Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Narrator:
Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. For us, this spring and summer are all about the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Over the course of the exhibition, we’ll be sitting down with some of the artists to talk about their work and what it means to be making art in the present unfolding moment.

Today we hear from Maja Ruznic about one of the two paintings that she has in the Biennial, called The Past Awaiting the Future/Arrival of Drummers. The painting is huge, over twelve feet wide, and more than eight feet tall. Figures and shapes painted in rich seductive colors move in every which way across the crowded canvas. Here’s Maja Ruznic: 

Maja Ruznic:
My name is Maja Ruznic and I'm a painter and I live in Placitas, New Mexico. I don't normally work in this horizontal orientation. Usually, my paintings are smaller than this kind of giant format. My palettes are colorful and I'm really in love with highly pigmented color. So having something like a cadmium red light right next to a cobalt green turquoise, it's supposed to make your eyes almost have a seizure. So I'm really interested in color level and how color can operate and have encoded meaning that is not available to our rational mind. 

And I really believe that through our senses and when our body is really affected, great changes can happen. And I think that's why people like to go to cathedrals, even if you're not religious, or mosques, there's a sense of awe that can fill the body. And I know there's a lot of research about how awe is a very restorative and opening emotion and how we need it as a species and how it differentiates us from other species. So the kind of awe I like to create with color and form and figures like this female figure here who is both crying, but she's also in a way the most powerful. She's the only one confronting us. 

I think my history has colored me in a certain way where I have certain preferences and I think sadness is the one thing that my body has remembered and I've learned to love. I find beauty in sadness and I do think that has a lot to do with my background. I don't know if I would have the same love for all things full of pathos if I had a different upbringing.

Narrator:
Ruznic grew up moving from country to country after she and her mother fled Bosnia when war broke out when she was a child in the 90s. Eventually, they landed in San Francisco. 

Maja Ruznic:
When you think about a conflict, most wars that are fought are often trying to reconcile or undo some past injustice. So that's the war that I fled from. It was the Serbs trying to undo the injustices of the Ottoman Empire. And I think there's something so strange and absurd about the desire to cleanse the past by doing something now that is equally damaging. So there's this sense of constantly pulling the past in order to “fix” or to amend. But I think there's always something dark and violent that arises out of that desire to fix that we may not even be aware of at the time. We can only tell that in the future.

So this piece is really about that. It's thinking about how the past is being dragged and how there are victims of the present that are somehow being used to undo something from the past. Yet time is kind of always marching on. So I think of all the feet in this painting, and most of them are in profile. Some of them are moving to the left, a couple of them are moving to the right, and some of them are facing us. So that was me trying to fuse the sense of all times existing in this one plane, collapsing the sense of actual moving time, and freezing it in this moment.

I think my figures if you really look at their expressions they're quite sad and things have happened to them, but they're survivors. They're kind of these wounded healers who are only as powerful as they are because of the stuff they went through. In alchemy, they talk about the transmutation of materials. The alchemist works on that in their lab to get to the gold. In Jungian psychology, they talk about all the different stages that your psyche needs to go through in order to achieve this kind of unified state. And I think I as a person and I as a painter am working that out as I paint. I'm constantly trying to make something moving for others out of these sad little parts that are inside of me.

Narrator:
Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Kyla Mathis-Angress, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson. 

Narrator:
Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. For us, this spring and summer are all about the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Over the course of the exhibition, we’ll be sitting down with some of the Biennial artists to talk about their art and what it means to be making art in the present unfolding moment.

Today we hear from Cannupa Hanska Luger about his Biennial work. The piece takes the form of a tipi inverted and hung from the ceiling of the gallery. It's made of a translucent material in rich pinks and burgundies and looking up at it from below has a kaleidoscopic effect. He mentioned to us that he uses the word tipi both literally, and as an acronym for Transportable Intergenerational Protective Infrastructure. He coined the phrase but said that “the phrase has always been what a tipi is in one way or another.” Here’s Cannupa Hanska Luger: 

Cannupa Hanska Luger:
My name is Cannupa Hanska Luger. I am Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota. And an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold. And I'm a ceramic artist. I have a background in ceramics anyway, and I do a lot of mixed media material.

The piece is called Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta, a Lakota phrase that says, “the fat-takers world is upside down.” There are aspects of this piece that are embedded, there are aspects that are visually experienced, and then there are concepts that with Indigenous knowledge or upbringing there's a deeper understanding of some of the work. But what you physically see is a tipi, full-sized, constructed out of crinoline which is a mesh material. So it has a transparent aesthetic to it. The skin surface is a hot pink and a black. It has trim and structural components that are made out of nylon ribbon. 

We've inverted the tipi and presented it from the ceiling pointed down. It's got a strong physical space, you get this tension of the tipi’s inversion overhead. And I think that imposes certain sorts of tensions that we have trouble describing presently. And really just thinking about the weight of Indigenous knowledge on our present culture, present community, our present world being inadequately described and demeaned through erasure and omission redaction from our history lessons. It allows the scale and the weight of that to impose the room in a way that we haven't been allotted presently.

There's a model in physics around the space-time continuum, and it's two cones that invert and it's like a geometric model of the space-time continuum that is embedded in the tipi and its form and its purpose from a long time ago. It is a lens. It's often times described as a lens that recognizes the entire universe and the place that we stand being the same. 

I'm interested in how we present a future look that isn't saying, "This is the way the future is going to go,” but “this is a way that the future doesn't narrow into a point that it actually expands in the other direction.” So what we're imagining today potentially and probably will become our distant future realities. And so recognizing that trajectory, that gives you a little bit of agency in time. "What do I want to carry from my past thinking about ancestral knowledge? How do I reassert that in the present by imagining its application in the future?" So this allows me to imagine futures that I'm actively participating in its creation presently by gathering information from the past.

I also see the tipi being co-opted by Artsy and Etsy and all of these different components that diminish the actual importance and the power of the tipi where you can get tiny versions of it for your children. You can get tiny versions of it for your dog. There are all of these iterations of that form. It is a form that you see repeated across the globe in different ways. But I think it's really important to understand the wholeness of its design outside of its form. And that access to the tipi should be an exchange and a recognition of all of the context, then you enter a tipi with the same level of humbleness. So presenting the tipi in a way that you cannot access it is a part of that conversation. So as an artist, I'm like, "Well, how do you present this work? Share that knowledge, but not slip into providing total access?" And so presenting it with this crinoline material, it allows you to see into that space but never actually physically be inside of it.

But then by inverting it and putting it on the ceiling, I can express that the present we are in is upside down. The tipi is not upside down. The tipi is actually in the right positioning, in right relationship in a right way in the world if the world isn't as upside down as it is presently. And so it could be accessible, but we need to flip everything that we value and consider as value in our world. The leap that we need to experience is like, "Oh, the tipi is not upside down. I'm upside down. Everything here is upside down." That's actually in right relationship.

Narrator:
Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Kyla Mathis-Angress, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson. 

Narrator:
Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. For us, this spring and summer are all about the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Over the course of the exhibition, we’ll be sitting down with some of the artists to talk about their art and what it means to be making art in the present unfolding moment.

Today we hear from Dala Nasser. Her work in the Biennial is titled Adonis River. The work is a space created from tall wooden structures—columns and cubes—draped with heavy fabric. The fabric is covered in rubbings taken from rocks at the Adonis Cave and Temple and then the material was dyed using iron-rich clay from the banks of the nearby Abraham River on Mount Lebanon, north of Beirut. Although it is now called the Abraham River, it was once called the Adonis River. Here is Dala Nasser.

Dala Nasser:
My name is Dala Nasser. I'm a material and process-based artist. Essentially the story of Adonis and Aphrodite is based on Sumerian history. So in ancient Sumerian tablets, there was a story of the goddess of fertility and her mortal lover and his untimely death and the mourning practices that developed throughout the region commemorating this sort of loss. And it moved on from Sumerian culture to Babylonian to Assyrian and to what you know now as Adonis and Aphrodite. So the names started to change as time moves by. So my interest in the story itself is how it's timeless and how it's morphing slowly and slowly.

And for me the interesting thing around this is the location of this tale in a cave in Mount Lebanon. Every spring as the snow melts off the top of Mount Lebanon, it goes through this cave and out into a river. The reason why they called it Adonis's River is that every spring, when the water would come gushing out as the snow melts, the water levels rise and mix with the very iron oxide-rich soil of the area. The river takes on a bit of a red hue. So the locals and everyone around the river would say that this river turns red with Adonis's blood.

I took fabric to the cave and the temple and I produced charcoal rubbings on site on the rocks of both of the locations. And after that, I dyed them with iron oxide-rich clay that's made out of the soil that surrounds the river. And the final step was I washed them in the river. When I started working the way that I work, which has now been, I don't know, over ten years now, it developed from just a very basic idea where I was sick of doing drawings and I knew exactly how I wanted them to end. And I thought to myself, how can I produce work that keeps changing beyond the artist's hand?

Lebanon had a fifteen-year civil war which was split between political factions with religious sects as well. And the location of the cave where Adonis was killed is commemorated across all religions here. This location is where people go and pray in different sorts of religions. So it's a very spiritual location. To work on it, I have to hike to get to the cave. You're in a place where people go on pilgrimages and you just look around you and you see young couples, old couples, babies. It is, it's very spiritual.

And it still very much exists within the current present-day psyche. This is history and myth kind of intertwined. Its importance has not faded, and the general reason that I say this is because this story resulted in mourning practices and mourning practices are far more than just tradition. You see them today. Mourning practices are exactly the driving force behind organization, like group mass organization. My interest in doing this work was very much to show it in the States where you know the civil rights movement was so fueled by this sort of organization. It's happening literally all the time. So the reason why I find this so relevant, and not just for Lebanon itself and the location that I worked in, is that this theme is ongoing and we know that now more than ever I suppose.

This idea of this ancient story of Aphrodite and Adonis and their lost love is not some ancient myth in the sense that we are surrounded by mourning. And it's not necessarily for a single person or a life. We mourn the future we thought that we were going to have. For example, you mourn a loss of a location, the landscape, your city. It's a way of dealing with loss but goes beyond just a physical life. And so my interest in this is that it exists, we are surrounded by it, we feel it. 

This is not just a simple kind of love lost or innocence lost, which you see in the story. What it created was a practice of mourning and obviously, this practice of mourning is all around us and it's something that we exist with and live alongside and there's a lot of power that you can get from this. You are not defeated. You're supposed to feel empowered. When you mourn and when you mourn as a group, you are exponentially empowered.

Obviously we're watching the news. I'm watching the news, you know what's happening. Like this is the power of the people and people that mourn together. It's not just about one thing. It's about mourning now, what's happening right now. It goes into the history of mourning of all of the sort of inherited trauma and mourning what our grandparents and their family and our ancestors all dealt with and what we want for ourselves in the future. It's all tied together.

It's very important when people say, "Not in my name. Not in anyone's name. My grandparents didn't do this for this . . .." This means something you know. This means something much more than just me and you. This means that we all come from a legacy that is connected and mourning is . . . we do it together. You don't do it alone.

Narrator:
Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Kyla Mathis-Angress, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson. 

Narrator:
Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. For us, this spring and summer are all about the 2024 Whitney Biennial. The Biennial is the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States and takes place here at the Whitney every two years. For over ninety years Biennial curators have traveled far and wide to bring together artists whose distinct and varied voices probe some of the most pressing issues of the current moment. Over the course of the 2024 Biennial, we’ll be sitting down with some of the artists to talk about their art and what it means to be making art now.

Today we hear from Eamon Ore-Giron who talks about two of the three artworks he has in the Biennial. The paintings are part of a series titled Talking Shit in which he reimagines deities from ancient Peruvian and Mexican cultures in a contemporary context to explore the idea of a living ancestral past. Here is Eamon Ore-Giron.

Eamon Ore-Giron:
My name is Eamon Ore-Giron. I'm an artist who lives in Los Angeles, California. The works are focused on deities from the Americas, primarily, right now, Mexico and Peru. This piece is called Talking Shit with Viracocha's Rainbow (Iteration I). And it is made up of essentially a two-headed serpent. So if you follow on the upper left, the head of the serpent is facing outward and the body coils around the canvas and makes its way down to the bottom, comes up again, does a little tumble down, and then comes back up to reveal another head facing the opposite direction. 

The title Talking Shit for me was a way to bring the ideas of sacred symbology and mythology closer, like a way of bringing it closer to my life. This body of work deals with the ways in which these ancient symbols and deities have been interpreted and their meanings have kind of evolved over time depending on the context. I read a quote in a book called The Stone and the Thread and it's about the roots of abstraction in the Andes. There's a really beautiful quote, it's by Octavio Paz, who's a Mexican writer.

Narrator:
Octavio Paz wrote about Mexican identity in the twentieth century by interpreting Indigenous artworks. In doing so, he pointedly critiqued how Spanish colonizers had misunderstood the art, languages, and beliefs native to the area. 

Eamon Ore-Giron:
And he's talking about a goddess, Coatlicue, which is an Aztec goddess and two-headed serpent that wears a skirt made out of a splayed body and snakes. It's a really powerful symbol. And he talks about how the statue of Coatlicue was at first considered an abomination and was reburied into the ground and then it was rediscovered during the Colonial era and then placed in a convent with a sheet over it because everybody was afraid of it. And then in the Modern era, it was brought out and now is the crown jewel in the collection of the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. I really loved that illustration of how symbols can change through time and the collective experience that we have allows for that evolution and mutation. So for me, the Talking Shit series was a way to explore my own ancestral past and connect it to my life now with a lot of room for me to interpret these forms. 

Viracocha is the god of creation in the Andes. And Viracocha is also known as teacher of the earth and then the other more vertical painting is an amaru, a version of an amaru, which is a mythological creature from the Andes. The amaru was born from the rainbow that Viracocha created. It was born from the chest of the rainbow. And so to me, it's really cool that these two pieces are existing together in the exhibition because they're related in that way. 

The first forms in the series are pulled from sculptures in the pantheon, the Aztec pantheon, because I started the series when I was living in Mexico. But I've moved the body of work into exploring more of the Andean mythologies. And in the Andean mythologies, it's a little bit more difficult to find specific examples of certain deities. There's a lot more room for my interpretation and my understanding of how I want to create this creature. 

One thing that stands out when I think about this bringing the sacred closer in some way is in Peru near my cousin's house there's a pyramid there, they call them huacas. And just as if it was just a crumbling building in the middle of a neighborhood. They're all over Lima. And actually a lot of the archeological objects that are in museums now come from these huacas that have been looted. To me, it's like the past still is here. And so for me, the “talking shit” element to the series is me literally looking at the form and imagining the form in my own way and maybe digging into my own past in my own neurological pathway, in my imagination, but also thinking about our current relationship with the past—especially in Latin America—is very present. It's all around us. And sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes it's not a great thing, but it’s a way for me to make that intimate, to draw it in closer, and to think about these forms.

Narrator:
Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Kyla Mathis-Angress, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson.