On the walk down Gansevoort to The Whitney in the full sun and disturbingly warm weather for mid-March, I saw a shining beacon holding vigil on the museum’s top floor terrace, looking northeast onto Manhattan next to an inverted American flag. It looked like she was guarding her house from pesky kids down the block and asking them not to ruin into her petunias with their bikes. Guarding her tilted house, she disappeared as I got closer, leaving me to look at the upside-down standard atop her roof as a banner of provocation on the part of the museum (I would later find out commissioned the terrace works for the Biennial I was in town to inspect). As I went inside, I wondered who this chrome, Americana-at-the-end-of-time NIMBY was, clutching her purse at passersby below.
I had been on a working slaycation in the U.S. of A. putting together the first issue of this magazine, but in the midst of this effort I sent a poorly-worded request to The Whitney Museum for a press pass to the preview of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which they have decided to call Even Better Than the Real Thing.
After a harrowing drive into the city (they hate to see a bitch from New Jersey winning!), I received my press pass and entered an elevator which was also being occupied by Rujeko Hockley, an associate curator at The Whitney, whose marital secrets I had just heard all about in that David Zwirner podcast lesbian-supreme Helen Molesworth hosts. It was going to be an unnerving day, no doubt. I went up to the top floor that the Biennial occupies—one of two—and began pissing about. I wanted to meet the lady who was like the show’s very own Statue of Liberty.
It turns out the terrace dweller was Kiyan Williams’ chrome dome Marsha P. Johnson resurrection holding a sign that says, “POWER TO THE PEOPLE,” standing next to a mud rendering of the White House sliding into the earth; to hell, or wherever else the occupants of that building over the years deserve to go. OK, I thought of the White House, I get the sentiment, but don’t we all already think it’s all going to shit no matter what side you’re coming from? With little information on the walls and in my ungenerous pamphlet, I thought the theme should have been cluelessness, because how is anyone supposed to know what the mud façade is really about?
As I walked away and looked at the other artwork throughout what felt like was a small show, I kept coming back to Marsha in my mind because the statue seemed to evoke a cold meaninglessness which anyone who knows who Marsha P. Johnson is would find antithetical to the way she lived her life. Unsatisfied and hungry for more, I went home and started my quest for information on what this work is referencing, if Marsha’s resurrection had been an act of imagination or if she had been plucked out of a moment in her life for the benefit of museum goers.
The statue is a recreation of a photograph by Diana Davies of Johnson protesting outside of Bellevue Hospital on October 5th, 1970. For a time in New York, anyone convicted of a felony sex crime (including consensual homosexual sex) was committed to Bellevue for a psychiatric evaluation often followed by involuntary treatment including electroconvulsive therapy. Pioneered by psychiatrist Laura Bender, victims of this treatment included Lou Reed.
That year, a black trans woman named Chris Thompson went to Bellevue seeking treatment for asthma but was locked in the psychiatric ward when the staff began to obsess about her ‘cross-dressing’ and was not allowed to leave. After a meeting with Silvia Rivera (a trans icon whose presence felt absent from the Biennial’s works) and journalist Arthur Bell, Rivera and Johnson organized a protest to the conditions at Bellevue and demanding Thompson’s release and an end to perverse medical procedures designed to correct so-called sexual deviance, which was sponsored by the Gay Liberation Front.
Williams’ version of this scene standing atop The Whitney seems entirely divorced from the message behind the image it is referencing both because the work itself lacks context in the exhibition and because it was commissioned by The Whitney itself. Museum commissions do not inherently become meaningless when a revolutionary message is sought after, but this golem of Marsha P. Johnson sanitizes the person she was by rendering her features blankly. There’s little soul in this cold metal. The bag she carries has been rendered the wrong way, emulating the photograph from the front featuring the bag’s metal hoop closure and strap, but viewed from the side the bag is elongated like a small duffle revealing the blank front side of a much larger bag which would never be designed that way, and I doubt Marsha would’ve carried anything other than a purse to a protest—it’s just not chic, and besides, big bags always look like trouble on the picket line. This sloppy oversight which betrays the statue as a thoughtless copy of Davies’ snapshot makes The Whitney Biennial’s Lady Liberty feel like a vehicle to claim space for the museum in the open air so the curators could say they were ‘letting black trans voice do the talking’—as much as an inanimate resurrection of one of the most consequential queer rights activists could speak to a public who doesn’t appreciate who she is or get an adequate lesson about it from the exhibition. It takes Marsha out of her world and turns her into a signpost pawn for viewers to be satiated by palatable queerness.
It is clear, like most white gays of a certain ilk living in The Village (read with New York gay drawl), that The Whitney thinks it’s special and holds a certain alternative mystique over its entrants (for the aforementioned gays, yes, I did mean it that way) who come to the institution for its reputation for curatorial gall. But the museum sits at the mouth of the Highline, making it a one stop shop for out-of-towners in khakis with too many pockets who go to museums as an act of tourism not of communion.
There’s something to be said about The Whitney’s former home at the Breuer Building–whose lobby was full of dizzying breast-like lights and somewhat dark gallery spaces with a churchly caveness that was difficult for the undetermined art viewer to penetrate–and subsequently for its lack of front-wearing backpackers (bag crimes of another kind). Now the flood gates are open in The Whitney’s Meatpacking era. And yes, more people looking at art is nice, but the prospective Biennial’s cultural audience is no longer just uptown (now downtown) richo-collectors and wannabes, art writers, cool artists and crafty queer students who find a way in. It must cater to the uninitiated completing The Whitney-MoMA-MET tourism triangle during their stay in the city. But this year, the museum didn’t give these prospective viewers the resources to understand the depth of who a Marsha P. Johnson type figure really is and what she means.
Ms. Johnson was asked to take on a figurative role by the curators to become a universal embodiment of a certain knowable transness. Aren’t we done asking Black trans women to do all the work? Even in death? She is presented as a universal symbol for transgression since her body coalesced so many different identities in and of itself. Within the context of the exhibition’s framing, if feels like she’s being asked to be representative of all non-cis, non-white bodies, left outside to draw in visitors from the street along with Williams’ inverted flag. She becomes like a saint in medieval paintings in churches and nooks where the illiterate can look at the figure and understand the story as best they can. For the curators, this seemed good enough when it came to the comprehensibility of their own rationale.
The Whitney seems to be so obsessed with pushing boundaries in their Biennial years that they forget that their best shows have always been specific. They have done the show 81 times, 21 times as the Biennial and 60 as an Annual. The Whitney has also have done some exceedingly important (“Black Male” curated by Thelma Golden in 1994, presented 3 years after Rodney King was murdered in L.A.) and recently good shows (I liked the Henry Taylor vehicle “B-Side” which ran last summer even though The Whitney tried to overly politicize it). But the problem with The Whitney Biennial is their urge to blow hot smoke up everyone’s ass as a way of faking relevance, which they don’t need to do, and never fails to be at its most noxious every two years.
Part of the problem is how The Whitney has aligned itself on a path of corrections for its racist and homophobic past—which is essential healing—sometimes doing so in a disingenuous and box-ticking way. In 2020, it cancelled its show, “Collective Actions: Artist Interventions in a Time of Change,” featuring the work of artists of color who objected to the museum acquiring their works at fundraisers meant to benefit racial justice organizations. Not only were the works intended for more small-scale destinations, the spirit behind offering them at lower prices was to allow institutions access to work by artists of color which were more diverse in background and focus than an institution like The Whitney. In 1971, 15 of 75 Black artists reneged from the exhibition “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” after a Black curator was not appointed to lead the show. Golden’s curation of “Black Male” offers a model for successful correction in a sense, a laser focused eye whose works spoke together with and without her curatorial voice being right in front of the viewer.
In 2024, the Biennial press release and framing of this show didn’t enhance or bring together a group of works which are each individually interesting. The work had nothing to do with the ideas being talked about. The curators, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, lay out a broad vision of what it means to look at something “real” as we are getting more exposed to AI generated content on the daily. Ok, realness! The problem is, only one artist in the show uses AI and talks about it in their work (Holly Herndon & May Dryhurst’s boring ginger Dune 2 AI huntress/cuntress which is the opening view on the 6th floor).
This was not your realness per ballroom, per queer and Trans identity which looks to metamorphosize (if that’s a word) gender and the body’s ability to be seen within the context of “cisness,” to pass—a concept which many in the community have begun to move beyond. The “realness” of the online and AI which the curators bring forth is one which they note threatens trans and other racially and socially marginalized bodies as being tools to describe them as not “authentic,” housed within a cisgender point of view. We are asked to view these bodies from the outside the house looking in, not sitting at a metaphorical table inside where the work is having a discussion. There was little attempt to engage with queer theory that I could discern beyond a “listening tour” where the curators talked to artists about the vibes-at-large. If the project of the show was about these bodies and this idea of transgression and not centered on AI, then that would’ve been better.
For decades, sociological theory has documented how our lives are simultaneously produced through and against normative structures of sex, gender, and sexuality. These normative structures are often believed to operate along presumably “natural,” biological, and essentialized binaries of male/female, man/woman, and heterosexual/homosexual. However, as the lives and experiences of transgender people and their families become increasingly socially visible, these normative structuring binaries are called into stark question as they. fail to adequately articulate and encompass these social actors’ identities and social group memberships. - (Pfeffer 1), “I Don’t Like Passing as a Straight Woman”: Queer Negotiations of Identity and Social Group Membership.” 1
I imagine that Iles and Onli read this paper in framing the show itself. It’s important what we say about the art we are showing to each other in all sorts of spaces, from the gallery to our lizard brain-scratching phone screens. It matters that Kiyan Williams collects dirt from sites across the country where black people have communed, been murdered, been enslaved by the men we call Founding Fathers and claim to have built our country. But the reality is the wealthy men who lead the Revolution did so on the back of the people William’s soil reconnects us to. This country was built on slave labor, on indentured labor, on exploited immigrant labor, on marginalized labor. Our culture has been defined by the cries of freedom from these true builders of our nation, the white majority stealing their art and rhythm and resolve as its own. This depth lies inaccessible to the average viewer who doesn’t want to buy or can’t afford the catalog ($50) on top of their ticket price ($30 for adults, $24 for students). The exhibition also relies on a film program to bring in a more diverse range of artists which was curated by Onli, Illes and Taja Cheek, but this too remains inaccessible as no single ticket options were offered for admission to the series of films requiring repeat purchases of $24 tickets every time or a MUBI subscription. In trying to be everything, their voice becomes fractious. Per Pfeffer: “Passing” carries the assumption that certain individuals somehow naturally embody particular identities to which others can stake only inauthentic membership claims. In a sense, some individuals are understood as rightful “owners” of membership to particular social identity groups—most notably, those groups holding disproportionate social power and authority (Harris 1993; Calavita 2000). The concept of passing also relies on juxtaposed notions of conscious, intentional, deceptive “dupers” and presumably natural, authentic, deceived “dupes” (Serano 2007).
These ideas were the daily battles of Marsha P. Johnson and continue to be the foundations of attacks against trans women both physical and ideological. Within the realm of AI and the biological determinism that the conservative right and other hate groups use to delegitimize marginalized bodies across the board, it’s not immediately present in the curation that there is any dialogue between assumptions made about passing and an intersection with the struggle to define ownership over AI-created things—and how any of this directly addresses queering gender. The curators seemed to assert that the public believes they are inherently being duped by either gender transgression or by AI without interrogating the narrow and retrograde nature of that ideology as the actual inciting reason behind the violence against bodies which the curators note. Is Marsha she shining beacon of this ideal?
No acknowledgement of the heterosexual “duping” of victimhood which so-called average people in the world put onto themselves when confronted with gender transgression is made. There is a lack of synergy which leaves the framing sloppy. Where was the non-queer, non-informed audience supposed to come in? Even in the several oases of good art that exist throughout the show (Seba Calfuqueo’s Tray Tray Ko, Pollinator by Tourmaline which also resurrected the specter of Marsha P. Johnson, Sharon Hayes’ Recherche: four—all films dealing with generational queerness), heterosexual viewers seemed positioned as curious voyeurs rather than eager learners. When I was as the preview Hayes’ work, which features outdoor chairs to invite the audience into the outdoor roundtable of queer elders they were watching, became a place for the elderly to rest their legs and fall asleep. It wasn’t clear if the stack of lawn chairs behind the screen were accessible by the audience.
Instead, we are locked in a cis art cage with the curators, in which a broad range of identities are represented on a ship without a rudder or wheel. Rather than presenting a vision of America from the point of view of a plurality of trans art practitioners working today, the curators create a space where attempts at representing everyone make each cluster of identities across the Biennial floors feel box-ticking. Why couldn’t we have been giving an exhibition by and for trans artists, signaling that we are entering a new age? As we move further and further away from centering millennial identity politics (the way identity is weaponized as a selfish and singular tool to establish personal uniqueness) and towards and understanding of how systems of oppression in gender are more complicated that many have time to admit, its a shame that The Whitney had chosen the former, bringing together a group of brilliant individuals whose chorus is off-pitch, to no fault of their own.
Maybe the big ‘ol question The Whitney Biennial should be asking is who built our American vernacular? Who builds our cultural identity? Where do we get the words we speak, the ways we dress? The codes we switch in and out of. Who is doing the work for the rest of us to “yasss,” “purr,” and “slay” our way through the day? Let me save you some time: trans women of color.
It is so essential to be able to say two things at once. We must lift up people like Marsha P. Johnson who lived more daringly than any of us could imagine, while also not allowing her legend to become diluted by pop cultural recognition. No straight white girls calling each other “sis” and wearing flower crowns at a Brooklyn pride event with their enabling and clueless corporate white fag handlers. Though a devout Christian her whole life, we cannot make Marsha a gay Jesus, turning the events of her life and death into a gospel to settle on and preach as the universal story of liberation. She offers no absolution; she did not die for our freedom. She lived each day as herself and for that she had to fight, but her legacy is a lesson on resisting the comforts offered by the masses for assimilation—into an art world; into an economy; into the darkness of similarity which white picket fence Joes demand of us for the right to scrape by.
1,2 Pfeffer, Carla A. “‘I Don’t Like Passing as a Straight Woman’: Queer Negotiations of Identity and Social Group Membership.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 120, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1–44.