So much hinges on the question of audience. Who is presumed to engage with artwork, and on what terms? In the museum, people of color so often feel that we are not the intended audience. The hurt that we experience on realizing that disconnect—that we are here for art but art is not necessarily here for us—has now been made starkly evident by a clumsy gesture that instigated so much debate that it seems to overpower any other conversation. This is a feeling we expect to get at the Whitney Biennial on a regular basis, and it is why so many people were negatively affected simply by the image of the painting as it circulated around the internet. It’s all the more frustrating when one stands before the painting, feeling the weakness of its impact and the pull of the other artists’ works around it.

Installation view of Cauleen Smith, In the Wake, 2017. Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 17-June 11, 2017. Collection of the artist; courtesy Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, and Kate Werble Gallery, New York. Photo by the author.

Perhaps what surprises most about seeing the painting in person is how small it is. Henry Taylor’s Ancestors of Genghis Khan with Black Man on Horse (2015–2017), on the sixth-floor landing, is many times its size. Nearly obscured in a back corner of a fifth-floor gallery, the now-infamous painting of Emmett Till does not scream for attention the way Dana Schutz’s other paintings on the fifth floor do. If anything, it is not sensational enough—not visceral enough, not cruel enough to do justice to its subject. On a large and busy floor, featuring a dizzying vortex by Samara Golden, Pope L.’s oozing bologna slices, a 3D film by Anicka Yi, and works using the institution to illustrate the operations of capital, from Occupy Museums and Cameron Rowland, the painting seems an ancillary work in the curatorial argument. This is perhaps the biggest indictment, this and its utter lack of resolution. Above these galleries hang several luxurious handmade banners by Cauleen Smith. “Rage blooms within me,” they proclaim. “I am holding my breath.” “We were never meant to survive.” Maya Stovall’s four videos of public performances in the streets of Detroit hang adjacent to the painting. In them, people of color talk about their experiences and their dreams. It is possible to hear their voices while looking directly at the painting of Emmett Till.

Looking at the painting is difficult. The obvious challenge is the subject matter, and how it clashes unnervingly with the candy-like color scheme. Neo-Expressionism’s blend of grotesque and provocative subject matter, combined with the media-saturated palette of Pop Art, makes a style particularly ill-suited for rendering an image of raw horror. Certainly the effect seems facile—if not exactly glib, then more ambivalent and anxious than the subject warrants. Critics of the painting have charged that it violates an innate truth carried in the original photograph. What is that truth, and is it inviolable? Or does it shift based on its framing, what is seen and what is unseen? What does a painting of Emmett Till in his casket need to show us?

Installation view of Pope.L aka William Pope.L, Claim (Whitney Version), 2017. Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 17-June 11, 2017. Collection of the artist; courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Photo: Matthew Carasella.

Historian Martin Berger has written in Seeing Through Race of how White media of the 1960s suppressed the circulation of the image of Till in his casket. “Given the importance of the Till murder to the history of civil rights, and the absence of visual representations of the boy’s suffering in the white press,” writes Berger, “analysis of the coverage of his death provides insights into the complex symbolic work that black children performed in the white imagination.” For Berger, “the modern civil rights movement was grounded on the unrepresented body of a black child,” namely Till, whose absence from the covers of mainstream newspapers indicated that “the idea of suffering black children was of greater interest to whites than visual evidence of their plight.” [emphasis his] Berger argues that White progressives’ inability to see Till as both a child and a visual manifestation of the everyday horror of White supremacy has hobbled efforts to improve social conditions for African Americans since the civil-rights era. His point is underscored by the similar rhetoric employed around the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, nearly sixty years later. In both cases, Black youths were described as “men,” their physical and sexual maturity greatly exaggerated, as a means of engendering public sympathy for the White men who committed the acts of killing.

Installation view of Henry Taylor, The 4th, 2012-2017 and THE TIMES THAY AINT A CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH!, 2017, with Deana Lawson, Ring Bearer, 2016. [Taylor] Collection of the artist; courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo. [Lawson] Collection of the artist; courtesy Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 17-June 11, 2017. Photo: Matthew Carasella.

Some critics of the painting have faulted the biennial’s curators, Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, for racial insensitivity in including this work. It is an ironic charge for two Asian American curators who for the first time lead the biennial team without a White colleague. Is it a tone-deaf choice? Possibly. Is it intended to foreclose dialogue around race, or to provoke it? Speaking to artnet, Lew described his intention to address questions of race head-on in the exhibition: “We spend our everyday lives skirting around these issues, but they’re really built into the show—we’re not running away from these discussions.” Asian Americans, though hardly a homogenous group or evenly represented in the art world, frequently find themselves awash in racial nuance when debates turn black-and-white.

Installation view of Frances Stark, Ian F. Svenonius’s “Censorship Now” for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Spread 1 of 8 (Sincerely), 2017. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York. Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 17-June 11, 2017. Photo: Matthew Carasella.

Even the controversial call to destroy Schutz’s painting, issued by artist Hannah Black in an open letter, is anticipated in the biennial. The presentation of Frances Stark’s paintings, which employ text appropriated from the writings of musician Ian Svenonius, constitutes a vigorous defense of censorship on grounds of its necessity in equalizing political representation in cultural spaces, much as Black suggests. One wonders whether Black, a Berlin-based artist of Black and Jewish heritage, saw Open Casket in its 2016 debut at CFA in Berlin, as Lew did, and whether the work could have been read differently there given Schutz’s own Jewish background. What role Schutz’s painting was intended to play in the biennial’s racial dialogue is unclear, although it represents the lone instance of a White artist attempting to wrestle directly with questions of race. If the curators thought they would balance the scales by including Open Casket, thereby showing that White artists were open to engagement with racial issues, they blundered by neglecting to recognize that a White artist’s engagement must be with the racial imaginary of Whiteness in order to matter. That complicated and ugly construct is one that few Americans of any race are well equipped to dismantle.

Installation view of Dana Schutz, Open Casket, 2016, with Maya Stovall, Liquor Store Theatre, 2014-2016, and Julian Nguyen, Executive Function and Executive Solutions, 2017. [Schutz] Collection of the artist. [Stovall] Courtesy of the artist, Eric Johnston, and Todd Stovall. [Nguyen] Collection of the artist; courtesy Neue Alte Brucke, Frankfurt, and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London. Photo by the author.

The 2017 Whitney Biennial is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through June 11, 2017.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

Sturtevant. Warhol Black Marilyn, 2004; synthetic polymer silkscreen and acrylic on canvas; 15 ¾ x 13 ¾ in. (40 x 35 cm). Ringier Collection. Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London. © Sturtevant.

#access #discrimination #appropriation #institutions #representation #re-performance

Two important events transpired in the art world last week that have brought the complications of diversity and hierarchy into sharp focus. The first is the passing of artist Elaine Sturtevant, an artist who sublimated a critique of gendered inequity among artist peers into works that appropriated and re-created works deemed significant to the canon of contemporary art. The other is the withdrawal of the artist group Yams Collective from the Whitney Biennial following their unsuccessful resolution of objections to a racially problematic project by Joe Scanlan. These two stories illustrate the challenges that appropriation-based institutional critique continues to represent for art-world institutions that are resistant to change.

Rather than address gender inequity directly in her work, Sturtevant critiqued the negotiation between economics and art history that drives the valuation of art objects. Feminism was not her stated objective; in fact she disavowed gender’s relevance to her practice. Still, it is hardly a coincidence that the artists whose works she re-created were mostly white, heterosexual men, as these were the majority of works being shown and cited among her peers. She reenacted performances and re-created objects by Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Frank Stella, among others. By her acts of remaking, she thought through the processes and experiences of the artists who made these works before her, demystifying “genius” into a collection of styles and techniques; a catalog of contemporary practices that mirrored the distance and intellect of her own. Her work as an archivist and a re-producer prefigures important trends in contemporary art of the 1980s and 1990s by two decades.

Sturtevant was born in Ohio and came of age in New York, but the United States has been slow to embrace her. Exhibitions of her work were organized by the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Musée Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm over the past decade, yet the Sturtevant retrospective slated to open at MoMA in November 2014 will be the first museum show of her work in the U.S. since 1973. The wariness of American museums toward Sturtevant is surprising given their embrace of later appropriation artists such as the 1980s Pictures Generation, but less so considering the ongoing gender disparity among artists represented in museum collections. The market continues to prefer a canon defined by individual male superstars whom Sturtevant’s whole existence reflects as negation.

Micol Hebron. (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Project. Poster for Sara Meltzer Gallery (NYC) by Krista Feld, 2014.

Micol Hebron’s recent (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Poster Project at For Your Art in Los Angeles visualized the realities of gender imbalance in the art market on a grand scale. The galleries Hebron and her accomplices tallied in Los Angeles and New York represented nearly 70% male artists overall. As Sturtevant’s work so deftly makes clear, that economic circumstance also determines whose work is deemed significant to history. As yet, no similar assessment has been made of ethnic diversity among artists represented in galleries or museums. This would seem a logical next step and one that I intend to help initiate down the line.

A 2010 report commissioned by the American Alliance of Museums indicated that the racial composition of contemporary museum audiences has remained at a level of diversity reminiscent of the 1970s while the diversity of the general population has more than tripled during that time. Worse still, comparative data shows that the percentage of people of color who are visitors to museums and art galleries has decreased as those populations have increased. For example, in 1992 the data shows that 17.5% of Hispanics visited museums and galleries, but in 2008 it was only 14.5 percent. Meanwhile, the population of Hispanics in the U.S. multiplied from 9 percent to 30.2 percent. In approximate but digestible terms, while the population of Hispanics in the United States grew from 1:10 to 1:3, the population of Hispanics among art audiences dropped from 1:5 to 1:7. Similar, if less dramatic, trends are apparent among African Americans, the other minority group singled out in the NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, cited in the AAM report. Given that art-gallery and museum attendance is shown to be dropping overall, the lack of traction with growing minority populations should be a significant cause for concern within the art world. Inexplicably, the Whitney Museum has instead opted to openly alienate minority audiences in this year’s Biennial.

Donelle Woolford. Avatar, 2007; digital file. Photograph by Donelle Woolford.

The subject of the current controversy is Joe Scanlan’s contribution to the Biennial, curated in by Michelle Grabner. Scanlan is a white man and Princeton professor whose work engages consumerism and persona in the parodic, conceptual vein mined by Sturtevant. His project for the Whitney Biennial involves creating the fictional persona of an Ivy League-educated Black female artist, “Donelle Woolford,” and presenting performances and art objects conceptualized by Scanlan as the creative products of this fictional artist who is played by a variety of actors. One of “Woolford’s” works consists of re-performing a censored Richard Pryor stand-up routine from 1977 entitled “Dick’s Last Stand.” Work that manipulates artistic persona is not unprecedented. Beuys and Warhol self-mythologized, and many contemporary artists work under assumed or collective names, or even through simulacra. Adrian Piper’s work Mythic Being (1973) and the work of Sara Greenberger Rafferty, an artist whose critique of social roles in stand-up comedy Grabner also curated into the Biennial, appear to have directly influenced Scanlan’s choices.The problem with his project is that it functions by exploiting rather than critiquing the severely limited representation of minority artists at the Whitney, and in the art world more broadly. Scanlan’s own name does not appear in exhibitions that include “Donelle Woolford,” who is represented as if a real person. On the Whitney’s artist roster, the inclusion of “Woolford” brings the number of African American participants in the Biennial to 9 out of 103 (8%), and the number of female participants to 38 (37%) (statistics reported by Jillian Steinhauer at Hyperallergic).

The form of Scanlan’s project mimics the structures by which minority voices are circumscribed and appropriated by white-dominated institutions under increasingly multicultural social conditions. Their perspectives are edited and reconstructed according to the established priorities of the dominant political class, such that their presence is ultimately represented as justification of policies that actively exclude others like them. The actors who portray “Donelle Woolford” adopt dissimilar personae, potentially critiquing the interchangeability of minority faces in an exclusionary environment. However, by maintaining that exclusionary environment, the Whitney negates any credibility it might gain from enabling the critique. Scanlan’s presence as manipulator mirrors larger oppressive structures, but rather than open those structures to change, this project reinforces their inflexibility. There is simply no reason apart from institutional racism that the multiplicity of Black female perspectives that inform Scanlan’s project could not be gained through an actual multiplicity of Black female artists participating in the Biennial. The fact that the Whitney prefers to present Joe Scanlan speaks volumes.

The artist Joe Scanlan.

Calculated to stand out from the several dozen white male artists at the Biennial (and in every other high-profile show and job applicant pool), Scanlan uses “Woolford” to usurp the visibility accrued to minority artists in the contemporary art spotlight by the fact of their relative absence. For artists of color, that visibility is a small and hard-fought concession, a minor boost that does little to offset entrenched limitations on their access to art-world power structures. For Scanlan, the attention garnered by this project—and granted only because of the basic conditions of inequity within the exhibition and the art world—situates him to accrue benefits to his profile and market value commensurate with his position of privilege. He has parlayed this work into a professorship at Princeton (in a department where all of the tenured faculty appear to be white). He attempts to deflect the reality of that privilege by casting his fictional Black-woman persona as a person of privilege herself, as if this negates the structural power imbalance that his work exploits. (It does not.) Meanwhile, his inclusion sends a clear message to minority artists and art viewers that while the Whitney is welcoming on its face, the perspectives of people of color are subject to mediation by the white academic establishment.

HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera, 2014; video, color, sound; 54 minutes. Collection of the Artists. © HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?

Many artists and art supporters of color have already heard this message implicitly at countless exhibitions and art fairs. Yams Collective’s alias HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? used for the Biennial speaks to how pervasive the generic view of Blackness remains even in the new global art world, such that “Africa” is broadly and shallowly referenced as a historical and cultural framework, and only when compatible with a white-led agenda. Still, the inclusion of Scanlan’s project at the Whitney reads as blatantly exclusionary to many people of color. Already situated as a single entity charged with representing a vast diaspora in the absence of true parity, Yams Collective ultimately chose to withdraw their work from the exhibition after failing to receive what they felt was an adequately sensitive response from the museum staff or Grabner regarding their concerns. The collective explains that their withdrawal came at the tail end of the exhibition only after they abandoned a process of dialogue and reconciliation sought with the institution. It was met with a response from Joe Scanlan that underscores the tone-deaf nature of the whole undertaking, in which he justifies the “Donelle Woolford” project by extolling the educational value that producing the work has had for him personally: “I only want to say that the experiences I have had working on Donelle Woolford have been some of the most intellectually challenging and humanly rewarding experiences of my life.”

This self-centered perspective is at the heart of Scanlan’s decision to cast Black women as agents for his personal edification and creative expression. It supercedes concern for those women’s lack of cultural space for self-determination, self-edification, or self-expression, or even whether the present undertaking further erodes that space. If Joe Scanlan wants to make art that looks at the world from someone else’s perspective, he would do better to work collectively and share the credit for his undertaking with peers who can help him to broaden it rather than engage superficially through contracted performers whose influence over the project’s trajectory is secondary to his own. This also requires that the Whitney value the contributions of a mixed-race group of artists as highly as they do those of a single white man. If the Biennial is to be redeemed from the obstinacy displayed by this debacle, it will only be by including a genuine diversity of artists and points of view in 2016. They could start by hiring some non-white curators next time around.

The 2014 Whitney Biennial is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through May 25, 2014. Sturtevant’s retrospective will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from November 9, 2014–February 22, 2015.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

With the arrival of the new Whitney Museum on Gansevoort Street, New York’s once notorious Meatpacking District completes lower Manhattan’s transition from a no-man’s-land populated by artists and outcasts to a stomping ground for fashionable elites. Befitting of an institution that represents the American art world—which has long positioned itself within both these groups, often simultaneously—the Whitney would seem to want to have it both ways. With the museum’s inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See, audiences are presented with a chronological reworking of the history of American art as collected by the Whitney. The works installed on five floors of the gleaming Renzo Piano building tell a story that is complex, and at times contradictory, while demonstrating the limitations of official art-historical narratives in articulating the various trajectories of art and culture in the United States and in the 20th century.

Whitney Museum of American Art, view from Gansevoort Street, 2015. Photo: Ed Lederman.

The good news is that Whitney curators, led by Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs Donna De Salvo, have systematically sought out gaps in the museum’s permanent collection and attempted to fill in missing contributors to American art history since the late 19th century, with particular attention paid to works by women and people of color. Less encouraging is the limited impact that these new introductions have had on the curatorial framing of American art’s influences and objectives. On the eighth floor, covering the years 1910 to 1940, unfamiliar names like Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and Richmond Barthé join a familiar roster that includes Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, Lyonel Feininger, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Isamu Noguchi. The historical narrative is expanded a bit to include African and Asian influences as well as European modernism. Yet, non-Western influences are cited only in discussions of the works by artists of color, while the overarching themes of industrialization and geometric abstraction as American art’s primary interests in that period are preserved from earlier presentations of the collection. An opportunity to connect American modernism writ large to the United States’ emergence as a global power is thereby wholly missed.

Glenn Ligon. Rückenfigur, 2009; neon and paint; 24 × 145 1/2 × 5 in. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art © Glenn Ligon.

On the seventh floor, covering the years 1925 to 1960, images of immigration and alienation in the cities from artists including Charles White, Maya Deren, and George Tooker begin to compete with heroic depictions of the American West by Andrew Wyeth, Grant Wood, and Chiura Obata (whose Ukiyo-e woodblock prints of America’s national parks represent a major recent acquisition and a collection highlight). These themes converge in the work of Edward Hopper, who blends the clear light and detail of the landscape genre with the psychological charge of Surrealism. Mannerism as a tool of social critique appears in works by Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, and Paul Cadmus, which invoke the exaggerated caricatures of German Expressionists George Grosz and Otto Dix, though that relationship is not articulated at the museum. Social Realists working in printmaking and photography, including Mabel Dwight, Hugo Gellert, Margaret Bourke-White, Lisette Model, Walker Evans, and Weegee, depict the era as tumultuous and divided: plagued by poverty, labor abuses, racist violence, and war. A suite of important paintings by Jacob Lawrence, War Series (1946–7), and a major work by Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–1932),  situate these themes within a larger historical sweep. Sited somewhat incongruously at the center of this storm of passion and rage is Alexander Calder’s whimsical Calder’s Circus (1926–31)—one of the Whitney’s best-loved works—which embodies the energy but not the anxiety of the works in its vicinity.

Woodblock prints by Chiura Obata, 1930. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Gyo Obata. Photo by the author.

That combination of energy and anxiety continues, although stripped of historical specificity, in the adjacent gallery of Abstract Expressionism including works by Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Alfonso Ossorio, Alma Thomas, and Joan Mitchell. While some artists such as Gorky and Guston can be said to have been responding to social upheaval and ethnic violence, the historical engagement of the Social Realists has been replaced by introspection and metaphor. Abstract Expressionism’s reputation for large-scale machismo is beautifully challenged by the central placement of Lee Krasner’s The Seasons (1957), a work nearly 17 by 8 feet large that is rambunctious and pastoral at once. Painted shortly after the death of Krasner’s husband, Jackson Pollock, The Seasons shows Krasner coming into her own as both a major painter and a woman who no longer fears the critics’ dismissive characterizations of her work as “feminine.” Complemented with sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and Ruth Asawa, this arrangement balances the traditional masculine narrative of the period with female points of view.

Alfonso Ossorio. Number 14-1953, 1953; ink and wax on board; overall: 60 1/2 × 38 1/2 × 1 3/8 in.; sheet: 60 × 38 in. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Anuradha Vikram.

The sixth floor, including works from 1950 to 1975, fluctuates between the serenity of geometric abstraction and the clamor of assemblage. A tranquil, meditative tenor is established by paintings from Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Jo Baer, Carmen Herrera, and Jasper Johns, only to be radically disrupted by the reentry of day-to-day life into art’s refined spaces. Arguably the strongest grouping in the whole museum brings New York art stars like Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, and Ray Johnson into dialogue with West Coast artists such as Noah Purifoy, Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, (Marjorie) Cameron, and Jess (Collins). Artists of color including Raphael Montañez Ortiz and women including Lee Bontecou are given pride of place, effecting a balance of perspectives as with the Abstract Expressionist gallery above. These groupings are rewarding because they respond to diversity without reducing the curatorial narrative to a lecture on diversity—allowing each artist to function as an artist, engaged with form and material, and equally entitled to ambiguity and open-ended interpretation.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz. Archaeological Find, Number 9, 1964; wood, steel, plastic glues, rope, fabric, and horse hair; overall: 76 3/4 × 66 3/4 × 22 in. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Anuradha Vikram.

This openness and inclusion is maintained throughout the sixth floor, with works by Yayoi Kusama, Marisol (Escobar), Malcolm Bailey, Lee Lozano, Nam June Paik, and Betye Saar alongside Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud. Regrettably, these works from the 1960s and early 1970s are the last in painting and sculpture to challenge official narratives within the exhibition as a whole. A gallery dedicated to Minimalism includes Rafael Ferrer, Eva Hesse, Anne Truitt, and Michelle Stuart, but subverts these artists’ contributions to an established discourse centered on Donald Judd and Richard Serra, who dominate the space. On the fifth floor, covering 1965 to the present, a terrific collection of videos approaches gender, racial, and geographic parity by linking the interests of Suzanne Lacy, Eleanor Antin, Lynda Benglis, Hermine Freed, Cynthia Maughan, Howardena Pindell, and Ulysses Jenkins with more frequently shown works by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas, and William Wegman. Feminism is very much on display in video and photography by many of these artists as well as Hannah Wilke, Dara Birnbaum, Laurie Simmons, and Adrian Piper; however, with the exception of Lacy, artists representing the Feminist Art Program and the Women’s Building that emerged from Los Angeles in the 1970s are absent.

Eva Hesse. Untitled, 1969-1970; latex, rope, string, and wire; dimensions variable. © Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.

In works from the 1980s through the present, the influence of the contemporary art market seems to inform selections in painting and sculpture as much as, or more than, the interests of posterity. Works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, Mark Bradford, David Hammons, and Jimmie Durham do less to challenge the official narrative than to demonstrate how contemporary art frameworks have adapted to incorporate artists of color and social-justice themes within a thriving luxury-goods economy over the past 40 years. This is not to say that the work is weak. Basquiat’s Hollywood Africans (1983) is to the Whitney what Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is to the MoMA collection: a watershed. Martin Wong’s Big Heat (1986), Mike Kelley’s More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and the Wages of Sin (1987), Fred Wilson‘s Guarded View (1991), and Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) will likewise be recognized by future generations as significant points of departure. Still, these works operate less like counterpoints to an official narrative than as its reinforcements, as the story has shifted from one of America’s heroic, masculine exceptionalism to one of America’s heartfelt yet superficial remorse at the inequality and pain we would prefer to believe we have left in the past.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Hollywood Africans, 1983; acrylic and oil stick on canvas; 84 1/16 × 84 in. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Anuradha Vikram.

Two works best encapsulate the conflict at the heart of the new Whitney Museum: Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), and Karen Kilimnik’s The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers (1989). Haacke turns his critical eye on real-estate transactions in lower Manhattan, chronicling exploitation of dire economic conditions by the wealthy to profit from the displacement of working-class New Yorkers. His work hangs in a gallery inside a $422 million building atop a natural-gas pipeline on a street that, in 1971, was home to slaughterhouses and transgender sex workers, and today hosts exclusive restaurants and a Louboutin store. Kilimnik’s installation considers a 1966 episode of the British serial The Avengers, “A Touch of Brimstone,” in which the titular spies infiltrate a fictional BDSM club that shares a name with one of the now defunct sex clubs of Gansevoort Street circa 1980–1990. Banned from broadcast in the U.S., the episode represents how popular media both absorbs and defangs what was once underground. Perhaps few people would begrudge the glittering river views of the new Whitney building for the AIDS-related anxiety and crushing poverty experienced by New York’s LGBTQI community between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. Nonetheless, the disappearance of that history from the shiny new Meatpacking District comes with an unaccounted-for cost. As Suzanne Lacy admonishes, it’s important to “learn where the meat comes from.”

Karen Kilimnik. The Hellfire Club episode of the Avengers, 1989; fabric, photocopies, candelabra, toy swords, mirror, gilded frames, costume jewelry, boot, fake cobwebs, silver tankard, audio media player, and dried pea; dimensions variable. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Peter M. Brant. Courtesy of the Brant Foundation. Photo: Anuradha Vikram.

America Is Hard to See is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through September 27, 2015. 

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

Two important events transpired in the art world last week that have brought the complications of diversity and hierarchy into sharp focus. The first is the passing of artist Elaine Sturtevant, an artist who sublimated a critique of gendered inequity among artist peers into works that appropriated and re-created works deemed significant to the canon of contemporary art. The other is the withdrawal of the artist group Yams Collective from the Whitney Biennial following their unsuccessful resolution of objections to a racially problematic project by Joe Scanlan. These two stories illustrate the challenges that appropriation-based institutional critique continues to represent for art-world institutions that are resistant to change.

Sturtevant. Warhol Black Marilyn, 2004; synthetic polymer silkscreen and acrylic on canvas; 15 ¾ x 13 ¾ in. (40 x 35 cm). Ringier Collection. Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London. © Sturtevant.

Rather than address gender inequity directly in her work, Sturtevant critiqued the negotiation between economics and art history that drives the valuation of art objects. Feminism was not her stated objective; in fact she disavowed gender’s relevance to her practice. Still, it is hardly a coincidence that the artists whose works she re-created were mostly white, heterosexual men, as these were the majority of works being shown and cited among her peers. She reenacted performances and re-created objects by Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Frank Stella, among others. By her acts of remaking, she thought through the processes and experiences of the artists who made these works before her, demystifying “genius” into a collection of styles and techniques; a catalog of contemporary practices that mirrored the distance and intellect of her own. Her work as an archivist and a re-producer prefigures important trends in contemporary art of the 1980s and 1990s by two decades.

Sturtevant was born in Ohio and came of age in New York, but the United States has been slow to embrace her. Exhibitions of her work were organized by the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Musée Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm over the past decade, yet the Sturtevant retrospective slated to open at MoMA in November 2014 will be the first museum show of her work in the U.S. since 1973. The wariness of American museums toward Sturtevant is surprising given their embrace of later appropriation artists such as the 1980s Pictures Generation, but less so considering the ongoing gender disparity among artists represented in museum collections. The market continues to prefer a canon defined by individual male superstars whom Sturtevant’s whole existence reflects as negation.

Micol Hebron. (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Project. Poster for Sara Meltzer Gallery (NYC) by Krista Feld, 2014.

Micol Hebron’s recent (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Tally Poster Project at For Your Art in Los Angeles visualized the realities of gender imbalance in the art market on a grand scale. The galleries Hebron and her accomplices tallied in Los Angeles and New York represented nearly 70% male artists overall. As Sturtevant’s work so deftly makes clear, that economic circumstance also determines whose work is deemed significant to history. As yet, no similar assessment has been made of ethnic diversity among artists represented in galleries or museums. This would seem a logical next step and one that I intend to help initiate down the line.

A 2010 report commissioned by the American Alliance of Museums indicated that the racial composition of contemporary museum audiences has remained at a level of diversity reminiscent of the 1970s while the diversity of the general population has more than tripled during that time. Worse still, comparative data shows that the percentage of people of color who are visitors to museums and art galleries has decreased as those populations have increased. For example, in 1992 the data shows that 17.5% of Hispanics visited museums and galleries, but in 2008 it was only 14.5 percent. Meanwhile, the population of Hispanics in the U.S. multiplied from 9 percent to 30.2 percent. In approximate but digestible terms, while the population of Hispanics in the United States grew from 1:10 to 1:3, the population of Hispanics among art audiences dropped from 1:5 to 1:7. Similar, if less dramatic, trends are apparent among African Americans, the other minority group singled out in the NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, cited in the AAM report. Given that art-gallery and museum attendance is shown to be dropping overall, the lack of traction with growing minority populations should be a significant cause for concern within the art world. Inexplicably, the Whitney Museum has instead opted to openly alienate minority audiences in this year’s Biennial.

Donelle Woolford. Avatar, 2007; digital file. Photograph by Donelle Woolford.

The subject of the current controversy is Joe Scanlan’s contribution to the Biennial, curated in by Michelle Grabner. Scanlan is a white man and Princeton professor whose work engages consumerism and persona in the parodic, conceptual vein mined by Sturtevant. His project for the Whitney Biennial involves creating the fictional persona of an Ivy League-educated black female artist, “Donelle Woolford,” and presenting performances and art objects conceptualized by Scanlan as the creative products of this fictional artist who is played by a variety of actors. One of “Woolford’s” works consists of re-performing a censored Richard Pryor stand-up routine from 1977 entitled “Dick’s Last Stand.” Work that manipulates artistic persona is not unprecedented. Beuys and Warhol self-mythologized, and many contemporary artists work under assumed or collective names, or even through simulacra. Adrian Piper’s work Mythic Being (1973) and the work of Sara Greenberger Rafferty, an artist whose critique of social roles in stand-up comedy Grabner also curated into the Biennial, appear to have directly influenced Scanlan’s choices.The problem with his project is that it functions by exploiting rather than critiquing the severely limited representation of minority artists at the Whitney, and in the art world more broadly. Scanlan’s own name does not appear in exhibitions that include “Donelle Woolford,” who is represented as if a real person. On the Whitney’s artist roster, the inclusion of “Woolford” brings the number of African American participants in the Biennial to 9 out of 103 (8%), and the number of female participants to 38 (37%) (statistics reported by Jillian Steinhauer at Hyperallergic).

The form of Scanlan’s project mimics the structures by which minority voices are circumscribed and appropriated by white-dominated institutions under increasingly multicultural social conditions. Their perspectives are edited and reconstructed according to the established priorities of the dominant political class, such that their presence is ultimately represented as justification of policies that actively exclude others like them. The actors who portray “Donelle Woolford” adopt dissimilar personae, potentially critiquing the interchangeability of minority faces in an exclusionary environment. However, by maintaining that exclusionary environment, the Whitney negates any credibility it might gain from enabling the critique. Scanlan’s presence as manipulator mirrors larger oppressive structures, but rather than open those structures to change, this project reinforces their inflexibility. There is simply no reason apart from institutional racism that the multiplicity of black female perspectives that inform Scanlan’s project could not be gained through an actual multiplicity of black female artists participating in the Biennial. The fact that the Whitney prefers to present Joe Scanlan speaks volumes.

The artist Joe Scanlan.

Calculated to stand out from the several dozen white male artists at the Biennial (and in every other high-profile show and job applicant pool), Scanlan uses “Woolford” to usurp the visibility accrued to minority artists in the contemporary art spotlight by the fact of their relative absence. For artists of color, that visibility is a small and hard-fought concession, a minor boost that does little to offset entrenched limitations on their access to art-world power structures. For Scanlan, the attention garnered by this project—and granted only because of the basic conditions of inequity within the exhibition and the art world—situates him to accrue benefits to his profile and market value commensurate with his position of privilege. He has parlayed this work into a professorship at Princeton (in a department where all of the tenured faculty appear to be white). He attempts to deflect the reality of that privilege by casting his fictional black-woman persona as a person of privilege herself, as if this negates the structural power imbalance that his work exploits. (It does not.) Meanwhile, his inclusion sends a clear message to minority artists and art viewers that while the Whitney is welcoming on its face, the perspectives of people of color are subject to mediation by the white academic establishment.

HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera, 2014; video, color, sound; 54 minutes. Collection of the Artists. © HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?

Many artists and art supporters of color have already heard this message implicitly at countless exhibitions and art fairs. Yams Collective’s alias HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? used for the Biennial speaks to how pervasive the generic view of blackness remains even in the new global art world, such that “Africa” is broadly and shallowly referenced as a historical and cultural framework, and only when compatible with a white-led agenda. Still, the inclusion of Scanlan’s project at the Whitney reads as blatantly exclusionary to many people of color. Already situated as a single entity charged with representing a vast diaspora in the absence of true parity, Yams Collective ultimately chose to withdraw their work from the exhibition after failing to receive what they felt was an adequately sensitive response from the museum staff or Grabner regarding their concerns. The collective explains that their withdrawal came at the tail end of the exhibition only after they abandoned a process of dialogue and reconciliation sought with the institution. It was met with a response from Joe Scanlan that underscores the tone-deaf nature of the whole undertaking, in which he justifies the “Donelle Woolford” project by extolling the educational value that producing the work has had for him personally: “I only want to say that the experiences I have had working on Donelle Woolford have been some of the most intellectually challenging and humanly rewarding experiences of my life.”

This self-centered perspective is at the heart of Scanlan’s decision to cast black women as agents for his personal edification and creative expression. It supercedes concern for those women’s lack of cultural space for self-determination, self-edification, or self-expression, or even whether the present undertaking further erodes that space. If Joe Scanlan wants to make art that looks at the world from someone else’s perspective, he would do better to work collectively and share the credit for his undertaking with peers who can help him to broaden it rather than engage superficially through contracted performers whose influence over the project’s trajectory is secondary to his own. This also requires that the Whitney value the contributions of a mixed-race group of artists as highly as they do those of a single white man. If the Biennial is to be redeemed from the obstinacy displayed by this debacle, it will only be by including a genuine diversity of artists and points of view in 2016. They could start by hiring some non-white curators next time around.

The 2014 Whitney Biennial is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through May 25, 2014. Sturtevant’s retrospective will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from November 9, 2014–February 22, 2015.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.