Could we consider the 2017 Whitney Biennial a feminist exhibition? Twenty-five of the 63 artists in the show are women. There are additional women in the participating collectives and more exhibitors who are gender fluid. The percentage isn’t as high as in 2010, when there were more women than men in the show, but certainly better than in 2014, when women made up only 32%. Even when they haven’t been included, feminists have played a critical role in the biennial, critiquing the show for its lack of diversity. Groups such as the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee and the Guerrilla Girls have protested the exhibition over the decades.
The versions of feminism on display in the current biennial are incredibly rich and varied. Among the most beguiling and subtly transfixing are the digital interventions of Porpentine Charity Heartscape. In her seven web-based games, installed on desktop computers in a small, darkened room, viewers encounter text-based questions and worlds that prompt emotionally manipulated responses, leaving us either unnerved or enthralled. In one game, you feel your anxiety rise as the empty, dark intervals seem to lengthen between text bursts about the isolation of a hospital stay.
The biennial also features works by several queer artists — Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Carrie Moyer, and Ulrike Müller — associated with the LTTR Group (the acronym originally stood for “Lesbians to the Rescue,” then changed to “Listen Translate Translate Record,” and then just became their collective moniker). The LTTR Group is a genderqueer collective founded in 2001; it produced an annual feminist art journal for five years, changing its name and editorial staff with each issue. At the Whitney, the Austrian-born Müller has contributed a wool rug with a black cat in a field of geometric designs; the feline as a wry, lesbian pussy joke takes on broader implications in the politicized milieu of 2017, when the pink pussy hat became the de rigueur fashion statement for the January Women’s March in response to a statement by our now president.
Müller also has a set of small abstract paintings on paper with some transparency, in dialogue with densely opaque enameled paintings installed in a nearby hallway. Though there are color and shape differences between the two groups, the forms are consistently simple, curvy, and gorgeous. Moyer has filled a room with large acrylic-on-canvas paintings in her signature butterfly and nonobjective compositions. Recalling Color Field painting, the works suggest luxurious, diaphanous curtains featuring super sexy, psychedelic, even tender forms, with occasional accents of glitter. Abstraction can be a strong vehicle for feminism, and has been recognized as such since the beginning of the second wave of feminist art. Müller taps into this by combining a strong and potent color sensibility with an undoing of the harsh and drastic modernist ideogram; she adds flair and drama that earlier modern artists would never have allowed. Moyer’s dense surfaces recall surrealist spaces, but rendered as abundant, decorative spreads and sprays.
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Read full review at hyperallergic.com.
