The 82nd Whitney Biennial Masters the Art of Ideological Grandstanding

The sculptors Sula Bermúdez-Silverman and Sarah M. Rodriguez have achieved something that no artist at least, in my experience, has managed to pull off at the Whitney Museum of American Art or, to be precise, the gallery located at the west end of the museum’s 5th floor. Anything exhibited in this space, with its towering floor-to-ceiling windows looking out toward the Hudson River, invariably plays second fiddle to the encompassing view. Sometimes it barely plays the fiddle at all.Not so with Mses. Bermúdez-Silverman and Rodriguez, both of whom have made bodies of work that generate their own peculiar logic, abstract sculptures that subsist on an adroit use of materials and, with that, thrive on metaphorical outreach. It’s worth noting that the texts on the accompanying wall labels are to-the-point. No grandiose theorizing or political posturing for these two sculptors; just an honest day’s work in the studio. Mses. Bermúdez-Silverman and Rodriguez are among 71 artists featured in the latest iteration of the Whitney Biennial, this time around subtitled “Even Better Than the Real Thing.”Ms. Rodriguez collects natural objects found outside her New Mexico studio — oddments of flora, say, or bones and stones — and casts them in aluminum. She then arranges them with an eye trained on balletic correspondences of balance, weight, poise and movement. Alexander Calder, whose famed circus is the subject of an exhibition that will be closing at the Whitney this Sunday, might have recognized the artist as a soul sister. As it is, there’s an abiding humility in Ms. Rodriguez’s homely artifacts, a sense of purpose that is greater than personal whim.In contrast to Ms. Rodriguez’s dioramas, Ms. Bermúdez-Silverman’s pieces are introspective and understated, even a bit hermetic. Concision of means and compression of form are the artist’s forte: found objects, such as animal traps and sheep shears, are juxtaposed with balloon-like blips of blown glass. The dialogue that ensues between the obduracy of steel and the delicacy of glass is both tender and comic, elegant and tense. There’s poetry to be gleaned from Ms. Bermúdez-Silverman’s oddball artifacts.Sarah M. Rodriguez, ‘Cover/Cross’ (2025). Courtesy of Babst Gallery The work by these two women is of such a high artistic calibre that a cynic might wonder if the curators, Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, made a mistake by including them. The majority of stuff on view — most of which is three-dimensional; painting being in short supply — merely poaches on the prestige of art to comment on this, that or the other cause. Among the hot topics mooted are colonialism, the surveillance state, “justice as televised spectacle,” the biases of Western art historians, and “the mythologized links among masculinity, muscle, and conservatism.”The advance buzz that this Biennial would eschew ideological grandstanding has, in other words, not panned out. If anything, “Even Better Than the Real Thing” points to how thoroughly post-modernist flimflam has been absorbed and subsequently codified by our creative classes. To be fair to Ms. Guerrero and Mr. Sawyer, they have chosen a preponderance of artists for whom craft is an important component of their visions. An emphasis on the handmade is welcome at a time when many of us are looking behind our backs at an ever-encroaching AI.Kudos then to the curators for highlighting the buckskin effigies of Teresa Baker, a suite of stoneware doodads by Erin Jane Nelson, Johanna Unzueta’s meticulous accumulations of pencil and thread, and the vegetation-based assemblages of Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, all of which reward close inspection. Otherwise, all “Even Better Than the Real Thing” has to offer is an array of objects whose guiding principle is an antipathy toward an audience to whom their creators can barely condescend. To paraphrase Chevy Chase, “We’re Whitney Biennial artists and you’re not.” There are better ways to celebrate American art.

The 82nd Whitney Biennial Masters the Art of Ideological Grandstanding

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