereof within the space of academic publishing and in the article itself). It is also about the broader response in the artistic community, primarily from artists of colour, who literally and figuratively stand between the viewer and artwork.

Listening to Echoes: Racial Violence in Contemporary Art History

Taking its cues from recent scholarship on the crisis of anti-Black violence, this essay revisits a constellation of art world events related to the 1991 police beating of Rodney King: Anna Deavere Smith’s 1993 performance Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a one-woman play about the riots sparked when King’s attackers were acquitted; the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which included the amateur videotape of the beating that had featured prominently in news coverage and during the trial; and a roundtable discussion about the Biennial that appeared in the journal October. Using the concept of the echo as a figure for a temporal “ongoingness,” I argue that racial disparity exists within art historical and art critical assumptions about time. By virtue of the echoic nature of police violence against African Americans, racialized subjects often have a different relationship to past-ness than white subjects, and thus the capacity to mark events as historical is a privilege to which not all subjects have equal access. Similarly, the ability to deploy the category of the contemporary in positive ways is differentially distributed. Inspired by Darby English’s suggestion that we listen for what “fights meaning” in works of contemporary art by and about African Americans, the essay harkens to the repetitions of the echo to reveal the ways in which time itself is racialized.

Introduction toVisual Arts ResearchSpecial Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Through Thick and Thin

Through Thick and Thin

Open Casket and the Art World: A Cautionary Tale

AbstractIn 2017, the artist Dana Schutz presented her painting, Open Casket, at the Whitney Biennial. Both the painting and the painter were subsequently subjected to criticism from the art world. A central critique was that Schutz usurped the story of Emmett Till (the subject of Open Casket) and that, as a white woman, she had no right to do so. Much can—and has—been said on the appropriateness of Schutz's painting. In this article, I argue that Open Casket is a site of oppression, an object that both reflects and reinforces dominant racial hierarchies. Specifically, I argue that Open Casket is a case of what Linda Alcoff calls “the problem of speaking for others”: when a member of a privileged social group speaks on the social experiences of an oppressed group, effectively silencing that group. I explore the moral and epistemic implications of Open Casket and related works and provide some reasons to think that socially privileged persons should not depict the experiences of socially oppressed persons—at least in many cases. I conclude by presenting some conditions under which it may be appropriate for privileged artists to speak for oppressed groups.

Editors’ Note: Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis ★ ★ ★

Editors’ Note: Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis ★ ★ ★

Institutional Certainty and Curatorial Ambiguity: The Whitney Biennial

The rise of more critical and radical political debates has made museums intensely risk-averse such that self-regulation, self-censorship, and most importantly pure self-preservation have become the foundations of museum operations. Whereas the 1990s and early 2000s were broadly seen as a period of bold, critical, and unflinching curatorial undertakings, especially in the context of biennials, the last decade has witnessed clear shifts toward benign, almost anodyne programming for fear of being perceived as offensive or insensitive. This essay considers the Whitney Biennial as a case study, tracing an arc from the lauded 1993 edition to the projected 2022 edition, which may be curated entirely by algorithm so as to please the broadest possible swath of the public. Stops along the way consider various controversies that have befallen the biennial despite its efforts otherwise: Donelle Woolford in 2014, Dana Schutz in 2017, and Warren B. Kanders in 2019.

Myth of neutrality and non-performativity of antiracism

ABSTRACT While museums are absorbing the language of social justice by hosting exhibitions on themes like feminism, blackness, accessibility, etc. the same museums are battling with systemic injustice within their own walls. This article discusses how museums are failing to uphold social change in their institutions by drawing attention to two recent cases: the hiring of Kristen Windmuller-Luna as curator for African Arts at Brooklyn Museum and the protests against weapons manufacturer Warren Kanders during the Whitney Biennial 2019. This study finds how the ‘myth of neutrality’ and ‘non-performativity of anti-racism’, creates barriers for social change. The study discusses the belief that museums are neutral and how social justice is treated as a ‘trend’ rather than a social problem that the museum is implicated in. These findings suggest that for museums to stay relevant they must be closely interconnected with the community.

A Decolonial Aesthetic Proposal to the Whitney Biennial 2019: An Interview with Afro-Puerto Rican Contemporary Artist Daniel Lind-Ramos

A Decolonial Aesthetic Proposal to the Whitney Biennial 2019: An Interview with Afro-Puerto Rican Contemporary Artist Daniel Lind-Ramos

Guernica, Inc.: Art, Exile, Recirculation

At the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York City––a show attuned to the intense political divisions and racial tensions in the United States today––one artist stood out for her reuse of images of resistance from various moments in the history of modernity, marked by figures such as Marx and Engels, Muhammad Ali, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s Veterans

Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity

Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity

Transcending Institutional Critique: Pepón Osorio’s Scene of The Crime (Whose Crime?) (1993)

As part of the controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial, Puerto Rican artist Pepón Osorio recreated the interior of a Nuyorican home in his work Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?). This paper aims to unpack the installation’s critical dimension, to argue that it goes beyond the mere institutional critique. To that end, I will first examine the particular disruption of the aseptic museum’s space prompted by Osorio’s installation. Secondly, I will analyze the artist’s intentional use of Kitsch as a gesture of cultural resistance: through the exaggerated accumulation of objects and imageries, Osorio deftly called into question the conventional systems of visibility that operate within the institutional realm.

Gay humor: a conversation with Mariana Valencia on Futurity (2019)

Yarden: I want to start with a question regarding the Whitney Biennial itself. It seems hard to avoid given the political uproar. How has the political urgency developed around the Biennial shaped ...

Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art by Susette Min

Reviewed by: Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art by Susette Min Jeanette Roan (bio) Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art, by Susette Min. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 272 pp. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9780814764305. Asian American art is a relatively new topic of scholarly inquiry. Works such as Why Asia? Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art (1998), Fresh Talk / Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (2003), Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 (2008), Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary (2009), Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (2017), and other contributions to the field have made visible a broad range of Asian American artists, offered compelling insights into their lives and works, and created a rich discourse of Asian American art history. Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art complements this body of work by asking us to consider the utility of the name “Asian American art.” The book begins by looking back at racial- and ethnic-specific exhibitions of the 2000s, in particular One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now (2006), curated by Melissa Chiu, Karin Higa, and Susette Min. In an essay included in the exhibition catalog, Min wrote of the necessity of “identity-based exhibitions” alongside the delimitations of existing curatorial frameworks. Unnamable expands upon these earlier reflections, situating the multicultural exhibitions of the 1990s [End Page 299] and the racial- and ethnic-specific exhibitions that followed in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. Min concludes, “The politics of naming art ‘Asian American’ at this historical juncture within an ethnic-specific exhibitionary framework subjugates or constrains the work, burdening it with a ready-made set of interpretations already embedded in the collective imagination” (27). While acknowledging the continuing underrepresentation of artworks by Asian Americans, Min seeks to move away from a “politics of recognition” to a “reformation of perception, reorienting the futurity of Asian American art” (18). Unnamable thus sets out to explore a “supplementary” way of showing and engaging with “Asian American art.” Min’s focus on curatorial strategies brings a new perspective to familiar questions of identity and difference, race and representation. The introduction asks, “How does one weigh a call and desire for inclusion against the very logic of neoliberal multiculturalism that will co-opt this inclusion?” (13). She looks to French philosopher Jacques Rancière and his theory of aesthetics and politics as a way of “foregrounding aesthetics to reconceptualize Asian American art” (20). Although Rancière has been prominent in discourses of contemporary art theory and criticism for at least the past decade, his work will likely be less familiar to scholars in Asian American studies. However, Min takes care to explicate key concepts, joining his thought to Lisa Lowe’s work to bring in a more familiar set of ideas. She also situates her work within a recent interest in the aesthetic in Asian American literary and cultural studies. Notably, Rancière also figures prominently in Kandice Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (2019). Chapter 1 demonstrates how exhibitions can shape the reception of artworks and offers insight into the challenges of showing work by Asian American artists within prevailing art world conventions and expectations by examining The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990), the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Asia/America (1994), and Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents (2008). The remainder of the book, conceived as “mini-exhibitions on paper and case studies,” presents critical analyses of the work of a handful of established artists: Tehching Hsieh, Byron Kim, Nikki S. Lee, Simon Leung, and Mary Lum (6). Each chapter is organized around themes that are familiar to Asian American studies even as the works themselves, selected for their conceptual richness and aesthetic strategies, do not directly “represent” these topics. Chapter 2 considers labor and Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece) and One Year Performance, 1980–1981 (Time Piece), Byron Kim’s Whitney Philip Morris: Wall Drawings (1999), and Simon Leung’s Squatting Project/Berlin (1994). Chapter 3 emphasizes space, history, and memory in selected works by Mary Lum alongside Simon Leung’s Surf Vietnam (1998). Unfortunately, the book does...

Contributors

Contributors

Carnegie International

The Carnegie International is the second oldest international contemporary arts exhibition in the world. Established in 1896, just one year after the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International has a storied history. Today it is probably eclipsed by flashier, socially central (and aligned with the art market) surveys like the Whitney Biennial. Even art fairs like the New York Armory Show, Frieze London, or Art Basel Miami seem to establish the metrics of inclusion and importance once measured by the Carnegie International. It was therefore a pleasure to experience curator Ingrid Schaffner’s refreshingly idiosyncratic 57th installment of the Carnegie International. Schaffer explained, “The aim of this International is simply to inspire museum joy. Simply put: the pleasure of museums comes from the commotion of being with art and other people actively engaged in the creative work of interpretation. Draw on what you know.”1 Andrew Carnegie founded the International to inspire local audiences and artists. Yet, it was also a way of raising Pittsburgh’s profile and achieving its nationalistic desire to be viewed as a center of modern culture as well as industry. It became a strategy for Carnegie to acquire new art for the growing collection of his new museum. With the first exhibition came the acquisition of Winslow Homer’s The Wreck (1896) and James A. McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Senor Pablo de Sarasate (1884), the first Whistler painting to be acquired by an American museum. Carnegie’s initial impulse was to advance international understanding with a bilateral process of North American and European curators working and consulting together. Schaffner was born in Pittsburgh, and while perhaps a coincidence, she appears to have been the right fit for the job. Her work ethos produced a highly researched and popular exhibition. To curate and select artists, Schaffner worked with …

Thoughts from Nepantla

Editorial| April 02 2019 Thoughts from Nepantla Charlene Villaseñor Black Charlene Villaseñor Black Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Charlene Villaseñor Black—is a professor of art history and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She authored Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire (Princeton University Press, 2006) and edited Tradition and Transformation: Chicana/o Art from the 1970s through the 1990s (University of Washington Press, 2015). Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2019) 1 (2): 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2019.120002 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Charlene Villaseñor Black; Thoughts from Nepantla. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 2 April 2019; 1 (2): 3–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2019.120002 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search Can the tools of Chicana/o/x studies decolonize art history? In this short editorial comment—equal parts original research, testimonio, and activist’s call for change—I reflect on being both an art historian and an ethnic studies scholar, positioned in between the rarefied, privileged world of art history and the activist politics of Chicana/o/x studies.1 Momentum has been building over the last several years in the various fields that constitute Latin American and Latinx visual culture.2 In 2016 in Chicago, during what organizers dubbed the “Latin Spring,” there were forty-five exhibitions of Latinx art, a record for that city, during the “Latino Art Now!” conference.3 The 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, featured a record seven Latinx artists out of a total of sixty-three; in contrast, there were zero Latinx artists at the 2010 Whitney Biennial.4 Opening in June 2017, Pacific Standard... You do not currently have access to this content.