Last week I joined several hundreds of New York City’s art crowd mafia at The Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial opening. As I arrived after 9 pm the atmosphere was still hot and steamy. Unfortunately the heat was not radiating from the majority of the work produced by the artists. It was the result a climate control system (in one of the city’s most fantastic institutions built by Marcel Breuer in 1966) desperately in need of an upgrade.
The Whitney Museum of American Art designed by Marcel Breuer
To imagine the existential courage and vision of patron Gertrude Vanderbilt-Whitney, in pioneering the foundation of an institution to house and pay tribute to the works of American artists, is awe inspiring. I guess that is why I am so confused. Why, during our present American climate, ripe with difficult economic, social and environmental negotiations, is the absence of a deeply emotional connection between the artists and their works so blatant? We are in the midst of battles over territory, struggling the care of tens of thousands of ailing American’s, and dealing with the damage we have caused our living earth. The unflinching apathy, on the part of the artists and curators actually fills me with rage. And perhaps the board of directors of this institution is at fault. If the hands of the curators had not been tied they may have unleashed a demographic of artists who dared to tell the truth, rather than linger in the mall-like safety of the majority of works currently on view. It is sad and even suspect that such a rarefied and privileged group, made up primarily of young people, find themselves producing banal works, barely transgressing beyond the prismacolor and sharpie markers they once used to doodle flowers. Yet there is hope.
"Self-Immoliation: A Cry For Help" by Stephanie Sinclair
Stephanie Sinclair’s photo journalistic project captures images of Afghani women who, in desperate acts of self preservation from their abusers, set themselves on fire. The piece depicts a truth about the terms of living life and its most fundamental act of consciousness, CHOICE . What at first seems graphically disturbing becomes frail and healing at second glance. Sinclair glimpses an ephemeral world. She sees a moment where women are completely present in their body, mind and spirit. Here the oppressive cultural artifice of male domination over the female body evaporates like smoke. Nothing more than mere illusion. The artist, acting as medium, extracts herself, in order to reveal a violent and poetic narrative. creating a monument to these heroes of self.
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