The most significant aspect of this year’s Whitney Biennial is its exhibition design. For the first time since 2016, the museum’s fifth floor has been restored to its Renzo Piano-designed primordial state, forgoing walls in favor of a field of fragmented, Tetris-like half-walls arranged in no discernible order or pattern, bookended by city and Hudson River views. The sixth floor, by contrast, is a funereal warren of black walls and black carpet: a “dark video hallway,” as my friend put it. It’s a mess. But bless this mess; it’s the biennial postponed because of a global pandemic, following the Black Lives Matter protests, and at the dawn of what feels like another world war. With “Quiet as It’s Kept,” curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards peer into the broken mirror of the past three years, gathering shards to figure out what just happened, and where to go from here.
If you take the stairs—climbing up past Rodney McMillian’s wonderfully homoerotic, eighty-foot-tall painting stretched over a column, titled shaft (2021-22)—the first thing you see on the fifth floor is Dyani White Hawk’s shimmery geometric composition, which she and her assistants made out of thousands of glass beads. Wopila | Lineage (2021) references a long-standing Lakota quillwork tradition. It also references Geometric Abstraction (Kenneth Noland and, later, Frank Stella, come to mind), but White Hawk seeks to show that abstraction has long been an integral part of Indigenous art and culture, even if art history was unable to recognize it as such. Installed on the back side of the armature that holds up the White Hawk work are a selection of photographs from Mónica Arreola’s ongoing series about Valle de San Pedro that depict hollow concrete buildings. They look like modernist cubes, yet they derive not from theory but from austerity—these are buildings in Tijuana, where the artist lives, that were left unfinished following the 2008 financial crisis. The pairing of Arreola and White Hawk initiates one of the exhibition’s central explorations, into how contemporary abstraction and politics feed into each other in novel ways.
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