The 2024 Whitney Biennial—“Even Better Than the Real Thing”—features artworks, films and performances by 71 artists and collectives. Within the show’s title is an obvious allusion to AI, but the Whitney suggests that it also raises the possibility of other ideas of “the real,” giving artists considerable latitude to explore the body, identity and precariousness of the natural world. Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli organized the performance program with guest curator Tara Cheek, and the film program with guest curators Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Zackary Drucker and Greg de Cuir Jr.

This year’s Biennial is full of grandiose gestures that don’t add up to a whole heck of a lot. For instance, Kiyan Williams’ Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House (2004), which was commissioned by the Whitney, seemed cheesy and obvious. Other works by other artists struck me in turn as derivative, sentimental, empty, dry, gimmicky—or just plain meh. As might be expected these days, there’s very little painting, with three of the six painters sharing a similar style that almost resembled airbrushing. There are an abundance of videos that can be accessed remotely, but with the exception of snapshots included in Carmen Winant’s The Last Safe Abortion (2003), and B. Ingrid Olson’s collaged pieces, no photography.

I was surprised to see Mavis Pusey included in this biennial. She is not only well-known, but also dead (going on five years now). I admire Pusey and would welcome a retrospective of her work at the Whitney. Fortunately, there’s one being mounted in 2025 by Philadelphia’s ICA and the Studio Museum in Harlem. But shouldn’t the Biennial be focusing on emerging artists—the ones who really need the career boost such inclusion would provide—not galleries and estates?

Moving through the show, I was able to parse out works that possess that ineffable spark really good art has. My selections struck me as original, visually appealing and fully realized, boasting a perfect alignment of vision and execution. Take Suzanne Jackson (Savannah, GA), who refers to her dazzling pieces (2020–21) that seem to exist somewhere between painting and sculpture as “Paint suspended in space.” Composed of many layers of acrylic, detritus and gel with netting and natural items like seeds from her garden, the work is hanging from the ceiling and seen in the round, meaning each piece comprises two separate paintings (front and back). Splotches of brilliant color explode across the translucent material and the scrunched-up clear medium creates surfaces that shimmer and glitter seductively. It’s a glorious union of decrepitude and beauty in which the pieces resemble frozen diaphanous veils, or tapestries wrested from the ruins of some post-apocalyptic midden.

Seba Calfuqueo, TRAY TRAY KO (still), 2022. Photo: Sebastian Melo. © Seba Calfuqueo. Courtesy of the artist.

Seba Calfuqueo’s (Ngulumapu, Wallmapu, Chile) Tray Tray Ko (2022) uses film and performance to explore Mapuche spiritual beliefs surrounding water. The artist, wearing a sarong fashioned from shiny blue fabric, drags a long piece of the same material by a rushing stream in a forest. To watch the fabric move amidst the greenery, snagging and shimmying, is mesmerizing. Its color and glossy folds more and more, assuming a resemblance to the color and movement of water. Calfuqueo wears dangly earrings that jingle like temple bells, providing the perfect counterpoint to the water’s basso profundo roar. Eventually, she reaches a wide pool with a waterfall—considered extremely salubrious by the Mapuche—which she stands beneath. The piece highlights the sacredness of water at a time when land and water in Chile (and elsewhere) are under threat from pro-development forces. The fluidity of the fabric and the water also speaks to gender fluidity—a matter of importance to Calfuqueo, a trans woman.

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s (Los Angeles) Paloma Blanca Deja Volar/White Dove Let Us Fly (2024) features a shiny rectangular box about the size of a billboard that looks like it’s made from tortoiseshell-colored glass. In fact, it is artificial amber that Aparicio produces from tree resin. He uses amber for its healing properties, but it also has a more symbolic importance. The trees from which the amber comes were imported to Southern California along with the introduction of laborers from Mexico and Central America. Just as the laws were changed so that people who entered the US legally to work were deported, the trees were removed from Los Angeles because their roots didn’t have enough room to thrive. To examine “privilege and solidarity,” Aparicio has packed his amber with documents generated by white allies working in LA and New York on behalf of immigrants. The amber is not stable and is expected to change over the course of the exhibition, shifting to reveal different pages and the struggles themselves that are sealed within it.

In her work, B. Ingrid Olson (Chicago) challenges the notion of a photograph being a “window into a world you’re supposed to enter into” in her installation of work made between 2013 and 2022. Playing with perspective and space, she creates a push-pull between depth and flatness. This tension is also evident in how she portrays the body, summoning it through fractured photographic images—a distorted leg in one—and by positioning various objects into suggestive anthropomorphic arrangements. One’s mind begins to go in one direction and then, realizing it’s not what it seems, one retreats from that line of thought. Olson arranges her photographs on the wall alongside an array of curious flesh-colored sculptural forms. She appears to be doing a similar push-pull thing here with concave shapes that draw one in, with ridges and rims that repel one back.

On the opposite wall hangs K.R.M. Mooney’s (Brooklyn) group of intimate sculptures (2022–24), which have a presence and grandeur that belie their size. Mooney’s classical abstraction is enhanced in interesting ways by his materials. They bring warmth and softness to the metals he employs and provide opportunity for Mooney to experiment, as in using silver electroplating on steel to create a white surface that oxidizes to form a subtle pattern. He thinks of these areas as living surfaces that will continue to change over time. Small blobs of eye-catching molten silver punctuate each piece, adding a dash of amorphous imperfection to the overall rectilinearity. Copper anti-tarnish sheets that he folds onto the surface add a bold visual statement and, as Mooney says, help the silver “care for itself” over time.

Jes Fan, Cross Section (Right Leg Muscle II), 2023. Photo: Olympia Shannon. Collection of the artist. Commissioned by M+ Museum, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artist; Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

Jes Fan (Brooklyn and Hong Kong) used a 3D printer to transform CT scans of the musculature of his body into sculptures (all 2023). Fan derives his palette from a species of incense trees native to Hong Kong, where he grew up. When the tree is injured, it secretes a self-healing resin that has a pleasant fragrance. Fan saw in this a connection to bodies of color and queer bodies that have transformed the internal injuries they have accumulated into something positive. With their looping shape and weathered look, his wall sculptures (cross sections of his leg) suggest such natural found objects as driftwood and bone. Blown glass is used to denote organs and adds a sleek reflective flourish to the otherwise dull, earthy quality of the works. For one piece, Fan co-opted the museum wall, where he created three weird orifices, working the plaster to form fleshy “lips” surrounding the holes. According to Fan, they suggest a conceptual “impregnating of the construct of the gallery” into its very structure.

Like Fan, Lotus L. Kang (New York) is also interested in the body. In Cascades (2023–24) features broad sheets of film draped over steel armatures. The film has been exposed in a “completely wrong” way, according to Kang—she’s interested in pushing materials beyond their accepted limitations. Her film captures ghostly images that suggest blurred landscapes or abstract compositions and evoke fleeting visual snatches of memory. The film is sensitive to light and environmental conditions, continuing to change. Walking through the walls of cascading film that form the installation, you have the sense of architecture, but there’s also something oddly biological about the colored film. Indeed, Kang calls its different hues “blood,” “bruise” and “bile,” and refers to the exposure as “tanning” and the film as “skin.”

Isaac Julien (London and Santa Cruz, CA) describes his five-channel video installation, Once Again … (Statues Never Die) (2022) as a “diasporic dream space.” This arresting work resembles a funhouse—with its maze-like arrangement of wall-sized screens punctuated by freestanding statues. The video is shot in black and white, imbuing the piece with a somber nostalgic elegance. Walking through the installation, one must weave one’s way through the screens, which enhances the installation’s immersive quality. Julien uses the conceit of Harlem Renaissance luminary Alain Locke engaging with the Barnes Collection and Albert Barnes on issues of how art from Africa and the African diaspora is collected and presented. The installation, which includes sculptures by Richard Barthé and Matthew Angelo Harrison, also considers queer desire.

Isaac Julien, Iolaus/In the Life (Once Again…Statues Never Die), 2022. © Isaac Julien. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro, London.

Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s (Oakland, CA and Merida, Mexico) monumental works are paeans to paint. One sees this in the obvious gusto with which she uses it, applying it in soft billowy clouds, thick smears, broad flat expanses, scrawled flourishes, or dripping down the canvas. Her Twelve Thirty-Four (Doctor Alcocer’s Corsets for Horses Series) (2023) is a remarkable balancing act between animated gesture and restraint. Composed of four joint panels that disrupt the horizontal flow and together with the other elements, the layering of paint serves to unsettle our perception of spatial relationships.

In general, I find themed shows problematic because one has to shoehorn in many different works. Of course, there are exceptions when the theme works. In this case, I found it kind of a sham, as notions of the real are so conceptually broad that it becomes meaningless. “Better than the Real Thing” seems to reference AI, which, as far as I could tell, only applied to Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s xhairymutantx Embedding Study 1 (2024). I took the time to visit Whitney’s artport where one can create AI-generated versions of Herndon and Dryhurst’s avatar doing things prompted by one’s text commands. The exercise is to underscore how identity on the internet can easily spin out of our control, but it seemed like a child’s game devoid of any real substance. And, with some exceptions, that is how I would characterize this Whitney Biennial: It’s big and splashy, but there doesn’t seem to be any real “there there.”