An Inclusive Litany

7/5/93

The 1993 Whitney Biennial art exhibit highlighted works that in the words of the exhibit literature, renounced "success and power" in favor of the "degraded and dysfunctional." "We encounter a wasteland of America, a bleak not-site of enervation... Anomie, anger, confusion, poverty, frustration, and abjection: a dead zone, a no-man's land." According to the exhibition's catalog, the emerging generation of artists had deliberately rejected "originality" on the grounds that it is one of the "emblems" of what the predominantly white, male, heterosexual art world deems "successful art." "To the highminded," the catalog pointed out, these new works might appear "defeatist or inept. But that is the point."

One videotape showed people casually spitting up blood. Many works prominently featured men's and women's genitals, and showed both transvestites and lesbians having sex. An enormous splash of imitation vomit lay at the center of one room in a section devoted to bulimia, along with another work that consisted of a pile of chewed lard. A 45-foot toy Tonka truck demonstrated "the confusion of sexualities that reside in the most commonplace early childhood environments." A huge mural-sized photograph of several black youths had the words, "What You Lookn At?" spray-painted on it. A central feature of the show was a 10-minute videotape of the Rodney King beating by Los Angeles police officers. In one video, a young man flaunts his hatred of "fags" to the camera, but implies a certain satisfaction in having sex with them. He then spits blood and explodes, and his innards drop from his body. Giant letters running across one room said: "In the rich man's house the only place to spit is in his face." One exhibit showed three grotesque casts of a larynx and tongue as if taken from the remains of murdered women, accompanied by the sounds of women's laughs and cries. The body parts were made out of lipstick to represent "the silencing of women through the use of a specifically gendered material—lipstick."

All who attended were required to wear small badges that included disconnected fragments of the phrase, "I Can't Imagine Ever Wanting To Be White," prompting wags to produce their own slogan that read, "I can't imagine ever wanting to be in the Whitney Biennial." Wall Street Journal critic Deborah Soloman, whose own tag contained the fragment of text that read "Ever Wanting," observed that this was an accurate description of the works she saw.

Two new shows that have been scheduled at the Whitney are "The Subject of Rape," and "Abject Art," which promise to feature such abject materials as dirt, hair, excrement, dead animals, menstrual blood, rotting food, and beeswax.