Anthony Elms

Second Floor If the Whitney Biennial is a snapshot of American art at this moment, and if any intimate encounter with American art at this moment must be mediated (as all intimacies these days are), then Marcel Breuer’s museum building here at 945 Madison Avenue is a well-disposed mediation for capturing twenty-four scenes of America. In assembling the artistsand groups I tried to answer a question of Breuer’s from his notes on the building: “What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan?”



I looked to answer Breuer’s question with twenty-four artists and groups that fit a statement by poet Susan Howe: “I believed in an American aesthetic of uncertainty that could represent beauty in syllables so scarce and rushed they would appear to expand though they lay half-smothered in local history.” In part because, given the sprawl, assembling an overview of American art these days is a fool’s errand—America is constant expansion. And because, to paraphrase a position declared by musician Mayo Thompson: I try for timeliness, while reserving the right to ask my own dumb questions. After all, it is always preferable to make time rather than to mark time.



Artists Selected by Anthony Elms



On the Second Floor

Academy Records and Matt Hanner

Terry Adkins

Michel Auder

Elijah Burgher

Jimmie Durham

Joseph Grigely

Susan Howe

Gary Indiana

Carol Jackson

Dave McKenzie

Rebecca Morris

My Barbarian

Paul P.

Public Collectors

Steve Reinke with Jessie Mott

Allan Sekula

Valerie Snobeck and Catherine Sullivan

Charline von Heyl In Other Locations

Academy Records and Matt Hanner

Robert Ashley and Alex Waterman

Miguel Gutierrez

Gary Indiana

Angie Keefer

Zoe Leonard

My Barbarian

taisha paggett

Charlemagne Palestine

Stuart Comer

Third Floor How to define “American” in a survey of contemporary American art, especially one with as much history behind it as the Whitney Biennial, is a question that has often challenged, even vexed, curators. As an American who has spent much of the last thirteen years in the United Kingdom, I have been compelled by artists whose work is as hybrid as the significant global, environmental, and technological shifts reshaping the United States. The work I have brought together for the Biennial reflects this, whether through complex relationships between linguistic and visual forms; the interface of digital technologies with more traditional media, and the recorded past with the lived moment; the development of two-dimensional scores, scripts, and patterns into three- or even four-dimensional actions and environments; the challenging of binary conventions of gender; or the intricacy of cosmopolitan, cross-national identities. Ideas about migration and movement are raised here too, as are those related to a position (geographic or otherwise) at a kind of periphery, off the mainland so to speak. The surfaces and spaces of the gallery respond in kind, playing multiple roles—from white cube to theater to cinema to publishing forum, and sometimes all of these at once.



Artists Selected by Stuart Comer

On the Third Floor

Etel Adnan

Ei Arakawa and Carissa Rodriguez

Uri Aran

Lisa Anne Auerbach

Julie Ault

Kevin Beasley

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst

Morgan Fisher

Tony Greene curated by Richard Hawkins and Catherine Opie

Channa Horwitz

Travis Jeppesen

Yve Laris Cohen

Fred Lonidier

Dashiell Manley

Keith Mayerson

Bjarne Melgaard

Ken Okiishi

Miljohn Ruperto

Jacolby Satterwhite

Semiotext(e)

A. L. Steiner

Triple Canopy In Other Locations

Kevin Beasley

Andrew Bujalski

Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, and Sensory Ethnography Lab

Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst

Radamés “Juni” Figueroa

Pauline Oliveros

Sergei Tcherepnin