WHICH WHITNEY WAS SHE: A STUDY OF THE 2014 WHITNEY BIENNIAL, WHITNEY HOUSTON BIENNIAL, AND LAST BRUCENNIAL

A Thesis Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS

by Nicole S. Restaino December 2016

Committee Members:

Gerald Silk, Thesis Adviser, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art Philip Glahn, Associate Professor of Critical Studies and Aesthetics

ABSTRACT

This study examines three related exhibitions from the spring of 2014: the Whitney

Biennial, the Whitney Houston Biennial, and the Last Brucennial, assessing the problematics invoked across all three shows, including representation in the art world; the nexus of contemporary feminist art, theory, and its display; and the role of exhibitions and display in creating meaning in the contemporary art world. The analysis begins with reviews, interviews, and other primary-source documentation of the three shows. The second chapter then situates the projects among an art historical continuum. The third and final chapter of the thesis conducts a theoretical analysis, utilizing methodologies from performance studies and visual cultural studies. The three chapters and their attendant methodologies build toward the conclusion, which suggests that the 2014 Whitney

Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial interact with one another and through a rich, complex web of contemporary art practices and conditions to create meaning and perhaps foment change.

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This paper is dedicated to my family, Joyce and Pat Restaino and

Ashley Haimson Restaino and Scott Restaino. Thank you

for your unending love and support.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the many individuals who helped me craft, perfect, and edit this paper, and those who challenged and shaped my thinking around art, its history, and its criticism. Thanks to friends and family who formed a network of support.

Firstly, I would like to thank my primary adviser, Dr. Gerald Silk, who provided continuous feedback and so generously worked with tight deadlines as I finished the thesis, moved, and started a new job all at once. My second reader, Dr. Philip Glahn, was also an invaluable source of feedback and support throughout this project and my graduate career. He truly guided my development as art historian and critic. I certainly owe a debt of gratitude to the entire art history department, both faculty and staff, who help support me and all the students each step of the way, particularly Drs. Tracy Cooper and Elizabeth Bolman, as well as Michele Gudknecht.

To my art-best-friend, Sasha Goldman, I could not have done this without you!!!

John Emison, Tiffany Livingston, and Janet Beeler-thank you for being incredibly talented artists; your work inspires me, as do our discussions about art, performance, criticism, exhibition, and everything else. Thanks to artist, historian, and critic friends

Jameson Paige, Spencer Silverthorne, Victoria Fleck, Elizabeth Duntemann, Alex Ibsen,

Theresa Sterner, Claire Howard, Kaelin Jewell and Chris Hammes. Jackie Sipes, Kristin

DiFidi-Williams, Rachel Cox, Madeline Horn, Andrew Marsh, Valerie Temple, Chelsea

MacDonald, Megan Kahwajian, Aimee Console, and Sarah Kessler also offered their kind words and friendship throughout the process.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………ii

DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………..iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………….....v

LIST OF FIGURES/ILLUSTRATIONS………………………………………...vii

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………...……….xiii

CHAPTERS

1. INTRODUCING IN THE SPRING OF 2014: THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL, WHITNEY HOUSTON BIENNIAL, AND LAST BRUCENNIAL……………………………...………...... 1

The 2014 Whitney Biennial……………………………...………………..2

The Last Brucennial……………………………………………………….7

The Whitney Houston Biennial…………………………..……………….9

The Whitney’s History of Controversy, Featuring 1993………………...11

Chapter Conclusions……………………………………………………..14

2. HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY: INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE, CURATION, FEMINIST PRACTICE…………………………………………. 16

Historiography…………………………………………………………...17

Museological Theory…………………………………………………….18

Critique, Curation, and Exhibition Making in Artistic Practice………….21 Since the 1990s

Biennial Culture and the Exhibitionary Expanse………………………...25

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A Feminist Legacy………………………………………………………..30

Chapter Conclusions……………………………………………………...35

3. THE EXHIBITIONS AND THEIR THEORY: ANALYSIS AND IMPLICATIONS……………………………………………..37

Exhibition as Medium …………………………………………………....39

Performativity in the Exhibition………………………………………….43

Exhibition and Performance in the Expanded Field……………………...47

Chapter Conclusions……………………………………………….……..49

4. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………..51

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………..55

APPENDIX, ILLUSTRATIONS/FIGURES...…………………………………..62

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LIST OF FIGURES/ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1.1, Semiotext(e), Semiotext(e) New Series, 2014 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)

Fig. 1.2, Sterling Ruby, Basin Theology/Butterfly Wreck, 2013, Ceramic, 28 1/8 × 39 3/8 × 41 inches (71.4 × 100 × 104.1 cm). © Sterling Ruby. Photograph by Robert Wedemeyer.

Fig. 1.3, Allan Sekula, Sketch from Allan Sekula’s notebook “PF poland 2009 (1),” 2009. Ink, correction fluid, and colored marker on paper, 3.5 × 5.5 in. (9 × 14 cm). The Estate of Allan Sekula; © the Estate of Allan Sekula.

Fig. 1.4, Zoe Leonard, 945 Madison Avenue, 2014 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Collection of the artist; courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Murray Guy, and Galleria Raffaella Cortese. Photograph by Bill Jacobson Studio, New York.

Fig. 1.5, Demonstrating the multiplicity of practices in the 2014 Whitney Biennial is this image of works by Joel Otterson, Sheila Hicks, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung. Photograph by Raymond Meier.

Fig. 1.6, Tony Greene, curated by Catherine Opie and Richard Hawkins, installation view.

Fig. 1.7, Julie Ault, Afterlife: a constellation, 2014 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Courtesy the artist. Photograph by Bill Orcutt.

Fig. 1.8, The Gregory Battcock Archive, 2009-14 by Joseph Grigley and Rebecca Morris (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.

Fig. 1.9, Angeline Evans, Malachi at the Empty Bottle (Pool Table Series), 2003. Courtesy the artist. Included in the project Malachi Ritscher by Public Collectors.

Fig. 1.10, Gretchen Bender, People in Pain, 1988 (detail). Paint on heat-set vinyl and neon, 84 × 560 × 11 in. (213.4 × 1422.4 × 27.9 cm). Remade by Philip Vanderhyden, 2014. The Estate of Gretchen Bender. Photograph by Philip Vanderhyden. vii

Fig. 1.11, David Foster Wallace, page from the Pale King materials, “Midwesternism” notebook, undated. Manuscript notebook, 10 1/2 × 8 1/4 in. (26.7 × 21.0 cm). Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Image used with permission from the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust.

Fig. 1.12, Works by (left to right) Jacqueline Humphries, Sterling Ruby, Dona Nelson, Pam Lins and Amy Sillman on fourth floor, curated by Michelle Grabner (installation view Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.

Fig. 1.13, Image of “Donelle Woolford” used by Whitney Museum, credited to “Woolford’s Studio,” though this was a character of artist Joe Scanlan’s creation. Credit supplied on Whitney Museum’s site: Donelle Woolford, Avatar, 2007. Digital file, Collection of the artist. Photograph by Donelle Woolford.

Fig. 1.14, Jennifer Kidwell performs as Donelle Woolford. Photograph by Stephen Garrett Dewyer/Infinite Mile.

Fig. 1.15, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, still from Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera, 2014. Collection of the artists. © HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?

Fig. 1.16, Dawoud Bey, Portrait of Barack Obama, 2014 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).

Fig. 1.17, Installation view of 2014 Last Brucennial, New York, 2014. Photograph via NYU.

Fig. 1.18, Installation view of 2014 Last Brucennial, New York, 2014. Photograph via NYU.

Fig. 1.19, Installation view of 2014 Last Brucennial, New York, 2014. Photograph via NYU.

Fig. 1.20, The Bruce High Quality Foundation. Raft of the Medusa, 2004. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of the Foundation.

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Fig. 1.21, performance during Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photo courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 1.22, installation view of Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 1.23, installation view of Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 1.24, installation view of Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 1.25, performance during Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photo courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 1.26, installation view of Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 1.27, feminist performance at the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 2.1, Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-1959. Photograph courtesy Rauschenberg Foundation.

Fig. 2.2, Robert Rauschenberg, Yellow Body, 1968. Photograph courtesy Guggenheim Museum.

Fig. 2.3, Rirkrit Tirvanija, Untitled (Free), 1992.

Fig. 2.4, Fred Wilson, Mining The Museum, 1992-1993 (installation view, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore).

Fig. 2.5, Fred Wilson, Mining The Museum, 1992-1993 (installation view, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore).

Fig. 2.6, Fred Wilson, Mining The Museum, 1992-1993 (installation view, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore).

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Fig. 2.7, enjoying the energetic event surrounding the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 2.8, enjoying the energetic event surrounding the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 2.9, enjoying the energetic event surrounding the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 2.10, Nancy Graves, Shamna, 1970, (installation view, Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany).

Fig. 2.11, Joseph Beuys, Boxkampf für direkte Demokratie (Boxing Match for Direct Democracy), performed at Documenta 5, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 1972. Image: documenta Archiv Stadt Kassel. ©2015 Estate of Joseph Beuys/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Fig. 2.12, Joseph Beuys, Büro der Organisation für direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung, Documenta 5, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 1972. Image: documenta Archiv Stadt Kassel. ©2015 Estate of Joseph Beuys/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Fig. 2.13, Biokenetic, Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany, 1972.

Fig. 2.14, Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel, Ein Haus für Schweine und Menschen (A House for Pigs and People), 1997. Documenta X, Kassel, Germany. According to the Documenta website, this “ The supposedly idyllic, interspecies setting combined subtly disturbing evolutionary theory with the gruesome reality of profit-oriented mass animal husbandry.”

Fig. 2.15, Christine Hill, Volksboutique, 1997. Hill initially ran Volksboutique, a used clothing store/installation, on an East Berlin side street, after living in the city for several years. She was invited to set up a franchise at Documenta X, where it ran for the 100 day stretch of the show in a vacant storefront in an underground passageway in the city of Kassel.

Fig. 2.16, Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument, 2002 (installation view Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany).

Fig. 2.17, 533 N. Mariposa Street, Los Angeles, site of Womanhouse. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the Arts Institute Archives.

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Fig. 2. 18, Cock and Cunt play in Womanhouse, 1972. Written by Judy Chicago, with Faith Wilding. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the Arts Institute Archives.

Fig. 2.19, Lea’s Room in Womanhouse, 1972. Performance work by Karen LeCoq. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the Arts Institute Archives.

Fig. 2.20, Dollhouse in Womanhouse, 1972. Sculpture by Miriam Schapiro. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the Arts Institute Archives.

Fig. 2.21, Dollhouse in Womanhouse (detail), 1972. Sculpture by Miriam Schapiro. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the Arts Institute Archives.

Fig. 2.22, Dollhouse in Womanhouse (detail), 1972. Sculpture by Miriam Schapiro. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the Arts Institute Archives.

Fig. 2.23, Lipstick Bathroom in Womanhouse, 1972. Installation by Camille Grey. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the Arts Institute Archives.

Fig. 2.24, Shoe Closet in Womanhouse, 1972. Installation by Beth Bachenheimer. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the Arts Institute Archives.

Fig. 2.25, Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–79 (installation view, Brooklyn Museum, 2002). Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Photograph courtesy Brooklyn Museum, by Donald Woodman.

Fig. 2.26, Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, Saint Bridget place setting, 1974–79. Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Photograph courtesy Brooklyn Museum, by Jook Leung Photography.

Fig. 2.27, Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, Sappho place setting, 1974–79. Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Photograph courtesy Brooklyn Museum, by Jook Leung Photography.

Fig. 2.28, Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, Virginia Woolf place setting, 1974–79. Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Photograph courtesy Brooklyn Museum, by Jook Leung Photography.

Fig. 2.29, Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, close up view of Heritage Floor names, 1974- 1979. Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Photograph courtesy Brooklyn Museum, by Donald Woodman.

Fig. 2.30, installation view of Bad Girls, 1994, New Museum, New York.

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Fig. 2.31, Works by Martha Roesler in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, (installation view Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles).

Fig. 2.32, Works by (left to right) Katharina Sieverding, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt and Orlan in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (installation view Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). Photograph by Brian Forrest.

Fig. 2.33, Works by (left to right) Louise Fishman, Joan Snyder, Isa Genzken, Lynda Benglis, Susan Hiller and Miriam Schapiro in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (installation view Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). Photograph by Brian Forrest.

Fig. 2.34, Boryana Rossa, Celebrating the Next Twinkling, 1999. On view during Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, 2007. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 2.35, Ryoko Suzuki, Bind, 2001. On view during Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, 2007. Photograph courtesy of Zeit-Foto Salon, Tokyo.

Fig. 2.36, Pilar Albarracìn, Long Live Spain (Viva España), 2004. On view during Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, 2007. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 3.1, Performance at the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 3.2, Performance at the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 3.3, Performance at the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 3.4, Copy of Krauss’ diagram denoting sculpture as the convergence between not- architecture and not-sculpture.

Fig. 3.5, Copy of Krauss’ diagram complete with complex and neuter terms.

Fig. 3.6, Klein group after Krauss’ analysis of sculpture, diagramming exhibition along an expanded field of practice.

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INTRODUCTION

In March of 2014, the Whitney Museum opened its 77th Biennial exhibition, the last to take place in its iconic uptown Manhattan location. This biannual guidepost of emerging and contemporary practices in American art was, as always, both highly anticipated and hotly contested. From the show’s detractors arose a well-worn refrain: the homogeneity of the 77th Whitney Biennial overshadowed its status as a taste-making, opinion-changing, challenging gathering of the best in American cultural production.1

Among the usual set of articles, write ups, and blog posts arose a distinct form of critique, two exhibitions with titular or thematic nods aimed right at the Whitney’s juggernaut biennial—the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Last Brucennial and the

Whitney Houston Biennial: I’m Every Woman, curated by painter C. Finley. At the heart of the curatorial charges of both the Last Brucennial and the Whitney Houston Biennial is the claim that the 2014 Whitney Biennial did not truly represent the best works by new and emerging artists, due to its only cursory inclusion of female, queer, and non-white artists.

Throughout this paper, I will address the problematics invoked across all three shows, including representation in the art world; the nexus of contemporary feminist art,

1 Jill Steinhauser of Hyperallergic provides the most succinct and damning demonstration of the Biennial homogeneity-only 32% of Biennial artists were women, 7.6% were people-of-color. Jillian Steinhauer, “The Depressing Stats of the 2014 Whitney Biennial,” Hyperallergic (blog), November 15, 2013, http://hyperallergic.com/93821/the-depressing-stats-of-the-2014-whitney-biennial/. My suggestion that the Whitney Biennial has always been a lightning rod, and that its intent is and has always been to provoke the art world while surveying of-the-moment American visual culture was informed by the extremely brief but dually informative history of the Biennial by Noelle Bodick for Artspace. Noelle Bodick, “A Brief History of the Whitney Biennial, America’s Most Controversial Art Show,” Artspace (blog), March 4, 2014, http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/in_focus/history_whitney_biennial-52098. xiii theory, and its display; and the role of exhibitions and display in creating meaning in the contemporary art world. My analysis does not assess the success of the Whitney Houston

Biennial and Last Brucennial against the Whitney Museum of American Art. Nor does it suggest a dichotomy of institution vs. alternative or antagonist vs. protagonist, with the

Whitney Museum assuming the former in both bifurcations. As this thesis makes clear, a nexus of critiques, controversies, and coincidences intertwines all three shows. To provide just one example, the 2012 Whitney Biennial included work by the Bruce High

Quality Foundation, and the 2014 show initially featured a piece by the

HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican? collective of which Finley is a part. Eventually the collective dropped out of the Whitney show, protesting its lack of diversity, all while

Finley was planning the Whitney Houston Biennial.

This paper instead analyzes the political possibilities of curation as an artistic practice, by framing curatorial action as a performative activity, and assessing it along a historiographic continuum that includes other socially engaged, performative practices.

Methodologically, I rely on frameworks developed by scholars including Irit Rogoff,

Beatrice von Bismarck, and Paul O’Neill, which posit that exhibitions, as a form of practice, engender new knowledge, precipitate further questioning, and “create differences, deviances, and frictions with the existing conditions.”2

Read through these theories, the Whitney Houston Biennial and Last Brucennial are not simply an alternative to the Whitney Biennial. Instead, the former reshapes

2 Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck, “A Conversation Between Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck,” in Cultures of the Curatorial, ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff and Thomas Weski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 37. xiv understandings of the latter, acting as a “durational, transformative, and speculative activity...encouraging certain ideas to come to the fore in an emergent, communicative practice."3 Through their interplay with one another, the Whitney Houston Biennial: I’m

Every Woman, the Last Brucennial, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial form a material example of the theoretical suggestion that exhibitions are performative, transitory events.

3 Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 89. xv

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING IN THE SPRING OF 2014: THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL, WHITNEY HOUSTON BIENNIAL, AND LAST BRUCENNIAL

This first chapter analyzes the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the Whitney Houston Biennial and the

Last Brucennial through reviews and criticism from spring of 2014, when all three exhibitions opened. This chapter also both describes and evaluates the form, content, and material circumstances of each show through sources including exhibition catalogs, interviews (both conducted by the author and from press sources), and images. This analysis demonstrates the interlocking, dialogic interaction between all three exhibitions. It also establishes all three as rich, complex sites that draw on contemporary curatorial models, employ artist-curated techniques and showcase a breadth of work, at least in medium and format. This analysis complicates the critical perspective in which the Whitney Houston Biennial and Last Brucennial stand in opposition to the 2014 Whitney Biennial. At the same time, it will acknowledge the ways in which the Whitney Houston Biennial and Brucennial highlight critical concerns around the Whitney Museum show.

This chapter also includes the historical case study of the 1993 Whitney Biennial. This show was mired in similar controversies around identity politics. It also similarly demonstrates the knot of interactions between an exhibition and its detractors, whether sharp-tongued critics, or curators proposing critique through the exhibitionary form. Ultimately, this chapter provides a material case study of exhibitions in dialogue, and demonstrates the particular political potency of the exhibitionary medium, providing a grounding in details before moving onto more theoretical concerns of exhibitionary form, performance, history, and political operation later in the thesis.

1 The 2014 Whitney Biennial

On March 7, 2014, the Whitney Museum of American Art invited the public into the 77th

iteration of their juggernaut biennial. This would be the final biennial to take place in the historic

Breuer Building on Manhattan’s upper east side before the entire museum’s operations,

collections, and, of course the biannual event itself, moved to a much hipper address on the far

west side of lower Manhattan. For the 2014 show, each of three curators, Anthony Elms,

Michelle Grabner and Stuart Comer, organized separate floors of the museum, carving discrete

spatial territories within the larger whole. Despite the separateness of their curatorial selection,

the three came together to suggest their hope that the show demonstrate the “profoundly diverse

and hybrid cultural identity of America today.”1 The museum’s Chief Curator and Deputy

Director of Programs, Donna De Salvo, echoed the institution's perception that the show was

pluralistic and inclusive, stating that it “offer[ed] one of the broadest and most diverse takes on ​ art in the United States that the Whitney has offered in many years.”2 The show teemed with 103

works representing objects and practices as disparate as the catalog of the Semiotext(e) ​ publishing imprint (fig. 1.1), sculpture from contemporary art star Sterling Ruby (fig. 1.2), works

from well-established names such as Allan Sekula (fig. 1.3), and a large scale installations, such

as Zoe Leonard’s massive camera obscura (fig. 1.4).

This striking breadth of practices confirms DeSalvo’s claim, at least in terms of medium

and format. Critics noted that 2014 Biennial selections included the “full monty of materials that

serve art today: vinyl, bronze, concrete, paper, plastic, clay, wood, fiber, fabric, acrylic, oil,

1 Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms and Michelle Grabner, introduction to Whitney Biennial 2014 (New York: Whitney ​ ​ Museum of Art, 2014, distributed by Yale University Press), 14. 2 “Whitney Biennial 2014,” Whitney Museum of American Art, accessed December 2016, http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2014Biennial. 2 graphite, powder-coated aluminum, enameled plexiglass, you-name-it readymades,

dust-to-garbage detritus, and the full array—neon, LED, Ganzfeld—of light-stimulated

experience.”3 (fig 1.5) There was also critical interest in the inclusion of archives, collections,

and small, curated selections throughout the show. Holland Cotter noted in his New York Times ​ review that “Within Mr. Comer’s installation, as in the Biennial as a whole, artists are curators,”

calling particular attention to a “mini-retrospective of paintings-on-photographs by...Tony

Greene” organized by photographer Catherine Opie and painter Richard Hawkins at Comer’s

request (fig. 1.6).4 Walter Robinson, in ArtSpace, is equally fascinated by this impulse, calling it ​ ​ a “special kind of generosity,” as artists curate and display the work of their peers: “Julie Ault

installs a ‘constellation’ of works by several people; Joseph Grigely presents an archive left

behind by the late critic Gregory Battcock; the Chicago group Public Collectors displays material

related to the noise-music fan Malachi Ritscher, who immolated himself to protest the Iraq war;

Philip Vanderhyden presents a laboriously reconstructed lost work by the late Pictures

Generation artist Gretchen Bender.”5 (figs. 1.7-1.10)

Another Times article notes a plethora of work by artist collectives, quoting De Salvo’s ​ ​ claim that the collectively created works in the 2014 show are more “fluid and diverse than

ever.”6 Several reviews noted the inclusion of text-based practices, with Brooks Adams calling it

“the writers’ biennale”7 and Emily Apter describing the show as “replete with printed matter,

3 Jill Spalding, “Farewell to the Breuer-The 2014 Whitney Biennial,” The Miami Rail, June 18, 2014, ​ ​ http://miamirail.org/summer-2014/farewell-to-the-breuer-the-2014-whitney-biennial/. 4 Holland Cotter, “One Last Dance in the Old Place: 2014 Whitney Biennial has New Faces and Interesting Choices,” Art Reviews. New York Times, March 6, 2014. ​ ​ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/07/arts/design/2014-whitney-biennial-has-new-faces-and-interesting-choices.html?_r=0 5 Walter Robinson, “The Many Faces of the 2014 Whitney Biennial,” Artspace, March 20, 2014, ​ ​ http://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/walter_robinson_on_the_whitney_biennial-52152. 6 Felicia Lee, “Singular Art, Made by Plurals: Yams Collective Brings Work to the Whitney Biennale,” Art & Design, New York ​ Times, February 21, 2014, ​ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/22/arts/design/yams-collective-brings-work-to-whitney-biennial.html. 7 Adams, Brooks. "Whitney Biennial 2014." Art In America 102, no. 5 (May 2014): 159-160. ​ ​ 3 writing, texts of all sorts—in short, with words.”8 (fig. 1.11) Yet others focused on the recurrence

of painting, particularly on Grabner and Comer’s floors.9 And even while panning the show

overall, New York Magazine’s long-time critic, Jerry Saltz, found praise in the vibrancy and ​ ​ variety of mediums at hand, celebrating Grabner’s floor as “a central gallery crammed with ​ colorful painting, sculpture, and handmade objects as well as ceramics and textiles. It’s wildly

overfilled, radiating heat and energy.”10 (fig. 1.12) Saltz also noted the inclusion of archives, ​ ​ micro-exhibitions, and a general tendency toward display and exhibition as a medium itself.

Amongst this set of largely positive reviews—ranging from lukewarm-though-optimistic

to out-and-out praise—rose a familiar complaint; Biennial artists were overwhelming white and ​ ​ ​ mostly male, their work empty of political content.11 Hyperallergic’s Jillian Steinhauer ​ ​ ​ announced the “depressing stats” of the 2014 Biennial: only 32% of included artists were

women. There were even fewer artists-of-color, with a measly 7.6% of the total show.12 And, in

The New Inquiry, Eunsong Kim and Maya Isabella Mackrandilal point out that though ​ ​ geographically and formally diverse, the show was actually not that inclusive. They posit that

Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed January 10, 2016), 159. ​ ​ ​ 8 Apter, Emily. "Whitney Biennial: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York." Artforum ​ International 5, no.9 (2014): 312. Academic OneFile. Web. 10 Jan. 2016. ​ ​ ​ 9 Cotter, “One Last Dance in the Old Place.” Cotter describes Grabner’s selections as evocative of Modernism, and notes she’s selected a number of gestural painters. Of Comer he states, “Painting and language are also basic ingredients of Mr. Comer’s smaller, sparer, third floor show.” 10 Jerry Saltz, "Sapphires in the Mud; There's a smart show buried in this big bland Whitney Biennial," New York Magazine, ​ March 10, 2014 . 11 Noelle Bodick, “A Brief History of the Whitney Biennial, America’s Most Controversial Art Show,” Artspace (blog), March 4, ​ ​ 2014, http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/in_focus/history_whitney_biennial-52098. Since its launch in 1932, the Whitney Museum’s catch-all surveys of American art, which began as annual programs but evolved into the Biennial we know today, have often courted controversy. According to Noelle Bodick’s extremely concise, but dually informative history of the tradition, the first Whitney Annual was radical and controversial simply in that it was unjuried with no prizes; from then on the Whitney events established a “reputation as being the country's most consistently provocative and opinion-changing display of ​ contemporary art.” Consistent protestation of the show’s challenges around diversity and representation began in 1987, when the Guerrilla Girls protested that only 24% of Biennial artists were women. Though the museum attempted to self-correct, featuring 40% women artists in 1989, identity politics have been a lightning rod for the Whitney ever since. The 1993 Biennial, which made much ado about such politics, is consistently cited as one of the most important exhibitions of the last 30 years. A section later in this chapter will explore the legacy of that show in greater depth. 12 Jillian Steinhauer, “The Depressing Stats of the 2014 Whitney Biennial,” Hyperallergic (blog), November 15, 2013, ​ ​ ​ 4 “[t]he 2014 Whitney Biennial is the whitest Biennial since 1993. Taking a cue from the corporate

whitewashing of network television, high art embraces white supremacy under the rhetoric of

multicultural necessity and diversity,”13 taking aim a the curators’ suggestion that “...the Biennial

will suggest the profoundly diverse and hybrid cultural identity of America today.”

Critique reached a tipping point with two nearly simultaneous controversies. First, the

revelation that the video and performances credited to Donelle Woolford were actually the work

of Joe Scanlan . Scanlan created Woolford as an alter-ego and hired African American artists to

portray her. Neither the Whitney catalog nor press release credited the work to Scanlan, which

some critics perceived as the institution’s attempt to claim another black, female artist for its

supposedly diverse 2014 roster (fig. 1.13-1.14).

Around the same time, the HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican? collective, a New York based

group comprised mostly of queer artists and artists-of-color, withdrew their film, Good Stock on ​ the Dimension Floor, from the show (fig. 1.15). Critics wondered if the Scanlan revelation and ​ Yams withdrawal were related. In an interview with Ben Davis for artnet news, several members ​ ​ of the collective, including Sienna Shields and Andre Springer, insisted that the Scanlan incident

was just one of many factors that lead to their departure. According to Shields, the Yams were

always skeptical of the Biennial, and they consistently positioned their participation in it as a

critical action. She states that the Yams met with curatorial advisors at the Whitney to discuss

ongoing concerns and suggest how the museum could be more transparent and begin to

dismantle unequitable practices. Shields later said she perceived the meeting as an attempt to ​

13 Eunsong Kim and Maya Isabella Mackrandilal, “The Whitney Biennial for Angry Women,” The New Inquiry, April 4, 2014, ​ ​ ​ http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-whitney-biennial-for-angry-women/. 5 “quiet down the black people. They weren’t sincere, or being proactive in coming up with ​ solutions to their internalized racism as an institution.”14

The Yams’ interview with Ben Davis, along with Kim and Mackrandilal’s critique in the ​ Brooklyn Rail, highlight another key point: diversity and inclusion in the art world, even ​ diversity in identity, does not dismantle institutionalized systems of racism and sexism. The

latter frame their article by introducing Dawoud Bey’s portrait of Barack Obama (fig. 1.16) as a

symbol for “the newest American myth: the multicultural, progressive future,” an overarching

narrative that posits isolated anecdotes of progress to (falsely) suggest America has overcome

institutionalized racism and sexism. According to Kim and Mackrandilal, “diversity” in the art

world plays out in much the same way. Of the 2014 Whitney Biennial they argued: “[t]he

insertion of people of color into white space doesn’t make it less colonial or more radical—that’s

the rhetoric of imperialistic multiculturalism...What’s more, the 2014 Whitney Biennial didn’t

even bother to insert more people of color.”15 Christa Bell of the Yams argued that the show does

feature a number of artists of color. But, much like Kim and Mackrandilal, she does not believe

that solves the problem anyway. She Davis “...[w]e need to stop talking about ‘diversity’ and ​ ​ start talking about ‘institutional white supremacy.’ This is not an issue of diversity. I mean,

clearly, you had over 40 brown people in the show.”16 This is not to say that Bell, Shields, and

others critique the inclusion of diverse identities in exhibition. Rather, they suggest this is just

the first step in dismantling a deeply embedded power imbalance.

14 Ben Davis, “The Yams, On The Whitney and White Supremacy,” artnet news, May 30, 2014, ​ ​ https://news.artnet.com/art-world/the-yams-on-the-whitney-and-white-supremacy-30364. 15 Kim and Mackrandilal, “The Whitney Biennial for Angry Women.” ​ 16 Davis, “The Yams, On The Whitney and White Supremacy.” 6 The Last Brucennial

In the wake of these controversies, the Bruce High Quality Foundation, (BHQF or “the Bruces”) ​ an anonymous collective who also run the “freest” of art schools, a residency program, and their

Foundation University Gallery-opened the doors to their Last Brucennial in the Meatpacking ​ ​ District of Manhattan. The show, which ran from March 7-April 4, would be the Bruces final

round, ten years on and one river away from the Brooklyn warehouse where the

artist/curatorial/educational collective began their biennial exhibition tradition, always timed to

overlap with the Whitney. The 2014 show was a massive, salon-style exhibition of nearly 600

works, all by women artists (figs. 1.17-1.19).

The Bruces refused to promote or explain the female-only nature of the show.17 A reticent

group, BHQF members rarely grant interviews, remain completely anonymous, and envelop their

discourse in humor or witticisms. Their relationship to the mainstream art world, however, has

always been part antagonism, part participation, what Beatrice Gross calls “the insoluble tension

between adherence and denial.”18 An example of this “simultaneous preservation and obliteration

of..historical inheritance” is the group’s live, performative stagings of canonical paintings, such

as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (2007) and Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa (2004) (fig ​ ​ ​ ​ 1.20). For their Géricault remake, the Bruces sent ten participants sailing across the East River in

a homemade boat scrapped together from rugs, shipping palettes and other scavenged goods. The

performative tableau sailed across the East River to “evoke the hazards and compromises of the

art market.”19 At once humorous and ironic, the Bruce’s performances reenacted major works of

17 Nick Irvin, “The Last Brucennial: The Interview,” Interviews (blog), Art in America, March 5, 2014. ​ ​ ​ ​ http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/the-last-brucennial-the-interview. 18 Beatrice Gross, “Ghost Images: Bruce’s Specters and his Posthumous Future,” in The Bruce High Quality Foundation and ​ Other Ideas, ed. the Bruce High Quality Foundation (Brooklyn, NY: Bruce High Quality Foundation Press, 2008), 32. ​ 19 Gross 33. 7 the art historical canon, while simultaneously poking fun at the seriousness of the art world and

critiquing the market. The Brucennials embody a similar impulse, leveraging an established art

world convention (in this case the Whitney Biennial) to at once critique and participate in that

very tradition.

Left with little explanation from the reticent collective, critics evaluated the Brucennials

against the Whitney, noting the former’s populist approach and diverse offerings against the

Museum’s perceived lack thereof. In 2012, Ken Johnson declared that year’s Brucennial: “[ a] ​ jam-packed, multi floor installation….a populist, radically inclusive survey of what artists in

New York are really creating…”20 Johnson’s suggestion—that the BHQF really know whats ​ ​ going on—implies that elsewhere there is a less diverse, less representative survey of

contemporary art practices. Johnson’s observation set a critical precedent for positioning the

inclusiveness of the Bruces against the hegemony of the Whitney; critics and writers drew

similar conclusions in 2014.21

In the absence of interviews addressing the female-only curatorial premise nor catalog

essays by the collective, it is difficult to ascertain how much the Bruces intend for their show to

critique the Whitney. Given the timing of the Brucennial and the collective’s tradition of critical

practices, however, it is likely that interplay is intended. At the very least, regardless the group’s

intentions, the show functions to highlight “a major issue in contemporary art: the overlooking ​ ​ and underrepresentation of female artists at major fairs and festivals.” The controversies of

20Ken Johnson, “Brucennial 2012,” Art in Review (blog), New York Times, March 1, 2012, ​ ​ ​ ​ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/arts/design/brucennial-2012.html?_r=0. 21 See Charlotte Murtishaw. "A Biennial of One's Own: Whitney and Bruces Clash," University Wire, Mar 07, 2014. ​ ​ ​ http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.temple.edu/docview/1504777819?accountid=14270 for a full on admonishment. Other reviews seemed eager to acknowledge the Brucennial’s diversity, implying a gentle contrast to the Whitney. Even the Bruce’s ​ ​ dealer, Vito Schnabel, cast their show as “a little more democratic” and representative of the diversity of the art world than the Whitney. Schnabel as quoted in Carmel Melouney’s Wall Street Journal article, “Women’s Artwork a Focus at the Last ​ Brucennial,” March 11, 2014. 8 identity politics surrounding the 2014 Whitney Biennial only strengthen this perceived exchange.

Emerson Rosenthal of The Creators Project received a typically elusive response upon asking ​ ​ the Bruces to elaborate on the relationship between their show and the Whitney Museum’s: "I

hear there's a Whitney Houston Biennial in Brooklyn."22

The Whitney Houston Biennial

On March 9, 2014, the Whitney Houston Biennial: I’m Every Woman opened its doors in ​ ​ DUMBO Brooklyn. By the time the exhibition finished its run five hours later, hundreds of

guests had, according painter C. Finley, the show’s curator, “shared in a moment of

consciousness...a feeling...being part of something that more meaningful together.”23 Finley

created both an exhibition and an event, collapsing opening night, celebration, and salon-style

show into a single evening featuring eighty-five works ranging from drawing and painting to

text, sound, and installation (fig. 1.21-1.25). With its March opening and titular nod to the

Whitney Museum’s juggernaut biennale, the Whitney Houston conversed with the Museum. And, ​ ​ much like the Brucennial, which had opened just days earlier, I’m Every Woman consisted ​ ​ entirely of work by female artists.

Unlike the Last Brucennial, however, critics largely cast Finley’s show as celebratory;

undeniably inspired by the 2014 Whitney Biennial, but not critical of the latter or its issues with

diversity. The Huffington Post wrote that in showing 100% female artists the Whitney Houston

Biennial was “even cooler” that the Whitney Biennial’s 32%, but made no reference to possible

unrest over that significant gender disparity.24 Online culture site The Daily Beast declared ​ ​

22 Emerson Rosenthal, “Ladies Only, Dispatches from the Last of the Grand Brucennial,” The Creators Project (blog), March 6, ​ ​ 2014, http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/ladies-only-dispatches-from-the-last-of-the-grand-brucennials. 23 C. Finley (curator, Whitney Houston Biennial), in conversation with the author, June 2016. 24 “The Whitney Houston Biennial Is Here To Make Your Feminist Art Dreams Come True,” The Huffington Post, March 3, ​ ​ ​ ​ 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/03/whitney-houston-biennial_n_4877424.html. 9 explicitly that the purpose of the Whitney Houston Biennial was not to draw attention to “the ​ ​ ​ Whitney Museum’s historic, and much criticized comparative exclusion of female artists versus

men, Biennial.”25 This positivity is consistent with Finley’s tone during our interviews in June of ​ 2016, in which she explained that her intent with the show was “not at all” institutional critique,

but instead an energetic, positive, celebration of art and artists.

This is not to say, however, that Finley and the artists in the Whitney Houston Biennial

are complacent on issues of gender and representation. The curator has made it clear that the

“usual grumbling” about the lack of diversity in the 2014 Whitney Biennial was the impetus for

the show, though her reaction was to carve a positive alternative space instead of protest. She

also emphasized the importance of showing work by artists of color and featuring people of color

at the Whitney Houston Biennial.26 Participating artist, Mickalene Thomas also called the show ​ “an important platform with which to explore the richness and diversity of contemporary female

artists.”27 Moreover, work about “about womanhood, and gender more broadly,”was abundant at

the Whitney Houston, from “a Guerrilla Girls ‘gender reassignment,’ [to] a mixed-media riff by ​ ​ Micol Hebron on Carolee Schneeman’s famous ‘Interior Scroll’ to Christa Bell, who spent three

hours chanting her list/poem/scripture of more than 1,000 names and euphemisms for ‘vagina.’”

28 (see figs. 1.26-1.27 for generalized examples) Therefore, the show functions in conversation

with the Whitney; regardless of authorial intent, I’m Every Woman’s title, content, even location ​ ​

25 Justin Jones, “The Art of Whitney Houston,” The Daily Beast (blog), March 8, 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/ ​ ​ 2014/03/08/the-art-of-whitney-houston.html. 26 C. Finley, in conversation with the author, June 2016. 27 “The Whitney Houston Biennial Is Here...” The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/03 ​ ​ ​ ​ /whitney-houston-biennial_n_4877424.html. 28Jill Steinhauer, “A Biennale for Every Woman.” Hyperallergic (blog). March 10, 2014, http://hyperallergic.com/ ​ ​ 113641/a-biennial-for-every-woman/. ​ 10 and chronology, recall both the museum and its more than twenty year history of critique around

identity politics.

The Whitney’s History of Controversy, Featuring 1993

As noted earlier, the Whitney Biennial is no stranger to controversy. A brief summation

of intra artworld critique and criticism historically surrounding the show demonstrates that the

2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial are but three points in a

metanarrative. Within this metanarrative, exhibitions function as dialogic texts in the ongoing

problematics of curation, identity politics, and representation in the art world.

The Whitney Biennial has faced criticism since its inception in 1932. As “the only ​ continuous series of exhibitions in the country to survey recent developments in American art,”29 ​ the show often crystallizes complaints around broader trends in the field. For example, in the

1950s, critics admonished American painting by attacking the show itself. And, in 1975, curators

received backlash for subverting the art market by selecting artists who had never shown at the

Whitney, nor, in many cases, even New York. Angry critics dubbed this the so-called “Virgins’ ​ Show.”30 By the 1980s, the Biennial began to receive critique for market-driven, out-of-touch

selections unrepresentative of the expansive diversity of contemporary practice. At that time,

work by artists of color and gay, lesbian, and female artists were a potent force in the New York

art world. Despite this, such work was generally shown in alternative spaces, such as the 1990

“Decades Show” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and

the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art.31

29 “Whitney Biennial 2017,” Whitney Museum of American Art, accessed December 2016, http://whitney.org/Exhibitions /2017Biennial. 30 Bodick, “A Brief History of the Whitney Biennial.” 31 Bruce Altschuler, Biennials and Beyond—Exhibitions that Made Art History, 1962-2002 (London and New York: Phaidon ​ ​ Press, 2013), 311. 11 Whether a response to a decade of criticism or an assessment of what had genuinely

become one of the decade’s most crucial artistic themes, the 1993 Whitney Biennial roared back

with its most diverse iteration yet. The curatorial statement was straightforward, positioning

works that “confront such dominant current issues as class, race, gender, sexuality, and the

family,” as its core. Curatorial and display choices made this manifest: near the entrance to the

museum was George Holliday’s amateur tape of the Rodney King beating screened in a video

gallery. 32 By choosing to frame Holliday’s film as an artistic work via its inclusion in the

Biennial, and by placing it near the front of the museum as a sort of introduction to the political

content within, the curators declared the show conversant with a broader swath of texts and

instances of visual culture. The prolific inclusion of video, multimedia practices, and

performance alongside a general eschewing of American painting was, in itself, controversial at

the time.33

In her review for the New York Times, Roberta Smith describes the Holliday video as ​ ​ symptomatic of a larger problem with the 1993 Biennial: that it was “less about the art of our ​ time than about the times themselves.”34 In total, her review was emblematic of the mixed

critical reception the show received. While Smith signaled the show’s flaws in her critique of the

Holliday video, she also called the Biennial both “watershed,” and gives it credit as “one of the

most ethnically diverse, generously installed shows in Biennial history.”35

32 Both the quote from the original 1993 curatorial statement and the information on the Holliday video derive from Jens Hoffmann’s text on influential exhibitions in contemporary art. Jens Hoffmann, Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions ​ of Contemporary Art (New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2014), 184. ​ ​ 33 Hoffmann 184. 34 Roberta Smith, “At the Whitney, A Biennial with a Social Conscious,” New York Times, March 5, 1993, ​ ​ http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/05/arts/at-the-whitney-a-biennial-with-a-social-conscience.html. 35 Smith, “At the Whitney.” 12 Other critics, however, were not as complimentary of the contemporary issues and

politics of race and sexual identity approached in the show. It is not that these critics disavowed

political content. Instead, they suggested that in its embrace of identity politics, the 1993 ​ Whitney Biennial abandoned tenets of intellectual and artistic rigor. In a review in Artforum, Dan ​ ​ Cameron declared that “The fact is that under the guise of egalitarianism, we are being asked not

merely to bend a little or even a lot where our standards of formal articulation and conceptual

rigor are concerned...instead we are now being pushed to declare that any overt preoccupation

with aesthetic principles represent an evasion of art’s social contract.”36 In a roundtable

discussion of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the October editorial board staked a similar claim. ​ ​ Rosalind Krauss lamented that the artwork itself is forsaken for “a set of ideas that the art might

invoke.” She went on to say:

I was struck reading the catalog texts for the Whitney Biennial by this constant deflection of attention from the texture of the work. The work is seen to have a meaning that one can succinctly name and then use that name to pass from the object to a register of "important ideas." The work is never thought to be layered, to be involved with a multiplicity of ideas, to be worked on.37

Though approached from a different critical framework, Krauss’ stake is similar to that of Kim, ​ Mackrandilal, and Bell in their critique of the 2014 Biennial: what does a signification of ​ difference, plurality, and identity politics in exhibition truly achieve? For Krauss it can deaden

the work, portend a proscribed interpretation. More than twenty years later, Kim, Mackrandilal,

and Bell maintain that signification of difference yields little material difference in the power

dynamics of the art world. The terms that Krauss thus forged in 1993 remain relevant today, and

36 Dan Cameron, “Backlash,” in Biennials and Beyond—Exhibitions that Made Art History, 1962-2002, ed. Bruce Altschuler ​ ​ (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2013), 324. Previously published as “Backlash” Artforum, May 1993. ​ ​ 37 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Silvia Kolbowski, Miwon Kwon, and Benjamin Buchloh, “The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the Whitney Biennial,” October 66 (1993): 4. ​ ​ 13 particularly in the discussion of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last

Brucennial.

It is clear that identity politics, diversity, and difference are crucial issues in the

production, reception, and criticism of artistic practice. The 1993 Whitney Biennial is one of the

most important historical examples of how those issues manifest in exhibition and display. The ​ ​ show is continually cited by historians, curators, as critics as one of the most important

exhibitions of the past twenty-five years not because of single works or artists in it, not because it

forged an avant-garde curatorial practice, but because it presented one of the first cohesive

arguments around the identity politics in the arts. Jerry Saltz describes the 1993 Biennial as the

moment that “broke the levee” in this regard.38 This moment of crystallization is, according to

scholar Nizan Shaked, a historical pivot point in multiple ways. Not only is the show one of the

first to synthesize the impact of identity politics across a variety of critical and conceptual

practices, it is also unique for a contemporary biennial in that it stakes a historical claim in doing

so.39

Conclusions

The 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial are bound up in a

multiplicity of issues—identity, diversity, controversy—and with one another. An analysis of the

three show demonstrates the way that reception and meaning of each is affected by and

constructed by the other, at points of both conversion and bifurcation. All three are interwoven

with larger concerns of the art work and their social and cultural context. Within this field,

38 Jerry Saltz, “How Identity Politics Conquered the Art World,” New York Magazine, April 21, 2016, ​ ​ http://www.vulture.com/2016/04/identity-politics-that-forever-changed-art.html. 39 The suggestion that the 1993 Whitney Biennial at once presented an overview of contemporary work while also staking an art historical claim is directly from Nizran Shaked’s writing on the show. Nizan Shaked, “The 1993 Whitney Biennial: Artwork, Framework, Reception,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 2, no. 2 (2013): 145. ​ ​ 14 criticism and other texts are actors, further shifting and shaping the ways in which the exhibitions perform.

The 1993 Whitney Biennial provided a useful historical benchmark. Not only did it deal with many of the issues essential to the analysis of the 2014 trio, but it is also an example of how reception and meaning of exhibitions shift over time. Reviled by many in the year of its birth, the show is now frequently cited as one of the single most important exhibitions of contemporary art.

It also neatly demonstrates the ways in which exhibitions are themselves texts or works, staking their own claims through artistic choice and curatorial medium.

15 CHAPTER 2 HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY: INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE, CURATION, FEMINIST PRACTICE

Just as Chapter 1 ended with a historical account of the Whitney Biennial and its attendant controversies, so too is it important to locate all three subjects of this project in the broader ongoing shifts in both artistic practice and cultural conditions. This chapter will examine the histories of several themes that influence exhibitionary culture, including the rise of the avant-garde curator, the blurring of lines between curation and other artistic practices, institutional critique, feminist exhibition practices, the economic and cultural functions of the art institution, and a proliferation in typologies of display. These trends have continued apace, quickening in the past 25 years. For this reason the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston

Biennial and Last Brucennial live amongst these ever-shifting boundaries between event, exhibition, and artistic practice, and the ever-widening sphere of the art world.

Chapter 2 begins with a brief overview of the literature on the interrelated practices of curation, institutional critique, and museum/institutional studies, moving on to key moments in the history of each. This is followed by an investigation of the porous boundaries between curatorial and artistic production, which, in many ways, were eroded by the aforementioned practices. The chapter concludes by suggesting that exhibitions are therefore their own medium ​ and form, which uniquely and productively critiques and responds to their own institutional conditions. This permits reading the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the Whitney Houston Biennial and the Last Brucennial as performative, open ended events that play against and respond to one another, as well as the art world as a whole. This chapter establishes the historical context for this suggestion, while its theoretical underpinnings are the focus of Chapter 3.

16

Historiography

As noted above, the literature related to exhibition and curatorial studies comprises several

overlapping categories; the three typologies most relevant to this project are highlighted above.

Of these, the most straightforward texts are book-length studies on the evolution of

contemporary exhibitions, organized chronologically and historically.40 These texts, including

Bruce Altschuler’s Biennials and Beyond—Exhibitions that Made Art History, 1962-2002 (2013) ​ ​ and Terry Smith’s Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012), offer a comprehensive history of ​ ​ shifting exhibition practices from the 1970s through the early aughts. Several interview based

books, such as Hans Ulrich Obrist’s A Brief History of Curating (2008) and Christopher Tanner ​ ​ and Ute Tischler’s Men in Black: Handbook of Curatorial Practice (2003) also chart the history ​ ​ of radical, innovative, and influential exhibition practices. Through the specificity of case studies

and primary documents (exhibition catalogs and curator interviews), these texts demonstrate the

breadth and richness of avant-garde exhibitionary techniques.

Alongside the history of exhibitions as such, are historical texts on artistic practices

incorporating curation and display. Histories of institutional critique and social practice also

overlap with questions of display, power, and interpretation, and are inevitably bound up with

theories and history of the institutions they assess. There is also a growing body of literature,

40 In their essay on Lyotard’s “Les Immatériaux,” Birnbaum and Wallenstein also identify these three major types of sources on ​ the history of exhibition. At the time of the text’s publication in 2008, the authors call for a fourth type of treatment, one that will examine a philosophy that proposes exhibitions are “not just as an illustration to a set of preconceived ideas, but...a way to continue thinking." (126) Many of the texts that have emerged in the past eight years do just that, and I utilize these methodologies heavily in Chapter 3. Therefore, Birnbaum and Sven-Olov’s four major methodological frames-three historiographic and one a theoretical proposition, guide some structure of this paper. Interestingly, my conclusions on the state of the literature in the field loosely followed these typologies, even prior to reading this text. This essay helped to further clarify, define, and confirm my previous findings. Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, “Thinking Philosophy, Spatially: ​ ​ Jean-François Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux and the Philosophy of the Exhibition,”in Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on ​ Philosophy, Politics, and Art, ed. Joseph Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, trans. Danniil Dynin, James ​ Gussen, Jeanine Herman (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2008), 124-126. 17 such as Celina Jeffrey’s The Artist as Curator (2015), which assesses curation as a means for ​ ​ artists to “explore a shared or collaborative process, idea, or thematic central to one’s own ​ practice.”41 While scholars frequently write about and historicize the work of avant-garde

curators, they rarely frame such work as artistic practice. Nonetheless, the history of the ways in ​ ​ ​ which artists use display and curation to critique and question dominant art institutions, and the

methods curators have utilized to expand the exhibitionary form, provide a historical continuum

along which to place not just the individual exhibitions under consideration, but their relationship

to one another.

Museological Theory

At the intersection of curatorial history and the legacy of institutional critique stands a set ​ of texts that theorize shifts in the ontology of the museum and art institution during the

postmodern, late capitalist era. Rosalind Krauss’ “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist

Museum,” (October, 1990) Andrea Fraser’s “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of ​ ​ Critique,” (Artforum, 2005) and Douglas Crimp’s “On the Museum’s Ruins,” (October, 1980) ​ ​ ​ ​ provide framework for analyzing the relationship between museums, exhibitions, art events,

alternative spaces, artists and curators. These lenses shape my understanding of an interlocking ​ yet contentious web of issues in today’s globalized, pluralized art world, which binds the

Whitney Houston Biennial, Last Brucennial, and 2014 Whitney Biennial, along with the

participating artists, curators, and the institutions that frame them.42

41 Celina Jeffery, introduction to The Artist as Curator (Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2015), 7. ​ ​ 42 Cristina Bechtler and Dora Imhof, preface to Museum of the Future Documents 18 (Zurich, Switzerland: JRP/Ringier, 2014), 6. ​ ​ Crimp, Krauss, and Fraser utilize postmodern and late capitalist frames to analyze the relationship between the museum, art, exhibition, and other institutions. Globalization and pluralization are crucial cultural conditions with accelerating importance over the past ten-thirty years since these texts have been written. Therefore it is important to call these particular symptoms of postmodernism and late capitalism to the fore, as Bechtler and Imhof do in the preface of their more recent museological text. 18 For Crimp, Krauss and Fraser, late capitalist economic structures, industry, and

technology are panoptic, bringing their conditions to bear on both the presentation and

production of art. Crimp locates Robert Rauschenberg’s move from techniques of production

(synthetic practices such as collages, assemblage and combine, fig. 2.1) to techniques of

reproduction (silkscreen, photography, transfer drawing, fig. 2.2) as a postmodern rupture for the

museum. In this shift, Rauschenberg undermined “[n]otions of originality, authenticity, and

presence, essential to the ordered discourse of the museum,” transforming the museum into a

space of “absolute heterogeneity.”43 Thirty-five years on, Crimp’s suggestion may seem well

worn, but it was also prescient. Whether the photographic and reproductive techniques discussed

by Crimp, or performative, social, and time-based practices that proliferated from the 1970s

onward, rapid shifts in artistic production have shaped and reshaped the core notions of order and

interpretation in museological and curatorial practice.44 Now, more than ever, exhibitions,

museums, and modes of artistic interpretation and display are sites of “absolute heterogeneity.”

Like Crimp, Krauss’ text defines the museum’s conditions of viewing and meaning

through the machinery of late capitalism. She contends postmodernism has usurped the museum,

making for a fragmented experience of “absolute heterogeneity” for the postmodern subject. For

Krauss, the trappings of late capitalist production are inescapable. Even in Minimalism, her

spectator sees “materials and of shapes...with the overtones of industry.”45 Here she is arguing ​ that the material components of Minimalism call forth capitalist modes of production via their ​

43 Douglas Crimp, “On the Museum’s Ruins,” October 13 (Summer 1980): 56. ​ ​ 44 A bit later in this chapter I more thoroughly footnote Elena Filipovic’s assertion that Duchamp’s readymades mark a crucial intersection between curatorial and artistic practice. That statement bears repeating here. I rely on Crimp’s work for this section as he addresses the intersection of curatorial and artistic practice from a Marxist/critical theory framework and in a capitalist ​ ​ ​ ​ context. The methodological similarities between the three texts I read in this section allow for the most concise analysis of a rather sprawling history of avant-garde practices. This methodological choice does not discount that Rauschenberg and his peers were drawing on these histories. 45 Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Autumn 1990): 10 ​ ​ 19 factory fabrication. Krauss concludes that the specialized, centralized, and technical facets of

capitalist labor will soon begin to impact the inner workings of the museum itself.46 This would

create a feedback loop in which art works, their display, and their administration collude to

“occupy the territory of what will be a next, more advanced level of capital.”47 Krauss’

pessimistic view precludes the possibility of change from within the exhibitionary complex in

the context of late capitalism.

Fraser too locates her argument in the totality of the capitalist economic system, asking

“[h]ow, then, can we imagine, much less accomplish, a critique of art institutions when museum

and market have grown into an all-encompassing apparatus of cultural reification?”48 If Krauss

positions the museum as a site of proscribed meaning in an all-encompassing late capitalist

culture, Fraser utilizes this framework to locate a space to critique that very institution,

performing criticality through artistic practice. For Fraser, the totality of economic systems has

created “the entire field of art as a social universe” including sites of production, distribution,

reception, and discourse.49 In this field, all artists, even those whose work is highly critical of the

field itself, are part of the same system. This view is considerably less pessimistic than Krauss’.

Within Fraser’s framework, artists are complicit in a totalizing system. At the same time, they

also possess a singular ability to impart change or identify problems from within. Of this, she

says, “It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of

what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice

46 Krauss, 15-16. 47 Krauss, 11. 48 Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44, no. 1 (September 2005): 278. ​ ​ 49 Fraser, 281. 20 we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.”50 Through such choices, artists can visualize

difference, even within institutionalized space.51

Fraser theorizes the contemporary art work as a field in which even the artist herself is, in

part, “the institution.” A material example of the “boundary-less” field in which the Whitney

Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial operate was explicated in Chapter 1:

the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Whitney Houston curator Finley previously participated

in Whitney Museum Biennials, the very show about which their March 2014 exhibitions are

comment. Furthermore, the Yams collective, of which Finley was a part, was actively protesting

the Whitney Museum that spring, first through a contradictory practice within the show, and then

through a messy withdrawal in the wake of several controversies tied to diversity and identity

politics. Crimp, Krauss, and Fraser’s thinking on the relationship between art, institutions, and

capitalism defines the sphere in which contemporary critical practices operate.

Critique, Curation, and Exhibition Making in Artistic Practice Since the 1990s

In “A Brief History of Exhibition and Display in Critical, Relational Art Practice,” scholars

Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson historicize institutional critique from the neoliberal,

capitalist locus from which Fraser, Krauss, and Crimp theorize art institutions. According to

Alberro and Stimson, institutional critique, from the 1990s onward, takes as a starting point that

“art institutions, and more broadly speaking the institutions of the public sphere, do not even

pretend to be autonomous from the forces of economic power.”52 The history of institutional

50 Fraser, 283. 51 Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art (London: Koenig Books, ​ ​ 2013), 56. The suggestion of the museum as a place in which to visualize difference, through both exhibitions and individual artistic practices, derives from Bishop’s text. This particular book focuses on the potentials and limitations of the late capitalist museum, much like Krauss, Crimp, and Fraser’s essays. 52 Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, introduction to Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, ​ ​ MA: MIT Press, 2009), 18. 21 critique dates well before the 90s, of course, but this moment coalesced shifts in artistic practice,

capitalist conditions, and an emergent dialog on identity politics.53 Much as the 1990s frame

Alberro and Stimson’s writings on institutional critique, so too do they frame the story of the

Whitney Houston Biennial, 2014 Whitney Biennial, and Last Brucennial.

As discussed in the previous chapter, artistic practice and identity politics collided in the

1990s. Throughout the decade, political, social, and communal issues became increasingly

important in both artistic production and aesthetic theory. Artists of the 1990s transformed the

time-based, performative, and participatory practices of their forbearers from “imaginary and

utopian realities” into “ways of living and models of action existing within the real,” utilizing the

“realm of human interactions” as medium and form.54 This tendency, theorized by Nicolas

Bourriaud toward the end of the decade, encompasses practices that build their form through the

relations and material stuff of lived experience.

Such practices often questioned the museum or exhibition as a site of meaning making.

Throughout the 1990s, artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Martin Beck, and Liam ​ Gillick staged exhibitions outside galleries and museums, or positioned

everyday-activity-as-exhibition within the museum or gallery.55 Examples include Tiravanija’s

Untitled (Free) (1992) (fig. 2.3), in which the artist cooked green curry in the offices of the 303 ​ Gallery in New York, emerging into the exhibition space only to serve his dish to the audience.

Projects like this position museums, galleries, or other institutional spaces as “just one potential

53 Elena Filipovic, “When Exhibitions Become Form: On the History of Artist as Curator,” in Exhibition, ed. Lucy Steeds, ​ ​ Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art (London; Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 159-160. Filipovic traces the intersection of institutional critique and exhibition back to Duchamp’s readymades, suggesting these works articulated choice (or curation) as a creative activity, and furthermore signaled the exhibition as “a means of interrogation” and a tool for staging criticality. 54 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, Collection Documents sur l’art (Dijon, ​ ​ FR: Les Presses du réel, 2002), 13-14. ​ 55 Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, ICI Perspectives in Curating, no. 1 (New York: Independent Curators ​ ​ International, 2012), 128. 22 place among others where an exhibition might be staged,” and call attention the administrative

and bureaucratic office spaces that are often disappeared from the discourse of art making and

presentation.56 Examples like Tiravanija’s tie relational aesthetics to questions that surround

exhibitionary practice, such as social relations, the presentation of art practice, and their

institutional frames.57

Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992-1993, figs. 2.4-2.6), marked another ​ ​ groundbreaking moment at the intersection participatory practice, and institutional critique, ​ ​ integrating identity politics into this equation.58 Like the relational aesthetics artists working at ​ about the same time, Wilson leveraged his art practice to question both the mutability of the

exhibition and the connection between community and display. Wilson oversaw the majority of

administrative and curatorial aspects of the resulting art work-cum-exhibition, including labels,

arrangement and selection, as he culled materials related to African American, Native American,

and other disenfranchised histories. Wilson upended traditional curatorial conventions,

displaying the objects in innovative ways that “call[ed] attention to the biases that normally

underlie historical exhibitions, thus subverting and shattering them.”59 Terry Smith denotes this

as a crucial moment in the relationship between institutional critique, artistic practice, and

curation, in which Wilson utilized the exhibition as a form for “critical intervention.”60 All told, ​

56 Smith, 129. 57 Staging art works outside the gallery, incorporating the everyday into material and performative art practices, and critical questioning of the institutional space are not, of course, exclusive to the artists listed here. Similar experiments took place both concurrently and previously to the work of Tiravanija, Beck, Gillick, and their peers. Examples include institutional critique of the late 60s and early 70s, and performance works like Allan Kaprow’s happenings, in which the “everyday” party or event became the art performance. I trace my history here to the 1990s, largely because that time period provides an important frame of reference in Chapter 1 and throughout other sections of Chapter 2. 58 Howard Halle and Fred Wilson, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street 44 (1993): 152. Wilson collaborated with community ​ ​ members, curators, volunteers and other artists on Mining the Museum. This is a lesser discussed aspect of the project. I believe ​ ​ the collaborative, participatory, community based elements are generally undermined at the service of identity politics. This project is also, therefore, closer to the frameworks of relational aesthetics than it initially seems. 59 Halle and Wilson, 170. 60 Smith, 125. 23 Mining the Museum, which opened the same year as the 1993 Whitney Biennial, knits together ​ the historical trajectories of artist curated projects, identity politics, and institutional critique.

Wilson, Tiravanija, and artists with similarly socially engaged, participatory projects, ​ ​ transformed both curatorial and artistic practices throughout the 1990s. As such, they reinvented

the exhibition as a “site of production, rather than display,” in which the exhibition itself

produces meaning through its own form and interpretive acts.61 Post social-practice, the

exhibition itself is as important as the individual work it might display. The 2014 Whitney

Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial all function in this way, creating

meaning holistically, sewing together hundreds of works to locate overarching meanings and

impulses in the art of the now.

The Whitney Houston Biennial and Last Brucennial demonstrate the participatory,

community-based legacy of 1990s social practice, drawing in social components while creating

meaning-through-exhibition. Unlike the Whitney Biennial, which brings prestige to those chosen ​ to participate, the Whitney Houston Biennial and Last Brucennial are for those who choose to ​ ​ participate, hence forming community. To populate the Whitney Houston Biennial, curator/artist

C. Finley asked women she knew, trusted, and admired to join her.62 The communal energy and

celebration surrounding the one-night only event (figs. 2.7-2.9) were as important as the art

works on exhibit. Similarly, the Last Brucennial’s chaotic web of 600 works by nearly as many

artists spoke as a whole, demonstrating a breadth of contemporary practices through inclusion.

This stands in contrast to the Whitney Biennial—which summarizes the same contemporary

61 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 219. Bishop’s text is ​ ​ another key work on the practices of the 1990s. It also analyzes participatory art practices and works striking similar to those assessed by Bourriaud. 62 C. Finley, in conversation with the author, June 2016. 24 impulses through only the best in representative works. Vestiges of relational aesthetics

reverberate through these communal, participatory projects. And, much like Wilson and his

predecessors in institutional critique, the Whitney Houston Biennial and Last Brucennial utilize

the exhibition as a form through which to question art and its institutions.

Biennial Culture and the Exhibitionary Expanse

Just as artists experimented with forms of display and exhibition in the latter parts of the 21st

century, so too did curators. Practitioners such as Harald Szeemann and Walter Hopps, who rose

to prominence in the late 60s and early 70s, just as institutional critique was taking hold,

“change[d] the rules of what an exhibition actually is.”63 According to Kate Fowles, Szeemann

and Hopps ushered in the expansion of curation, from museum-based, show-based, spatially

based forms, to “live project[s]” or “event[s].”64 The curator became a “mediator, facilitator,

middleman, and producer,” as well as an exhibition-maker.65 These shifts similarly contribute to

readings of contemporary exhibitions such as the Whitney Houston Biennial, Last Brucennial

and 2014 Whitney Biennial. The expanse in exhibitionary practices is furthermore tied to the

all-encompassing conditions of social institutions and the market explicated by Krauss, Fraser,

and Crimp. Therefore, the histories of exhibition-making frame this project as much as the

histories of participatory, social, critical art practices.

Documenta 5 (1972, Kassel, Germany), was one of Szeemann’s most influential projects.

66 He transformed Documenta’s previous framework of the “100-day museum,” into a “100-day

63 Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating, Documents 3 (Zurich: JRP/Rigier; Dijon, FR: Les Presses du réel, 2008), 20. ​ ​ ​ 64 Kate Fowles, “Who Cares? Understanding the Role of the Curator Today,” in Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating, eds. ​ ​ Heather Kouris and Steven Rand (New York: Apex Art, 2007), 30. 65 Fowles, 32-33. 66 Eva Fotiadi effectively argues that Documenta 5 was a collaborative, collective project, and that assigning authorship to Szeemann alone mitigates the exhibition’s groundbreaking importance in the history of collective practices. To streamline my discussion of Documenta 5 and the Documenta projects more broadly I have cited Szeemann as the primary curator, as have many other scholars, including Kate Fowles in the essay cited earlier. Eva Fotiadi, “The Canon of the Author. On Individual and Shared Authorship in Exhibition Curating,” Journal of Art Historiography 11 (December 2014): 3-12. ​ ​ 25 event.” Through process, performance, and a set of more traditional display-based exhibitions

(fig. 2.10-2.13), Szeemann and collaborator Bazon Brock organized around a set of thematics: 1.

the reality of the visual representation, 2. the reality of the subject, and 3. the identity or

nonidentity of visual representation and subject.67 Szeemann also displayed objects from a broad

swath of visual culture: political propaganda, advertising, utopian architecture, and science

fiction imagery, and also commissioned five “museums” created by artists. All told, Documenta

5’s critical curatorial charge, untraditional media, and performative and event based practices

collided, producing a project that questioned the mythos of art, its practices, and its institutions.68

Negative reviews and criticism, particularly from artists, plagued the show at the time. Daniel

Buren called it “an exhibition of an exhibition,” and ten American artists signed a letter in

Artforum asserting their autonomy and right to exhibit their own work.69 Artists critiqued ​ Documenta 5, claiming it “anoint[ed] itself as a work of art and exploited art for that purpose.”70

Szeemann and his collaborators had collapsed art work and exhibition to shocking effect,

utilizing a variety of practices that eroded curatorial autonomy. Curators like Szeemann were

creating forms as much as they were arranging and selecting them. ​ The Documenta projects have remained both controversial and demonstrative of

avant-garde curatorial practices. Theorists Beatrice von Bismarck and Irit Rogoff trace axis of

“the relation between curating, artistic practices of knowledge production, and political

imperatives,” to Documenta X (1997).71 Documenta X achieved this mode of presentation, which

67 “Documenta 5,” documenta, http://www.documenta.de/en/retrospective/documenta_5. ​ ​ 68 Bruce Altschuler, Biennials and Beyond—Exhibitions that Made Art History, 1962-2002 (London and New York: Phaidon ​ ​ Press, 2013), 157. 69 Altschuler, 157. 70 “Documenta 5,” http://www.documenta.de/en/retrospective/documenta_5. 71 Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck, “A Conversation Between Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck,” in Cultures of the ​ Curatorial, eds. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 26. ​ 26 Von Bismarck and Rogoff call “the curatorial,” via its lectures, discussions, and a curated

performing arts section planned alongside more traditional displays (fig. 2.14-2.15).72

Documenta X also leveraged its curatorial program to approach theoretical and social concerns,

and is often “credited with introducing postcolonial considerations to the German art world.”73

Von Bismarck’s framework theorizes the increasingly blurred lines between curation, artistic

practice, exhibition, and artistic product, which made room for political possibility along the

way.74

The second Bienal de la Habana, which took place nearly a decade prior to Documenta X

in 1986, was also a ground breaking, genre blurring example of Biennial culture. According to

Terry Smith, it “anticipate[d] many of the changes in curatorial practice,” incorporating “shows,

events, meetings, publications, and outreach programs” in addition to traditional object-based

displays.75 With a format similar to Documenta X, and a clear concern with postcolonial and

third-world artistic practices, the second Bienal de la Habana was both a turning point in

curatorial practice and an influential moment in both content and form.

In 2002, Documenta 11 explored postcolonial practices through nontraditional modes of

presentation. The show was, unsurprisingly, as socially conscious and controversial as its

predecessors. Staged across five global locations, this was the first in the series organized by a

non-European curator, Okwui Enwezor. It sought to “describe the present location of culture and

72 The tenth iteration of Documenta was marked by a Roman, not Arabic numeral. The intentions of this choice are vague, though it may have simply been a bold and controversial design choice. According to the official Documenta website, “The poster, on which the small d is crossed out by a large Roman numeral X, triggered outrage—as it was seen by many as an attempt to question the very institution of documenta.” There is little, if any, additional discussion on this point in the historical and critical resources I consulted. Documenta official website, “Documenta X,” https://www.documenta.de/en/retrospective/documenta_x. 73 Jens Hoffmann, Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art ​ ​ ​ Publishers, Inc., 2014), 127. 74 That same year, the Venice Biennial also blended curation, historicism, and the production of new work under star curator Germano Celant and his selected theme, “Future, Present, Past.” 75 Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 118-119. ​ ​ 27 its interfaces with other complex, global knowledge systems.”76 In addition to its unique platform

of five global locations, Documenta 11 continued Szeemann’s tradition of interrogating the

meaning and mythos of art, visuality, and its modes of display. One example is Joëlle

Tuerlinckx’s installation, AQUI HAVIA HISTORIA- CULTURA AGORA 0 (Here There Was ​ History-Culture Now Nothing), which flummoxed visitors seeking to move about, view, and ​ enter the art work. Barbara von Bismarck describes the work as a dizzying array of “[s]maller

and larger spaces,” which “close in on the viewer and immediately open up again, leading

towards other, loosely connected spaces that are themselves linked, accentuated or centred by the

material structures of display” as multiple slides, projections, and transparencies play.77 The

work thus “displays the means of displaying for their own sake.”78 Other projects, like Thomas ​ Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (fig. 2.16), which consisted of a communal, interactive library ​ ​ constructed in part by local youth, also blurred the lines between social project, art work, and

exhibition. Overall, even Documenta 11’s unique, five-location-platform, utilized form to mirror

content. The literal spread of global locations echoed a curatorial mission that addressed

globalism, postcolonialism, and neoliberalism.

At the same time, Documenta 11 demonstrates the very economic and political ​ ​ conditions it was commenting on, thus echoing Andrea Fraser’s suggestion that critical art

practices mirror the very projects they critique. According to Angela Dimitrakaki, “what

Documenta 11 achieved was an inadvertently powerful demonstration of the limits of current

structures for exhibiting art, in so far as such structures will inevitably – in the present historical

76 “Documenta 11,” documenta, http://www.documenta.de/en/retrospective/documenta11. 77 Beatrice von Bismarck, “Gestures of Exhibiting,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 10 (Autumn/Winter 2004): ​ ​ 6. 78 von Bismarck, “Gestures of Exhibiting,” 6-7. 28 conjuncture – call attention to the persistent recapitulation of even socially engaged art as

spectacle.”79 Despite the project’s status as one of the most “self-consciously socially-relevant”

exhibitions of contemporary art, ultimately Documenta 11 relied on over-educated, under-paid

surplus labor, and other capitalist conditions, such as cultural tourism.80 Panos Kompatsiaris

takes this critique one step further, arguing that such practices are not simply complicit in, but

essential to neoliberal, late capitalist economic structures. Kompatsiaris claims, “practices that

recourse to criticality but still engage with neoliberal economic models and procedures, provide

the lifeblood of contemporary capitalism in that they neutralize and institutionalize a mode of

critique.”81 Dimitrakaki and Kompatsiaris’ logic follows that of Krauss and Fraser earlier in this

chapter, and creates a frame in which even critical practices, such as the Whitney Houston

Biennial and Last Brucennial, can not be completely unbound from their complicitness in the

very systems they seek to criticize. Furthermore, such critiques demonstrate how emergent

curatorial modes and avant-garde cultural practices, though unique in form and medium,

participate in the systems that bind them. Ultimately, Kompatsiaris argues for socially conscious, ​ ​ critical practices: internalized critique is better than no critique at all.82

Shifts in curatorial practice emerge consistently from curators and art institutions like

Documenta nearly as often as from art practices themselves. These practices are often

self-critical in nature. Like institutional critique and relational aesthetics, they question the basic

tenets of art and its institutions, while bound to those very objects of critique.83 The 2014

79 Angela Dimitrakaki, “Art and Politics Continued: Avant-garde, Resistance and the Multitude in Documenta 11,” Historical ​ Materialism 11, no. 3 (2003): 174. ​ 80 Dimitrakaki, 154. 81 Patos Kompatsiaris, “Curating Resistance in Contemporary Biennials,” Communication, Culture, & Critique 7 (2014): 80. ​ ​ 82 Kompatsiaris, 86. 83 There are countless biennials, triennials and regularly recurring temporary, contemporary, art events at this moment. Of course, not all of them claim social-consciousness. Examining the curatorial perspectives of a broader swath of such projects is outside the scope of this thesis. I draw my conclusions here from the lineage that I trace—the Documentas and the second Bienal de la Habana, which are indebted to issues of social justice. 29 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial all bear the marks of this

Biennial culture. Firstly, on a very simplistic level, they are recurring event-like exhibitions that

test avant-garde curatorial practice, blur the line between artist and curator, celebrate

contemporary practice, and claim socially-conscious perspectives. Though the Whitney Biennial

was critiqued for its lack of diversity, remember the curators’ perspectives expounded in Chapter

1: all three Biennial curators plus Whitney curator Donna DeSalvo espoused the importance of

diversity and equity as goals for the show. Much like Documenta 11, it was perhaps these

advanced claims of social consciousness that open the show up to critique.

A Feminist Legacy

Feminist artists and curators contribute a particularly crucial legacy to the history of

avant-garde curatorial/artistic practice and exhibition making laid out above. Much like my

previous examples, feminist performance, exhibitionary, and intermedium works have important

roots in the 1960s and 70s, which are explored by a next generation of artists and curators in the

1990s. This section traces the continued and productive relationship between exhibitions and ​ feminist practices, expanding on the suggestion that exhibitions and identity politics are

frequently linked, and that the exhibition is a particularly fertile medium for political

meaning-making.84 This is a necessary exploration, as both the Whitney Houston Biennial and

Last Brucennial consisted only of female artists and much of the critique of the 2014 Whitney

Biennial focused around diversity and representation, or lack thereof. The Whitney Houston

Biennial and Last Brucennial utilize the exhibitionary form to pose questions around

84 Katie Bode, “Some Notes on Lady Girly Female,” exhibition catalog for Lady, Girly, Female, Hammock Gallery, Los Angeles, ​ ​ 2015, http://www.ktbode.com/ladygirlyfemale-1/, 2015. In this catalog essay, Bode states that all-woman group shows of the 1970s were “incredibly powerful in giving voice and visibility to women artists for the first time...” ​ 30 contemporary curatorial practice in dialogue with the the 2014 Whitney Biennial and, much like

earlier feminist examples, question cultural production.

The connection between feminist practices and exhibition extend back to the emergence

of the field in the 1970s. Scholars Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry declare “Womanhouse,” ​ the 1972 work by Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, the

“ground zero of feminist art.”85 And though “Womanhouse” is a hybrid work of performance,

installation, and display, Dimitrakaki and Perry declare it an exhibition, locating the work as an

important moment which establishes the prominence of the exhibition in the genealogy of

feminist art. For this work, Schapiro, Chicago, and more than twenty students took over an

abandoned house in Los Angeles (fig. 2.17), creating performances and mixed media

installations in nearly every room.86 Individual works within the greater whole, such as

performances Cock and Cunt (fig. 2.18) and Lea’s Room (fig. 2.19) and installations Dollhouse ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ (figs. 2.20-2.22), Lipstick Bathroom (fig. 2.23), and Shoe Closet (fig. 2.24), questioned biological ​ ​ ​ ​ determination of gender roles, women’s daily performances of beauty and caregiving, and the

perpetuation of “traditional gender expectations.”87 Womanhouse was a multidimensional site of ​ ​ feminist critique that, like an exhibition, embedded discreet works into a greater whole. That

greater whole then transmutes meaning as such, demanding viewers and participants consider the

cumulative effect of the practices therein, along with their terms of display. In this way,

Womanhouse operates on the register of the exhibition. ​

85Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry, introduction to Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial ​ Transgressions (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 12. ​ 86 Temma Balducci, “ ‘Womanhouse’: Welcome to the (Deconstructed) ‘Dollhouse’,” Woman’s Art Journal 27, no. 2 ​ ​ (Fall-Winter 2006): 17-23. The descriptions and readings of “Womanhouse” in this thesis are greatly indebted to Balducci’s thorough and detailed explications. 87 Balducci, 20. 31 Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974-1979, fig. 2.25), another crucial example of early, ​ ​ collaborative, feminist art, manifests the exhibitionary form, incorporating acts of arrangement,

classification and display. The table of the Dinner Party is set for 29 female history-makers (figs. ​ ​ 2.26-2.28), and the names of 999 more are inscribed on its porcelain floor (fig. 2.29). The names

of all 1,028 historical figures were selected by Chicago and her students as they analyzed history,

influence, and community.88 The mere research and selection process here is extensive, and

strikingly similar to curatorial work. If Fred Wilson rearranged the material vestiges of

marginalized histories through his curatorial project in the 90s, Mining the Museum, Chicago ​ ​ first wove the ephemeral texts and stories of feminist history into material form, then curated and ​ ​ ​ arranged these forms into the Dinner Party. For example, at Susan B. Anthony’s plate, Chicago ​ ​ and her team created a satin runner with “‘memory bands,’ edged in black and embroidered with

the names of prominent members of the suffragette movement, which are designed to recall the

sashes work by suffragettes.”89 This analysis of just one of the settings at Chicago’s table

demonstrates the project’s reliance on history, memory, and selection, the very stuff of curating.

Both Womanhouse and Dinner Party demonstrate an early blurring of lines between ​ ​ ​ ​ art-making and curation and establish an important tie between curating and feminist practice. A

repeated insistence of the connection between feminist meaning-making and the exhibition

reemerges in the 1990s with Marcia Tucker’s Bad Girls (1994, the New Museum, fig. 2.30) and ​ ​ Amelia Jones’ restaging and exploration of Dinner Party through the exhibition Sexual Politics: ​ ​ ​ Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, at the Hammer Museum at UCLA (1996). ​ For the latter, Jones provided context and chronology of feminist practice from the 70s through

88 Ricia Ann Chansky, “When Words Are Not Enough: Narrating Power of Femininity Through the Visual Language of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 29, no. 1 (2014): 63. ​ ​ 89 Chansky, 63-64. 32 the 90s, positioning Chicago’s work as “a catalyst for feminist debate since its premier

exhibition,” and, despite it's a controversial position both within and outside of feminist circles, a

work that has “clearly informed the development of feminist art and theory.”90 Tucker also traces

her impetus for feminist exhibition making to an engagement with the movement and its work in

the late 60s and early 70s.91 Bad Girls consisted entirely of works from the 1980s and 90s, and ​ ​ though it was not anchored by the display of earlier works as was Jones’ show, it too sought to

complicate and expand feminist frameworks and take up, but not take sides on, the schisms that

occurred throughout the 1990s as the movement considered its intersection with multiple nodes

of identity politics.92

Bad Girls and Sexual Politics are pivot points in my historicization of feminist practices ​ ​ ​ as they relate to contemporary curation. Both shows look back to the avant-garde artistic and

curatorial practices that emerged along with the movement throughout the late 60s and the 70s.

Projects such as Womanhouse and Dinner Party cast long shadows on material, textual, and ​ ​ ​ ​ theoretical iterations of feminist work. At the same time, Tucker and Jones use Bad Girls and ​ ​ Sexual Politics to complicate readings of feminisms, utilizing the exhibitionary form to both ​ question and operate within a single theoretical field. Bad Girls and Sexual Politics speak with ​ ​ ​ ​ one another, with the history of feminist art practices, and with their contemporary conditions.

They do not discard their conditions, but instead create spaces for conversation, inquiry and

action. The ways these exhibitions operate within their field, parallels my reading of the Whitney

Houston Biennial, Last Brucennial, and 2014 Whitney Biennial, with the former two projects ​

90 Amelia Jones, “Sexual Politics: Feminist Strategies, Feminist Conflicts, Feminist Histories,” in Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s ​ Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, ed. Jones (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 24. ​ ​ 91 Marcia Tucker, introduction to Bad Girls (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge: The MIT Press, ​ ​ 1994), 4. 92 Marcia Tucker, “Attack of the Giant Mutant Ninja Barbies,” in Bad Girls, 16. ​ ​ 33 operating both alongside and in opposition to the latter in a symbiotic relationship. In this

reading, exhibition is form, querying and contributing to contemporary practice and its

intersections with identity politics, with a particular focus on gender.

A feminist connection and commitment to exhibitionary form and the forebears of the

70s and 90s once again emerged about a decade ago. In 2007, Wack! Art and the Feminist ​ Revolution opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (figs. 2.31-2.33). The ​ show then toured for nearly two years through Washington, D.C., New York, and Vancouver.

The same year Wack! Opened, the Brooklyn Museum launched the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center ​ ​ for Feminist Art. The Center would host archives, exhibitions, and programs centered on

historical and contemporary feminist practices. Its opening show, Global Feminisms, traced ​ ​ feminist practices from the 1990s onward through 87 works across 46 countries (figs. 2.34-2.36).

According to curator Maura Reilly, Global Feminisms was “the first exhibition to look at ​ contemporary feminist art on such a large global scale.”93 The Sackler Center would also house a ​ permanent installation of Dinner Party. ​ ​ Like Sexual Politics before it, Wack!’s thesis centered specifically on the history of the ​ ​ ​ ​ movement at its precipitating moment and the mutability of feminism’s work. Curator Cornelia

Butler stated the exhibition would “make the case that feminism’s impact on art of the 1970s

constitutes the most influential international ‘movement’ of any during the postwar period—in

spite or perhaps because of the fact that it seldom cohered, formally or critically, into a

movement the way Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, or even Fluxus did.” She stated that

furthermore, “feminism is a relatively open-ended system that has, throughout its history of

93 Dana Micucci, “Feminist Art Gets Place of Pride in Brooklyn,” New York Times, April 19, 2007. ​ ​ 34 engagement with the visual arts, sustained an unprecedented degree of internal critique and

contained wildly divergent political ideologies and practices.”94 And, like Bad Girls, the ​ ​ Sackler’s Global Feminisms, sought to both contest and confirm feminism as it worked through a ​ ​ new regime of identity politics. In a global, capitalist economy, the exhibition now must account

for “what it means to be a feminist in radically different class, cultural and political situations.”95 ​ As Global Feminisms once again critiqued through the form of exhibition, the curatorial forms of ​ ​ Dinner Party looked on across the Sackler Center. ​ Feminist art and exhibition making is a point of intersection on the two historical legacies

explored earlier in this chapter—the artist’s play with curatorial form, and the expanding

political and artistic project of the exhibition. Though many critics believed the Whitney failed in

its quest to map the diversities of contemporary culture makers, the show’s thesis, explored in

Chapter 1, was very much invested in that problematic. And, though it is difficult to decipher the

precise ideologies of the Whitney Houston Biennial and Last Brucennial, their focus on women

artists insists on at least some feminist analysis. As they are deeply concerned with contemporary

practice and identity politics, I believe the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial,

and Last Brucennial are indebted to the histories of feminist meaning making through art and

curatorial practices explored above.

Conclusions

Art historical and cultural conditions including social based practices, an expanded exhibitionary

culture, an erosion of boundaries between art making and curation, and an increased connection

between political and curatorial practices, particularly in the feminist sphere, coalesced over the

94 Cornelia Butler, “Art and Feminism: An Ideology of Shifting Criteria,” in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Lisa ​ ​ Gabrielle Mark (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 15. 95 Reilly again quoted in Micucci, “Feminist Art Gets Place of Pride in Brooklyn,” New York Times, April 19, 2007. ​ ​ 35 past 50 years and reached an apex in the 1990s. These histories are essential to understanding

contemporary curatorial and artistic practice. The selected examples throughout the chapter also

help locate the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial amongst

a tradition of avant-garde, politically-engaged, and feminist exhibitionary practices. As art

institutions bore increased marks of neoliberal, late capitalist culture, curatorial and artistic

practices evolved to critique from within. The exhibition-whether arranged through the work of

the artist or the curator-became one of the most potent forms for staging that critique.

Lines between event and exhibition, curator and artist, social project and art practice

blurred. Contemporary curators-whether a practicing artist or critic/administrator-became “the

principal representatives of some of our most persistent questions and confusions about the

social role of art. Is art a force for change and renewal, or is it a commodity, for advantage and

convenience? Is it a radical activity, undermining social conventions, or is it a diverting

entertainment for the wealthy?”96 In taking on these questions, the curator and her product, the

exhibition, became interpretive forms. And, as such “the convergence of artistic and curatorial

practice can be seen as an opportunity to engage in a critique within the field of cultural

production as a whole”97 and “a means to explore a shared or collaborative process, idea, or

thematic.”98 This form and medium deserves interrogation on its own terms; this will be the

focus of the following chapter. Just as the history of the critical exhibition helps unpack the

meaning, function, and relationship between the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston

Biennial, and Last Brucennial, so does a reading of exhibitionary theory and form.

96 David Levi Strauss, “ “The Bias of the World: Curating After Szeemann & Hopps” in n Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating, ​ ​ eds. Heather Kouris and Steven Rand (New York: Apex Art, 2007), 15. 97 Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 110. ​ ​ 98 Celina Jeffery, introduction to The Artist as Curator (Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2015), 7. ​ ​ 36 CHAPTER 3 THE EXHIBITIONS AND THEIR THEORY: ANALYSIS AND IMPLICATIONS

In her article, “Curating Curators,” Beatrice von Bismarck moves the discussion of curation from

a historical narrative, such as was explicated in the previous chapter, to one of an artistic activity

on its own terms. According to von Bismarck, curation is the action— “the compilation of

subjects, objects, places, and information and the determination of their relations between each

other”— that begets the exhibition.99 This action is therefore a “particular method for

determining material practices,” the very description Paul O’Neill uses to define and exhibition’s

medium.100 And though it is important to historicize curatorial and related artistic practices, one

must consider the ontology and theory of the exhibition.101

Throughout this chapter I will define the possible terms of the exhibition-as-medium.102

First, I will lay a groundwork that allows me to consider the exhibition as a communicative form.

This is not to discount the effect of the artworks therein, but to theorize the ways in which the

whole acts through and on its material circumstances. I will then move to consider potential

typologies of the form. First, I read the exhibition as performative, which opens up space to

consider how the form creates meaning vis-a-vis audience, duration, and phenomenological

experience. Even within the performative frame, I employ a variety of methods drawn from

performance studies and semiotics. These approaches share a common conclusion—that

99 Beatrice von Bismarck, “Curating Curators,” Texte zur Kunst 86 (June 2012): 48. ​ ​ 100 Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 89. ​ ​ 101 The focus of this chapter is theorizing the exhibition as form, not the art institution or museum, which was covered in the previous chapter. Though Chapter 2 is largely historical in method and Chapter 3 theoretical, I included museological studies in the former because, much like an historical overview, these texts assess the larger cultural and contextual framework of the field that exhibition sits within. 102 Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck, “A Conversation Between Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck,” in Cultures of the ​ Curatorial, eds. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 22-24. von Bismarck ​ ​ and Rogoff’s theory of the “curatorial,” introduced in the previous chapter, takes as a given that the exhibition is its own form and hence begin interrogating just what that form might be. Ultimately, the authors imagine the curatorial as ongoing, political, open-ended work, “a series of existing knowledges that come together momentarily to produce an event of knowledge.” ​ ​ 37 performance activates a moment of difference. At this moment of difference, new meaning is

made. After defining the performativity of the exhibition, I will move to complicate the

relationship, reading the terms “exhibition and “performance” through the “expanded field” of

contemporary practice, employing the strict structuralist methodologies utilized by Rosalind

Krauss in her seminal essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.”103 From this reading I conclude

that exhibition and performance are not, of course, entirely synonymous. Yet, the close

relationship between the two illuminates the conditions of the exhibitionary form.

After clarifying how, why, and on which terms exhibitions are their own artistic form, I

will then examine how this form can “turn into a relational, spatiotemporal configuration that in

itself creates differences, deviances, and frictions with the existing conditions.”104 That the

exhibition is a medium, and a politically potent one at that, creates a model for my interpretation

of how the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial operate in

relation to one another and their broader contexts. The result of this interaction is at once a

critical conversation on equity and politics in the art world and a confirmation of the

interconnectedness of artistic action in contemporary cultural conditions—the so-called

“dialectic between complicity and criticality.”105 While ultimately bound to the system in which ​ they take part, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial offer

the possibility of locating change and shifting the terms of artistic discourse.

103 In Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating, Kate Fowles writes, “by echoing Krauss we can readily establish that contemporary ​ ​ exhibitions are now not only dealing with the presentation of an expanded notion of art, but also extending their own spatial parameters into conceptual and virtual realms, as well as experimenting with the role of the public in the ‘completion’ of a project.” My own application of Krauss’ theory aligns with Fowles’ expression here. Kate Fowles, “Who Cares? Understanding the Role of the Curator Today,” in Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating (New York: Apex Art, 2007), 33. ​ ​ 104Rogoff and von Bismarck, 37. 105 Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44, no. 1 (September 2005): 280-281. ​ ​ 38

Exhibition as Medium

Rogoff, von Bismarck, and O’Neill’s theories of curating and exhibition, mentioned in the

chapter introduction above, set the parameters for my discussion of the exhibition as medium or

form. All three scholars suggest that the exhibition is a space of production, a “trajectory of

ongoing, active work, not an isolated end product but along the line of an ongoing project”106 or

“a durational, transformative, and speculative activity, a way of keeping things in flow, mobile,

in between, indeterminate.”107 Marion von Osten draws a similar conclusion in her interview in

Men in Black: Handbook of Curatorial Practice, stating that the exhibition can “act as a ​ ​ workspace...a public studio for critical discourse, a space for political theory and

interdisciplinary collaborations, rather than a space for visual and textual representation.”108

Rogoff, von Bismarck, von Osten, and O’Neill all suggest that the exhibition is a time-based,

open-ended, and, perhaps most crucially a “transformative” form. They conceive of the

exhibition as a medium with potential to enact change via its collusions with spectators, culture,

and context. That all four of these theories locate potential-for-change as a key feature of the

exhibitionary form is crucial to my reading of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston

Biennial, and Last Brucennial. I contend that these exhibitions problematize and call attention to

106 Rogoff and von Bismarck, 26. 107 O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), 89. In their text on Lyotard’s “Les Immatériaux,” Daniel ​ ​ ​ Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein use similar terms to describe the medium of the exhibition. They suggest the conceptual precepts of the exhibition are a way to “continue thinking” instead of simply an “illustration to a set of preconceived ideas.” Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, “Thinking Philosophy, Spatially: Jean-François Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux and ​ the Philosophy of the Exhibition,”in Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art, eds. Joseph ​ ​ Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, trans. Danniil Dynin, James Gussen, Jeanine Herman (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2008), 126. 108 Marion von Osten, interview in Men in Black: Handbook of Curatorial Practice, eds. Christopher Tanner and Ute Tischler ​ ​ (Berlin : Künstlerhaus Bethanien ; Frankfurt am Main : Revolver, 2003), 224. Though I take exception with von Osten’s suggestion that visual and textual elements are the either/or to critical discourse, theory, and collaboration, her specificity creates a picture of the critical, contemporary exhibition. 39 issues of diversity and politics in the art world, while operating distinctly within that world. The conversations engendered by the three exhibitions, then, represent a shift in material circumstance.

And, though not explicitly stated, the aforementioned theories also provide a framework ​ for addressing exhibitions of contemporary art. Any exhibition is, of course, open to interpretation. But historical and survey shows are bound to narratives and didactics to a much greater degree than event-like amalgamations of contemporary practices. The latter, as demonstrated by the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial, insist on multitude, creating meaning through the difference and breadth found in contemporary practices. As iterated in Chapter 1, the curatorial charges of all three shows centered entirely and singularly on the expanse of materials included therein. There was no stated theme, timeframe, or content-based focus. Instead each took care to explore an extensive range of contemporary practice, presenting performance and the written word next to paintings, photographs, sculpture, and more, allowing audiences to draw their own conclusions around “what makes” contemporary art.109

The regular recurrence of all three of these exhibitions also adds specificity to Rogoff, von Bismarck, and von Osten’s argument that the durational, temporal, and ongoing nature of contemporary exhibitions is both unique and a key determining material in the exhibitionary form. The exhibition is self evidently temporal, but but even more so in the ongoing project of biennial culture, described in depth in the previous chapter. Here, temporality becomes a more important consideration, a way to create meaning across longer periods of time and through a

109 See chapter 1 for both critical response and curatorial statements that emphasize the diversity of practices included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial. See figure list for illustrated demonstrations of the same. 40 conversation between the past, present (and anticipation of) future iterations. Of course not all

exhibitions of contemporary art are recurring, but the continuous nature of biennial culture and

its attendant avant-garde curatorial and programming practices exerts significant impact on our

understanding of how the contemporary art world operates. And, in the case of the 2014 Whitney

Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial, this reiteration is is absolutely true.

The second annual Whitney Houston Biennial is set to take place in spring of 2017. The

Brucennial repeated on a biannual basis until 2014 and though the exhibition no longer takes

place, the Bruce High Quality Foundation continues its exhibitionary and event based critique

through its Foundation University Gallery (FUG), opened in 2015. The recurring nature of the

Whitney Biennial is self-evident.

Temporality is also an important consideration in any exhibition as such, whether ​ ​ recurring or not. In her essay on duration in contemporary exhibition, Claire Bishop locates

1993, a crucial year in the histories and exhibitions discussed in this project, as a turning point

for the extended relationship between time and the exhibition. According to Bishop, in that year

two distinct genealogies of exhibition-making collide: the performative exhibition and the

site-specific, socially engaged exhibition. As a result, this collision “establish[ed] a new ​ relationship to temporality by expanding the duration of the exhibition: instead of being a fixed

arrangement of objects, bracketed by a definitive date of opening and closing, the exhibition

becomes one moment in a longer-term, expanded ‘project’.”110 Bishop’s interpretation of ​ contemporary exhibition provides further specificity on its material and form, while tying it to

110 Claire Bishop, “Performative Exhibitions: The Problem of Open Endedness,” in Cultures of the Curatorial 2: Timing: On the ​ Temporal Dimension of Exhibiting, eds. Beatrice von Bismarck, Rike Frank, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, Jörn Schafaff, and ​ Thomas Weski (Berlin: Sternberg Press; Leipzig: Kulturen des Kuratorischen, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, 2014), 240. 41 temporality. Bishop’s notion of temporality also introduces the relationship between performativity in the exhibition.

The connection between temporality and performativity in the 2014 Whitney Biennial,

Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial rests, I believe, in the compressed timeline of each show, resulting in larger crowds at any single time, and an open, performative, energy.

Even the longest running of the three, the Whitney Biennial, was open for just 11 weeks, drawing massive crowds to the “must-see” show. Though lesser known, the Whitney Houston

Biennial and Last Brucennial were open for much shorter periods of time, one night and one month, respectively, therefore also attracting sizable audiences and their performative, interactive energy. This interactivity and energy builds as visitors move between one section of the exhibition to the next freely, conversing and interpreting as they go, as opposed to a historical, monographic, or retrospective show, which guides them through a more predetermined experience. Performance itself also has a pronounced presence in a short-run contemporary art show. Particularly in the case of the one-night Whitney Houston Biennial, performance took place throughout the entire open-run of the exhibition, making the form intrinsic to and inseparable from other elements of the exhibition, permeating the entire space

(figs 3.1-3.3). Though this condition is less marked in the Last Brucennial and 2014 Whitney

Brucennial, it follows that their relatively short runs produced a greater chance of confronting performance at any given time. From this connection between performativity and temporality rises a more thorough, and theoretical, examination of the performative form of the exhibition, below.

42

Performativity in the Exhibition

Throughout this next section, I utilize various theories to read the exhibition as a performative

work. I draw on methods that locate “the performative” in two and three dimensional works of

art or in text and language.111 I also analyze concepts from the field of performance studies that

define performativity so that it may encompass the medium of exhibition.112 I will also briefly

consider concepts that locate affect or anthropomorphic qualities in the exhibition or museum.

Through these frameworks I read the exhibition as an actor in a performative moment. In any

case, to imagine the exhibition operating at the register of the performative is to imagine an

interactive, dialogic, temporal and communicative space, one for both the transmission of ideas

and for Birnbaum and Wallenstein’s suggestion of a “place to continue thinking.”113 The

Whitney Houston Biennial, 2014 Whitney Biennial, and Last Brucennial are precisely spaces

that both allows for and engender the thinking through of various problematics. In their

performative moment, these exhibitions problematize simple conceptions of gender, equity, and

diversity in the contemporary art world.

Jennifer Fisher suggests that when studying exhibitions, we must consider their affect,

and expand “the discipline of art history beyond its concerns with objects, meaning,

111 Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, “The Performativity of Art,” in Performatives After Deconstruction, ed. Maura Senatore (London ​ ​ ​ and New York: Bloomsbury Academic of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2013), 169-184 locates the performative in individual artworks. Bruce W. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material Speech and Utter Sense,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, eds. ​ ​ Ferguson, Reesa Greenberg, and Sandy Nairne (New York: Routledge, 1996), 175-190; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: The ​ Politics of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); and Marvin Carlson Performance: A Critical ​ ​ Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) explore the performativity of text and language. All of these concepts ​ will be expanded upon throughout the subsequent section. 112 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Culture as Performance: Developing a Concept of Performance.” in Exploring Textual Action eds. ​ ​ Anders M. Gullestad, Patrizia Lombardo, and Lars Sætre (Aarhus, DNK: Aarhus University Press, 2010), 123-140. 113 Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, “Thinking Philosophy, Spatially: Jean-François Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux and ​ the Philosophy of the Exhibition,”in Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art, ed. Joseph ​ ​ Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, trans. Danniil Dynin, James Gussen, Jeanine Herman (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2008), 126. 43 representation and interpretation, to examine art events and exhibitions as energetically charged

contexts.”114 Furthermore, exhibitions that do so, “immerse the subject” in a moment in which

the curator and exhibition act as catalyst, more than mere interpretive vehicles.115 Fisher’s theory

asks us to account for the intangible, the ways in which exhibitions take on their own character

and meaning. Fisher contends that exhibitions possess an intangible affect, feeling, energy or

vibe. Bruce Ferguson takes that suggestion further, ascribing feeling and energy to the

exhibition, theorizing it as anthropomorphic. According to Ferguson, exhibitions are “the central ​ speaking subjects in the standard stories about art which institutions and curators often tell to

themselves and to us.”116

While first-hand accounts of the 2014 Whitney Biennial and Last Brucennial were not

readily available, I can apply concepts of exhibitionary affect to the Whitney Houston Biennial,

as I interviewed curator C. Finley several times, and received primary documentation from her.

When asked to describe the Whitney Houston Biennial, Finley went straight away to the energy

and shared sense of community she believed the show both captured and produced. She told me

that “It [the Whitney Houston Biennial] was fresh, it was a moment of consciousness...a

feeling...being part of something that more meaningful together, a collective effervescence” in

which the evening was more than the sum of its parts.117 Finley’s description of the

affects/effects of the Whitney Houston Biennial map onto Fisher’s suggestions exceedingly well.

114 Jennifer Fisher, “Exhibitionary Affect,” n. Paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal 18 (July 2006): 28-29. Fisher traces a ​ ​ particularly strong relationship between the “affective” exhibition and feminist practices, making this a particularly relevant theory for a discussion of exhibitions that deal with gender identity politics. 115 Fisher, 33. 116 Bruce W. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material Speech and Utter Sense,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, eds. Ferguson, ​ ​ Reesa Greenberg, and Sandy Nairne (New York: Routledge, 1996), 176. Ferguson draws on the Whitney Independent Study Program’s 1989 publication, The Desire of the Museum, as a precedent for anthropomorphizing the exhibitions. This text ​ ​ suggests that the museum as an institution are places of subconscious desire and meaning-making, drawing on psychoanalytic theory to locate agency in the institution. 117 C. Finley (curator, Whitney Houston Biennial), in conversation with the author, June 2016. 44 Even with Finley’s confirmation of affect at the Whitney Houston Biennial, Fisher and

Ferguson still ask us to take great leaps and account for the unmeasurable and the affective

feelings or consciousness of exhibitionary works. But, their theories also open up space for

understanding the exhibition as a performance by ascribing affect or consciousness to the

exhibition, which, along with the spectator, act together in a performative moment. Performance

theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte describes this co-presence as a prerequisite from which a variety of ​ cultural and artistic acts can be read as performance.118 These actors then co-determine the

performance at their very moment of interaction. This moment then produces potentially altering

effects.119 It is in this co-determination that Juan A. Gaitán locates the ability of the exhibition of

contemporary art to stimulate the public sphere through its performative intersections with its

audience.120 The altering-and-stimulating-co-determination occurs within the Whitney Houston

Biennial, 2014 Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial as each exhibition problematizes

and engenders a reconsideration of diversity, equity, and gender in the contemporary artworld.

Jonathan Lahey Dronsfeld describes the performativity of individual works of art

similarly to Gaitán’s reading of the exhibition. According to Dronsfeld, art performs its meaning

through identity and iteration. In this model, “the singular artwork cannot exist independently of ​ my experience of it, it is in the experience of the work that the condition of its identity is to be

118 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Culture as Performance: Developing a Concept of Performance.” in Exploring Textual Action eds ​ ​ Anders M. Gullestad, Patrizia Lombardo, and Lars Sætre (Aarhus, DNK: Aarhus University Press, 2010), 125. 119 The “performative” as a moment of meaning-making has a broader context beyond the production of art and cultural performance. Judith Butler’s important contributions to gender theory describe the performance of gender as the moment in which it is created. There is no essential meaning behind “male” or “female” until the subject calls it into being through action or performance. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). See also ​ ​ Silvia Stoller’s “Expressivity and Performativity,” Continental Philosophy Review 43 (2010): 97-110 for a concise reading of ​ ​ ​ Butler's theory. See J. Hillis Miller “Performativity1/Performativity2,” in Exploring Textual Action eds Anders M. Gullestad, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Patrizia Lombardo, and Lars Sætre (Aarhus, DNK: Aarhus University Press, 2010), 31-58, for a study of the relationship between Butler’s theory of performativity and its relationship to performance studies in the reading of art and cultural performance. 120 Juan A. Gaitán, “What Is The Public,” in Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, ed. Jens Hoffmann (Milan: Mousse ​ ​ Publishing, 2012), 36. 45 found.”121 Much as Gaitán located performance in the exhibition’s interaction with its spectator, ​ ​ so too does Dronsfeld locate the meaning making potential of the performative moment within

the individual work of art. My application of this theory may seem antithetical to the case for the

reading the exhibition as a whole, but in this case I use Dronsfeld’s theory because I am reading ​ ​ the exhibition as a “work” itself.

Similarly, theories that ascribe performativity to textual and communicative tools can be

applied to a performative reading of exhibitions. Again, this is not to suggest that individual

didactic elements of the exhibition perform as texts, but that the exhibition, as a whole, is a

communicative tool.122 Speech-act theory ascribes performativity to communication, insisting

that it “does something,” creating material impact on the contexts in which it operates.123 If the

previously explicated theories conjure meaning at the site of the performance, the exhibition, or

the artwork, Judith Butler does so at the site of the speech act. In Excitable Speech she describes ​ ​ the speech act as one that “does not just confer a recognition, but that it actually creates the ​ recognizable.”124 Dronsfield’s and Butler’s theories, much like Fischer-Lichter’s, conceive of a ​ performative co-determination between subject and meaning. The site of this co-determination in

my study is, of course, the exhibition, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the Whitney Houston

Biennial, and the Last Brucennial.

The explicated theoretical approaches present a performative framing of the exhibitionary

form, therefore allowing for a more specific reading of the medium. Furthermore, if we imagine

121 Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, “The Performativity of Art,” in Performatives After Deconstruction, ed Maura Senatore (London ​ ​ and New York: Bloomsbury Academic of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2013), 171. 122 Martin Beck, “The Exhibition and the Display,” in Exhibition, ed. Lucy Steeds, Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art ​ ​ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 28. In this essay, Beck discusses the history of the exhibition as a site for “experimenting with mass communication.” 123 Here I am drawing on the summaries and conclusions explicated throughout the entire chapter on “Linguistic approaches,” in Marvin Carlson’s Performance: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). ​ ​ 124 Emphasis mine. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). ​ ​ 46 the exhibition as performative, we can then utilize the tools and theories of performance studies,

which variously define the spectator, the artworks, and their co-creation of meaning. From this

site of meaning making emerges the possibility of facilitating, encouraging, and enticing

“visitors to be moved, so that in the process they may become permeable for the subjectivity of

others, and as a result may change their views or social behaviour.”125 Reading the exhibition as

performative form, therefore opens up the possibility of the exhibition as a productive critical,

political space, a space that I argue the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and

Last Brucennial co-create by presenting a web that both questions and reiterates concerns around

diversity, gender, and identity politics in the art world.

Exhibition and Performance in the Expanded Field

Rosalind Krauss’ seminal essay, “Sculpture in An Expanded Field,” provides yet another method

for theorizing the exhibition’s medium and form. Such a reading both complicates the

relationship between exhibition and performance, while simultaneously reaffirming their

interconnectedness. Rooted firmly in structuralist methods, Krauss’ theory also accounts for the

postmodern, postmedium, post 70s context of art making. In this way, it binds a

methodologically innovative approach to the material and historical circumstances of art practice

in an increasing complex field.

In her essay, Krauss diagrams typologies of art practice along the “Klein group” matrix.

In this matrix, she defines sculpture as the converging point between two “neuter,” or negative,

terms: “not-architecture” and “not-landscape.” (fig. 3.4) She then expands the diagram, placing

the “complex” terms- “architecture” and “landscape,” over top and parallel to their inverse. This

125 Mieke Bal, “Curatorial Acts,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 1, no. 2 (2012): 189. ​ ​ 47 opens up three more points on Krauss’ grid:126 the convergence of the complex terms at the top

of the diagram and, along each side, a point of intersection for each neuter/complex pair (fig.

3.5).127 For example, Krauss describes the point between landscape and not-landscape as the

“marked site,” exemplified by the land art of the 1970s. On the other side, she diagrams works

that are at once architecture and not-architecture, or so-called “axiomatic structures.” Krauss

describes these works as those which display the “axiomatic features of the architectural

experience-the abstract conditions of openness and closure-onto the reality of a given space.”128

I would like to propose a similar diagram for complicating the relationship between the

exhibition and performance. In this schema, the complex terms are “material practices” (three

and two-dimensional, painting, drawing, sculpture) and “performance.” These terms converge at

the top on mediums such as theater or puppetry, in which the artist constructs both the temporal

and material elements of the work. At the convergence of the neuter terms—“non-material” and

“non-performance”—are social practice projects which, neither scripted nor physically

constructed, are made of the stuff of the social and the communal. Exhibitions sit along the axis

of the “performance” and “non-performance,” engaging both the social and the communal of the

practices at the “neuter” axis, and the temporal, durational, scripted and meaning-making aspects

of the performance (fig. 3.6). The expanse of this diagram is made possible by the continued

opening and intersecting of curatorial and artistic practices, explored in the previous chapter.

Therefore, Krauss’ term, “expanded field,” describes the contemporary exhibitionary

landscape, both literally and theoretically. Her essay has become so influential, that “expanded

126 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 37. ​ ​ 127 Krauss describes the convergence of architecture and landscape as those historical constructs, such as labyrinths or Japanese gardens, which incorporate elements of both. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 41. 128 Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 41. 48 field,” is now nearly synonymous with intermedium, postmedium practice.129 This secondary,

more colloquial meaning of the term is particularly true of the relationship between art making

and curation. In referencing the “expanded field,” Celina Jeffery asks “in what capacity does the

artwork or artistic site of practice and consumption become so porous as to render the divisions

between art and curating indistinguishable?”130 I would argue that applying Krauss’

methodologies reveals that, in some cases, that distinction is already mute.

Conclusions

What, then, is at stake in theorizing the exhibition’s medium and form? And, how do these

questions open up space for a more productive understanding of the 2014 Whitney Biennial,

Whitney Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial? My reading of the three exhibitions is further

grounded by the contemporary curatorial theories, which open this chapter. These theories,

located alongside specific examples of avant-garde curatorial practice from the previous chapter,

provide a crucial context for evaluating how and through which means the contemporary

exhibition acts upon its world and forges its meaning.

Reading performativity onto the exhibit theorizes its medium in even more specific

terms. Through performance theory, the exhibition becomes a site of active, participatory

meaning-making. In this process, so too resides the potential for change, the possibility that the

exhibition creates, to requote Rogoff and von Bismarck, “differences, deviances, and frictions

with the existing conditions.”131

129 François Bovier and Adeena Mey, “The Multiple Sites of Expanded Cinema,” in Cinema in the Expanded Field (Zurich: ​ ​ JRP/Ringier; Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2016), 7. Bovier and Mey state that Krauss’ essay, now part of our “art historical unconscious,” has continued to create new points of departure for understanding artistic mediums in a postmodern world even now, nearly forty years later. 130 Celina Jeffery, introduction to The Artist as Curator (Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2015), 7. ​ ​ 131 Rogoff and von Bismarck, 37. 49 Understanding the exhibition as a space of potential political or social change thus allows us to consider how the Whitney Houston Biennial, 2014 Whitney Biennial, and Last

Brucennial functioned in relation to one another and their spectators. Ultimately, these exhibitions cast a critical eye toward one another, and perform within their larger contexts, critiquing gender, identity politics, and representation in the art world. The exhibitionary form has, in fact, a history as a site of feminist critique. The next chapter will focus more closely on the historical and theoretical ties between gender and the exhibition, further analyzing them critical potency of the form.

50 CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION

In 2010, Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry convened a roundtable discussion on the state of

feminist curation in which the participating scholars queried “the critical implications for

feminist practice when it is transplanted from the margins to the centre of curatorial activity, as it

(sometimes) was in the years around 2010.”132 This statement was referencing the Brooklyn

Museum’s aforementioned Sackler Center and exhibitions such as Wack! Art and the Feminist ​ Revolution (opened 2007 in Los Angeles, toured through 2009) and Gender Check. Femininity ​ ​ and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (ran 2009-2010 at the Museum Moderner Kunst ​ Stiftung Ludwig Wien along with an accompanying symposium). Over the course of the

conversation, the scholars make clear that, though feminist exhibition-making and curation may ​ seem emergent, there is a legacy of feminist creation through exhibition that dates back to the ​ movement’s nascent years. Throughout this paper, I have explored this history in depth, noting

that a broad field of political issues, from identity politics to globalized capitalism, have been

effectively critiqued, explored, and explicated through the exhibition’s form.

Later in their conversation, Dimitrakaki, Perry, and their colleagues turn to why this ​ ​ might be. They consider the exhibition as a way to undermine historical canons, and to visually,

forcefully, and productively insert the work of women and feminist artists into the broader field.

The assertion is made most succinctly by Patrik Steorn, who suggests that “[e]xhibitions and

pedagogical work can be useful in order to undermine the canon, and to ask questions about

which narratives are included and which are excluded.”133 Amelia Jones poses similar questions

132 Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry, “Constant Redistribution: A Roundtable on Feminism, Art, and the Curatorial Field,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 2, no.2 (2013): 220. ​ 133 Dimitrakaki and Perry, “Constant Redistribution,” 227. 51 about the “re-emergence” of feminist art at the end of the aughts in her essay “The Return of

Feminism(s) And the Visual Arts, 1970/2009,” concluding that “feminist art and feminist art

history are...absolutely central to a radical historicization of the past, a radical understanding of

the impossibly fleeting moment of the present, and a radical imagining of the new politics of

positionality that might inform cultural practices in the future.”134 Here she is speaking

specifically of feminist curation, and the possibility of shifting cultural conditions that emerges

from this tradition.

It is this set of “whys” that surrounded my thinking about the Whitney Houston Biennial, ​ ​ Last Brucennial, and 2014 Whitney Biennial as soon as I learned of the projects. I wondered

about the persistent tension between exhibition and identity politics, about the continued

“question” of the female artist, and why the exhibition had always been and continued to be a

key site for exploring and presenting feminist practices.135 I also wondered why these projects, all

three of which were curated by practicing artists (at least in part) drew attention to issues of

feminism, exhibitions, and identity politics in such a productive fashion. Even the Whitney

Biennial, which was critiqued for its lack of female artists, provided a space for working through

these problematics. The Whiney does make efforts to consider contemporary political issues and ​ ​ diversity of both practice and representation in curating its biannual show. I believe it is the

Whitney’s self-fashioned claim that its Biennials are diverse, fresh, and politically correct, along

with the project’s long tail of controversy, that agitates these critiques in the first place.

134 Amelia Jones, “The Return of Feminism(s) And the Visual Arts, 1970/2009,” in Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays ​ ​ on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, eds. Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe (Cambridge: Cambridge ​ Scholars Publishing, 2010), 14. 135 My personal confrontations with these issues are bookended by a visit to the Sackler the year it opened, and now, nearly ten years later, opening the New York Times fall arts season preview to read that, once again, the critics were interested to see just how many women artists had major museum shows this season. See Roberta Smith, “Museums Embrace the Unfamiliar,” New ​ York Times, September 16, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/arts/design/museums-embrace-the-unfamiliar.html. ​ 52 Therefore, it became part of my project to complicate the bifurcation between the Whitney on one side, and the Whitney Houston and Last Brucennial on the other. Instead I sought to imagine how all three exhibitions worked together toward productive conversation.

The concomitant meaning-making between all three exhibitions has centered my exploration of these projects. Reading the exhibition as a communicative tool is also the basis for my more generalized claims about the exhibitionary form. I predicated my study on proving that the exhibition is its own form. I surveyed the histories of avant-garde curatorial practice, feminist curating and art making, and artist curated projects, and found that a certain performativity emerged as the boundary between “curation” and “art making” eroded. I defined this performativity as a place in which the exhibition makes meaning with individual artworks, its conditions, its spectators, and the field in which it operates.

A performative reading of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and

Last Brucennial is bracketed by the formal similarities between the three, which are bustling, brimming, events in which spectators meet an amalgamation of contemporary practices. The phenomenological experience of this type of show is distinct from an exhibition arranged chronologically, or with a larger art historical thesis. All three exhibitions insist on a multiplicity of practices; other than that, they are open for unbridled interpretation. Reading these shows, and their relationship to one another, as performative, created the a coherent field from which I imagined their symbiotic interactions.

Performative methodologies also capture the particular relationship between duration, temporality, and these three exhibitions. Each was extant for only a brief period of time. The shortest run, that of the Whitney Houston Biennial, was only one night. The longest is the

53 Whitney Biennial, open from March until May, a significantly shorter block of time than most

major museum engagements. This period seems particularly truncated when considering its

international importance and its weight in the art world—extensive, international audiences have

less than eight weeks to make their pilgrimage to it. The Last Brucennial was open for less than a

month. At the same time, all three exhibitions are recurring, creating an unending temporal loop

with the iteration that came before it, or is yet to come.

A performative reading of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Houston Biennial, and

Last Brucennial accounts for the ways these exhibitions make meaning. It also creates space in

which that ephemeral moment of meaning making translates to material change. The Whitney

Houston Biennial and Last Brucennial had the potential to shift readings of the Whitney

Biennial. The Whitney Biennial provided a frame that brought the Whitney Houston Biennial

and Last Brucennial’s “all female” curatorial charges into sharper relief. And, working together,

the three created a critical conversation on the continued importance of equity in the art world.

This conversation could prompt further considerations, unleashing the potential of the exhibition.

And, though I find Jean Leering’s suggestion—that this potential is emancipatory— a bit

overstated, I agree with Claire Bishop, the exhibition’s potential lies in its ability to “visualiz[e]

alternatives through culture.”136 The intersecting work of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney

Houston Biennial, and Last Brucennial does just this, providing several, concurrent loci from

which to imagine the most diverse and equitable representations of contemporary art practice

through a biennial, salon style exhibition.

136 Jean Leering, “Museum Policy, Subject of 25 Years Thought and Action, Criticism and Evaluation.” Kunst & ​ museumjournaal 4, no. 2 (1992): 6. Claire Bishop Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary ​ ​ Art? (London: Koenig Books, 2013), 56. ​ 54 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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APPENDIX FIGURES/ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1.1, Semiotext(e), Semiotext(e) New Series, 2014 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) ​ ​

Fig. 1.2, Sterling Ruby, Basin Theology/Butterfly Wreck, 2013, Ceramic, 28 1/8 × 39 3/8 × 41 inches (71.4 × 100 × 104.1 cm). © ​ ​ ​ Sterling Ruby. Photograph by Robert Wedemeyer. ​

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Fig. 1.3, Allan Sekula, Sketch from Allan Sekula’s notebook “PF poland 2009 (1),” 2009. Ink, correction fluid, and colored ​ marker on paper, 3.5 × 5.5 in. (9 × 14 cm). The Estate of Allan Sekula; © the Estate of Allan Sekula.

Fig. 1.4, Zoe Leonard, 945 Madison Avenue, 2014 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Collection ​ ​ of the artist; courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Murray Guy, and Galleria Raffaella Cortese. Photograph by Bill Jacobson Studio, New York.

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Fig. 1.5, demonstrating the multiplicity of practices in the 2014 Whitney Biennial is this image of works by Joel Otterson, Sheila ​ Hicks, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung. Photograph by Raymond Meier.

Fig. 1.6, Tony Greene, curated by Catherine Opie and Richard Hawkins, installation view.

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Fig. 1.7, Julie Ault, Afterlife: a constellation, 2014 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Courtesy ​ ​ the artist. Photograph by Bill Orcutt.

Fig. 1.8, The Gregory Battcock Archive, 2009-14 by Joseph Grigley and Rebecca Morris (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.

Fig. 1.9, Angeline Evans, Malachi at the Empty Bottle (Pool Table Series), 2003. Courtesy the artist. Included in the project ​ ​ Malachi Ritscher by Public Collectors.

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Fig. 1.10, Gretchen Bender, People in Pain, 1988 (detail). Paint on heat-set vinyl and neon, 84 × 560 × 11 in. (213.4 × 1422.4 × ​ ​ 27.9 cm). Remade by Philip Vanderhyden, 2014. The Estate of Gretchen Bender. Photograph by Philip Vanderhyden.

Fig. 1.11, David Foster Wallace, page from the Pale King materials, “Midwesternism” notebook, undated. Manuscript notebook, 10 1/2 × 8 1/4 in. (26.7 × 21.0 cm). Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Image used with permission from the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust.

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Fig. 1.12, Works by (left to right) Jacqueline Humphries, Sterling Ruby, Dona Nelson, Pam Lins and Amy Sillman on fourth floor, curated by Michelle Grabner (installation view Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.

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Fig. 1.13, image of “Donelle Woolford” used by Whitney Museum, credited to “Woolford’s Studio,” though this was a character of artist Joe Scanlan’s creation. Credit supplied on Whitney Museum’s site: Donelle Woolford, Avatar, 2007. Digital file, Collection of the artist. Photograph by Donelle Woolford.

Fig. 1.14, Jennifer Kidwell performs as Donelle Woolford. Photograph by Stephen Garrett Dewyer/Infinite Mile.

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Fig. 1.15, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, still from Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera, 2014. Collection of ​ ​ ​ ​ the artists. © HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?

Fig. 1.16, Dawoud Bey, Portrait of Barack Obama, 2014 (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). ​ ​

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Fig. 1.17, installation view of 2014 Last Brucennial, New York, 2014. Photograph via NYU.

Fig. 1.18, installation view of 2014 Last Brucennial, New York, 2014. Photograph via NYU.

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Fig. 1.19, installation view of 2014 Last Brucennial, New York, 2014. Photograph via NYU.

Fig. 1.20, The Bruce High Quality Foundation. Raft of the Medusa, 2004. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of the ​ ​ Foundation.

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Fig. 1.21, performance during Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photo courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 1.22, installation view of Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

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Fig. 1.23, installation view of Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 1.24, installation view of Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

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Fig. 1.25, performance during Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photo courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 1.26, installation view of Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

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Fig. 1.27, feminist performance at the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

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Fig. 2.1, Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-1959. Photograph courtesy Rauschenberg Foundation ​ ​

Fig. 2.2, Robert Rauschenberg, Yellow Body, 1968. Photograph courtesy Guggenheim Museum.

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Fig. 2.3, Rirkrit Tirvanija, Untitled (Free), 1992. ​ ​

Fig. 2.4, Fred Wilson, Mining The Museum, 1992-1993 (installation view, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore). ​ ​

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Fig. 2.5, Fred Wilson, Mining The Museum, 1992-1993 (installation view, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore). ​ ​

Fig. 2.6, Fred Wilson, Mining The Museum, 1992-1993 (installation view, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore). ​ ​

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Fig. 2.7, enjoying the energetic event surrounding the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 2.8, enjoying the energetic event surrounding the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

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Fig. 2.9, enjoying the energetic event surrounding the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

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Fig. 2.10, Nancy Graves, Shamna, 1970, (installation view, Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany). ​ ​ ​ ​

Fig. 2.11, Joseph Beuys, Boxkampf für direkte Demokratie (Boxing Match for Direct Democracy), performed at Documenta 5, ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 1972. Image: documenta Archiv Stadt Kassel. ©2015 Estate of Joseph Beuys/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Fig. 2.12, Joseph Beuys, Büro der Organisation für direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung, Documenta 5, Museum ​ ​ Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 1972. Image: documenta Archiv Stadt Kassel. ©2015 Estate of Joseph Beuys/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Fig. 2.13, Biokenetic, Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany, 1972. ​ ​

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Fig. 2.14, Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel, Ein Haus für Schweine und Menschen (A House for Pigs and People), 1997. ​ ​ Documenta X, Kassel, Germany. According to the Documenta website, this “ The supposedly idyllic, interspecies setting combined subtly disturbing evolutionary theory with the gruesome reality of profit-oriented mass animal husbandry.”

Fig. 2.15, Christine Hill, Volksboutique, 1997. Hill initially ran Volksboutique, a used clothing store/installation, on an East ​ ​ ​ ​ Berlin side street, after living in the city for several years. She was invited to set up a franchise at Documenta X, where it ran for the 100 day stretch of the show in a vacant storefront in an underground passageway in the city of Kassel.

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Fig. 2.16, Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument, 2002 (installation view Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany). ​ ​

Fig. 2.17, 533 N. Mariposa Street, Los Angeles, site of Womanhouse. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the Arts ​ Institute Archives.

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Fig. 2. 18, Cock and Cunt play in Womanhouse, 1972. Written by Judy Chicago, with Faith Wilding. Photograph courtesy ​ ​ ​ ​ California Institute of the Arts Institute Archives.

Fig. 2.19, Lea’s Room in Womanhouse, 1972. Performance work by Karen LeCoq. Photograph courtesy California Institute of ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ the Arts Institute Archives. 85

Fig. 2.20, Dollhouse in Womanhouse, 1972. Sculpture by Miriam Schapiro. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the Arts ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Institute Archives.

Fig. 2.21, Dollhouse in Womanhouse (detail), 1972. Sculpture by Miriam Schapiro. Photograph courtesy California Institute of ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ the Arts Institute Archives.

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Fig. 2.22, Dollhouse in Womanhouse (detail), 1972. Sculpture by Miriam Schapiro. Photograph courtesy California Institute of ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ the Arts Institute Archives.

Fig. 2.23, Lipstick Bathroom in Womanhouse, 1972. Installation by Camille Grey. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Arts Institute Archives.

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Fig. 2.24, Shoe Closet in Womanhouse, 1972. Installation by Beth Bachenheimer. Photograph courtesy California Institute of the ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Arts Institute Archives.

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Fig. 2.25, Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974–79 (installation view, Brooklyn Museum, 2002). Gift of the Elizabeth A. ​ ​ ​ Sackler Foundation. Photograph courtesy Brooklyn Museum, by Donald Woodman.

Fig. 2.26, Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, Saint Bridget place setting, 1974–79. Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. ​ ​ Photograph courtesy Brooklyn Museum, by Jook Leung Photography.

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Fig. 2.27, Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, Sappho place setting, 1974–79. Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. ​ ​ Photograph courtesy Brooklyn Museum, by Jook Leung Photography.

Fig. 2.28, Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, Virginia Woolf place setting, 1974–79. Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. ​ ​ Photograph courtesy Brooklyn Museum, by Jook Leung Photography.

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Fig. 2.29, Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, close up view of Heritage Floor names, 1974-1979. Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler ​ ​ Foundation. Photograph courtesy Brooklyn Museum, by Donald Woodman.

Fig. 2.30, installation view of Bad Girls, 1994, New Museum, New York. ​ ​

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Fig. 2.31, Works by Martha Roesler in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, (installation view Museum of Contemporary Art, ​ ​ Los Angeles).

Fig. 2.32, Works by (left to right) Katharina Sieverding, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt and Orlan in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (installation view Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). Photograph by Brian ​ Forrest.

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Fig. 2.33, works by (left to right) Louise Fishman, Joan Snyder, Isa Genzken, Lynda Benglis, Susan Hiller and Miriam Schapiro in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (installation view Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). Photograph by Brian ​ ​ Forrest.

Fig. 2.34, Boryana Rossa, Celebrating the Next Twinkling, 1999. On view during Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, 2007. ​ ​ ​ ​ Photograph courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 2.35, Ryoko Suzuki, Bind, 2001. On view during Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, 2007. Photograph courtesy of ​ ​ ​ ​ Zeit-Foto Salon, Tokyo.

Fig. 2.36, Pilar Albarracìn, Long Live Spain (Viva España), 2004. On view during Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, 2007. ​ ​ ​ ​ Photograph courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 3.1, Performance at the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

Fig. 3.2, Performance at the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

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Fig. 3.3, Performance at the Whitney Houston Biennial, New York, 2014. Photograph courtesy C. Finley.

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Fig. 3.4, copy of Krauss’ diagram denoting sculpture as the convergence between not-architecture and not-sculpture.

Fig. 3.5, copy of Krauss’ diagram complete with complex and neuter terms

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Fig. 3.6, Klein group after Krauss’ analysis of sculpture, diagramming exhibition along an expanded field of practice

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