ARTISTS: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Kelly Akashi, Kamrooz Aram, Ash Arder, Teresa Baker, Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Zach Blas, Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, Leo Castañeda, CFGNY, Nanibah Chacon, Maia Chao, Joshua Citarella, Mo Costello, Taína H. Cruz, Carmen de Monteflores, Ali Eyal, Andrea Fraser, Mariah Garnett, Ignacio Gatica, Jonathan González, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Kainoa Gruspe, Martine Gutierrez, Samia Halaby, Raven Halfmoon, Nile Harris with Dyer Rhoads, Aziz Hazara, Margaret Honda, Akira Ikezoe, Mao Ishikawa, Cooper Jacoby, David L. Johnson, kekahi wahi, Young Joon Kwak, Michelle Lopez, José Maceda, Agosto Machado, Oswaldo Maciá, Emilio Martínesz Poppe, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Kimowan Metchewais, Nour Mobarak, Erin Jane Nelson, Precious Okoyomon, Aki Onda, Pat Oleszko, Malcolm Peacock, Sarah M. Rodriguez, Gabriela Ruiz, Jasmin Sian, Jordan Strafer, Sung Tieu, Julio Torres, Anna Tsouhlarakis, Johanna Unzueta
First things first, I liked Pat Oleszko’s Blowhard (1995), a giant inflatable goblin jester head playing a fire-breathing horn, Aki Onda’s presentation of José Maceda’s Ugnayan (1974), a composition for indigenous Filipino instruments played over 20 vintage radios, and Mo Costello’s gelatin silver prints of staples in telephone poles, although her Readers thrown haphazardly in a vitrine feel like an unfortunate collision of self-consciously unprecious art objects with museum protocol, like the artworks aren’t really artworks unless you can flip through them but the Whitney couldn’t handle that logistically and settled for this dumb half-measure.
I didn’t exactly hate every other thing, but those three are the only moments where I felt the art broke through the fog of biennialese. That’s about par for the course with the three Whitney Biennials I’ve seen and, in spite of the rote discourse about this show being different from the last two, I find it to be more of the same with only a thin veneer of change. The main keywords I’ve picked up on this year are that this is a “weird” biennial that’s focused more on “mood” than overt political orientation. I have the impression that “mood” is a term taken from this article as the institutionally-vetted avenue of response to “The Painted Protest” now that curators have finally had to at least acknowledge the non-revelation that the identity-political script was wearing thin with their audience. As far as I can tell, “mood” is a half-baked rebrand of “aesthetics” without going so far as to accept that artworks might not actually be inherently powerful talismans for enacting social change, i.e. trying to take a half-step back from the worn-out, mangled heritage of post-conceptual art and institutional critique while avoiding any consideration of where that artistic ideology might be mistaken on the ontology of art.
Thus the ironic result is that the exhibition continues to do exactly what’s wrong with identity art with only a perfunctory shift in surface appearance and emphasis. The paradigmatic mistake of this art isn’t identity or even politics, but the misappropriation of art’s meaning away from the art object into the wall text. An artwork means something by first and foremost being an artwork: If Courbet’s early masterpieces like A Burial at Ornans are political artworks by signifying an engaged consciousness of the state of French peasant life, they are masterpieces because that political content is inextricable from his revolutionary approach to painting that could express that consciousness while making a great painting. The artworks here may not be as obsessively concerned with the identities of the artists as the last two biennials, but the sleight of hand is exactly the same when the material components of the artworks are treated as allegorical totems that intrinsically contain an artwork’s symbolic meaning. Andrea Fraser’s unset wax sculptures of babies are supposed to symbolize the care and maintenance the art object receives from the art system, and the signifier of childbirth relates to the intergenerational presence of her mother’s work in the same room, as well as Nour Mobarak’s work that incorporates casts of her pregnant body. (As an aside, Fraser’s retreat from critiquing institutions into the psychoanalytic constellation of the familial is glaringly tepid, if unsurprising, considering the biennial’s proximity to the suspension of the Whitney ISP, her alma mater.)
Other artists utilize nature and the ecological, or technology and the virtual, or nostalgia, or regionality, or tradition, or personal loss, or surveillance, or conceptuality, but almost everything feels as if it’s using these narratives as a means to an end, and the end isn’t the artwork itself but an armature that institutional curators like. If one simply doesn’t care about the associations the artists are sticking onto their work (and I, as you know, don’t), a whole lot of the show immediately becomes inane and ridiculous. At some point I was struck with the realization that this biennial looks worse than the last two iterations. The art doesn’t look like art, which at least here gives it the negative, amorphous quality of slop. Is that what people mean when they say the show is “weird”? There’s aesthetic content, like doilies, video games, purple and neon green, colored glass, reflective surfaces, driftwood, affectations of conceptual-austerity-as-aesthetic, whatever, but it’s all flashy, superficial, and overeager, like fishing for likes on social media, those viral cakes that look like fairies made them out of mud, or Gen Z star-shaped pimple patches.
The prevailing stylistic “mood” is downstream of pop culture, appropriative of the kitsch everyone already gets too much of on their phones. What the show mostly feels phobic of is any kind of art history before the ’60s, which isn’t inherently a problem except precisely in terms of aesthetics. If I liked Oleszco, Maceda, and Costello’s works it’s because it was extremely glaring how those older artists in the first two cases had some sensibility about what the fuck they wanted their end product to be like (every other audio component in the exhibition is slapdash junk), and Costello’s photos were an effective, simple use of the inherent qualities of retro technology. Otherwise almost everyone seems to be recklessly unconcerned with and perhaps oblivious to the things artists used to spend all their time doing, like scrutinizing a painting to decide if it works or not, or developing their skills, or thinking about art as something that doesn’t immediately spiral off into references to something that isn’t art. And who can blame them?
This is a systemic problem. It’s not like the curators could turn on a dime and find enough viable artists to do anything other than a show like this if they wanted to, and the current generation of artists has been hemmed-in from the start by the demand that they’d better get with this program or get a different job. Maybe the most indicative moment for me was Isabelle Frances McGuire, one of the only artists in the show who seems to have any earnest artistic influences; her interview in the catalogue is with Charles Ray and her connection to his work is obvious without being slavishly derivative. For her to “qualify as a serious artist” in 2026 she has to slap her spooky figures with nested narratives: The scene is Salem, Massachusetts during the witch trials, the witchy figures are made from open-source CT scans, the evil villagers are from Doom, the wall is based on Abraham Lincoln’s house. If you have to jump through that many self-justifying hoops to be allowed to make figurative sculptures today, what hope does anyone have of actually trying to get good enough at anything that it might actually be exciting?
The strictures of the system that holds together the art world’s sense of self-importance are suffocating the life out of art, and at this point I might be more sympathetic with the plight of artists than I am dismayed by the quality of the art. It still sucks though. I could go on about specifics, but this is exhaustingly dull and I’m not saying anything that I haven’t said before. I got a similar feeling from all the press the show has received, as if the writers are desperately trying to divine some sort of new trend or basic difference from the last ones but it’s impossible to hide the universal fatigue at this point. To finish I’ll just point out that Ash Arder is slavishly derivative of Josh Kline, David L. Johnson is slavishly derivative of Cameron Rowland, and, as I’ve said before, Josh Citarella isn’t an artist. I think it’s safe to say you shouldn’t be in a biennial at all if your contribution is doing your podcast on site.
I really don’t care at all about Doomscroll and have no particular animus towards him but, as someone who prides himself on the depths of his pessimism about the state of the art world, even I’m astounded at the level of cynicism that went into him deciding to pretend to be an artist (for clout? What clout?) and into the curators deciding it was a good idea to let him pretend. Oh, and this October roundtable on the 1993 Whitney Biennial is startling to read 33 years later, if only because the biennial playbook is almost exactly the same and in the meantime the critical discourse has atrophied completely.