Under the Influence at the Whitney Biennial
If nothing else, the 2026 Whitney Biennial, curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer (at the Whitney Museum through August 23rd), introduces viewers to what I call ChatGPT art—facsimiles of facsimiles by makers who have little if any relationship to what they’re putting out there, aside from its being a product in service of a career. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of the people who grew up with and apparently condone the use of A.I. sources in the creation of “art” as artists themselves, especially if you define art as a creative expression of thoughts or feelings that have changed, and contributed to the vision of, the artists who made it.
It’s true that, nearly from the beginning, postmodern art challenged the notion of originality, or, more specifically, the weight of originality—often with great joy and wit and not a little fear. Think of Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (1953), or Andy Warhol’s version of the Mona Lisa, titled “Thirty Are Better Than One” (1963), or almost all of the conceptual artist Elaine Sturtevant’s significant œuvre. But, once you start to believe that production (or reproduction) alone justifies the work, you’re in trouble, especially when there’s little acknowledgment of the artists who paved the way for your kind of production.
To stand in front of Mo Costello’s dark, textured photographs in the Biennial is to see James Welling’s profound pictures about darkness and texture from 1980 and 1981. And to take in Aziz Hazara’s piece “Moon Sightings” (2024) is to see Wolfgang Tillmans’s experiments in color and abstraction. To be in the room with Isabelle Frances McGuire’s “Symbolic Birth Cabin Unit” (2024) is to once again feel the power of Nayland Blake’s “Feeder 2” (1998). And, as much as you may appreciate Jasmin Sian’s beautiful lacelike cutouts and drawings, they make it impossible to get Elaine Reichek’s samplers, from the nineteen-nineties, out of your head. Nour Mobarak’s audio and resin-and-pigment works, which contribute to her dreamlike atmospheres, draw so much on Pierre Huyghe’s genius that you can’t make out what exactly is coming from Mobarak herself, except that Huyghe’s brilliance is about gestures rather than definitive statements, while Mobarak privileges the weird over the difficult.
Part of why Sherrie Levine’s 1981 series “After Walker Evans,” based on the great photographer’s 1936 images of Alabama tenant farmers and their families, remains so poignant is that Levine is not just making a picture of a picture; she’s evoking the flatness and complexity of history, in general and in Evans’s original photograph, and now in hers. The drama of Allie Mae Burroughs’s face is something that Evans could capture but not reach, with his photograph “Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife”: Burroughs is resolute within herself, her poverty, her Southernness, her femaleness. By retaking or remaking that photograph, Levine asks, Can I get any closer to this image than Evans did? And how does the forty-five-year difference between my “I” and Evans’s “I”—let alone Burroughs’s—affect what I see? Or what the viewer sees? A lot of the artists whose work is presented in the Biennial circumvent this Borgesian labyrinth of perception and history—if they’re aware of it at all. What replaces it is a garbled rhetoric that is supposed to further substantiate the work, but what if the work just isn’t there?
You can find real work in the Biennial—the Whitney has devoted three floors (and will soon add a fourth) to this survey, the eighty-second in the museum’s history—and it’s a joy, or a mixture of joy and the kind of melancholy that maturity inevitably brings, to come across, on the museum’s sixth floor, Agosto Machado’s shrines honoring the spirit of seventies and eighties downtown New York art and culture, a world in which Machado, who died on March 21st, participated, as a performance artist, activist, and archivist. The galvanizing forces in Machado’s work—his apparent openness and the pleasure he took in making—do much to close up your critical distance and cut straight to your memories of gone times, gone people. But Machado was not a lachrymose artist; he evoked sentiment without being sentimental, and his colors and ephemera stand out like flags, signalling life in a colorless, dying world. The shock of his work is that it reminds you of that dirty, beautiful word “taste,” which Machado had plenty of. His assemblages may evoke—just a little—Joseph Cornell’s dreams in boxes, but Machado made pieces that are what one might call documents of reverence, excavated burial grounds, that reveal what we once had and must now live without. You want to touch the items in his stately piece “Ethyl (Altar)” (2024)—which honors the life and career of the performance artist Ethyl Eichelberger, who died by suicide, after receiving an AIDS diagnosis, in 1990—because they touch you, and bring back all that you’ve forgotten about what you’ve lost.
Although Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s simultaneously austere and sensual handblown glass sculptures—which are light-bulb-shaped and affixed to steel rods—bear no visual resemblance to Machado’s softer edges, she also knows something about art history and the humor to be found in the grand narrative. A thirty-three-year-old Los Angeles-based artist, Bermúdez-Silverman embraces the fun and danger of Dadaism—for instance, when she encloses one of her glass sculptures in iron sheep shears, in “blister iii” (2025). (Her work is especially effective because Guerrero and Sawyer have given it, and everything else in the show, plenty of space.) Bermúdez-Silverman knows something about texture as well, pairing the fragile with the hard, and making comic use of the latter word and concept throughout. Her work is partly fuelled by the fact that she is a female artist dealing with male-centric art history; it’s a kind of intellectual and visual romp around such work as Marcel Duchamp’s “50 cc of Paris Air” (1919) and Jasper Johns’s unforgettable “Light Bulb I” (1958). Johns’s light bulb is molded from Sculp-metal, and the mark of the artist’s hand is visible in the roughly sculpted base that it rests on, like a body in a coffin. Bermúdez-Silverman’s glass pieces can be similarly anthropomorphic. They resonate because—like the work of the Hawaii-born Sarah M. Rodriguez, whose otherworldly, elongated aluminum sculptures in the Biennial remind one of the stripped trees, shattered structures, and devastated people seen in newsreels about Hiroshima, life poking through devastation—they are evidence of what happens when artists don’t make art synonymous with a desire for capital.
I don’t buy it when folks say that, given the number of artists and works included in the Whitney’s Biennials, curators can’t make a cohesive statement about contemporary American art. In 2022, the Biennial’s curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, proved that wrong by, among other things, challenging the museum’s traditional way of displaying work. They removed many walls and had film and video cheek by jowl with painting, while sculptures were scattered in unexpected places. In this way, they showed us that an exhibition doesn’t have to be one stationary thing—that it can move, and be many things at once.
Guerrero and Sawyer’s Biennial, which includes the work of fifty-six artists, duos, and collectives, comes to us at a terrible time in American history, when rhetoric is used to distort reality and to evade the complications of subjectivity and nuance in narrative. One afternoon, as I was taking notes at the Whitney, I wondered why, although there were some terrific paintings and drawings by young artists in the show—Johanna Unzueta’s unusual color sense and fascinating biomorphic shapes are the real thing—I kept returning to the sculptures. Kainoa Gruspe’s small, exquisite objects made with materials—stones, fabric scraps, fishhooks, nails, cowrie shells, and so on—that he gathered from military bases, resorts, and the like in Hawaii, his home state, are particularly effective. That afternoon, I realized that it was in the sculptures that I saw, most glaringly, the vast divide between the artists who had worked to find a new vocabulary and those who were centered squarely in a language that was not their own.
It doesn’t take long to see that David L. Johnson, a New York-based artist in his early thirties, is working in a vernacular that has made Cameron Rowland, a few years his senior, one of the more sought-after artists of his time. Like Rowland, Johnson is a minimalist who challenges our idea of beauty while framing language as his primary “art,” language that taps into the idea and reality of the prohibitive: what constitutes “correct” behavior among, presumably, correct people. Johnson’s work “Rule” (2024-ongoing), which makes use of signs announcing the rules of conduct for privately owned public spaces, is clearly the start of something, but I don’t want him to get caught up in what are by now received ideas. I want him to foster his own voice and listen to where it takes him. Although there are layers in his work, there is no postmodern grappling with the father, as there was in Rauschenberg’s take on de Kooning, or Warhol’s rethinking of Leonardo da Vinci; instead, Johnson picks along the edges of Rowland’s work, and considers that nourishment. But it isn’t.
You can never fully enter another artist’s process—or subjectivity—and that’s partly what makes the Nigerian American Precious Okoyomon’s stuffed-animal and baby-doll sculptures so troubling. Okoyomon’s most obvious influence is Mike Kelley, whose incredible evocation of childhood in his “Arenas” pieces, from the nineteen-eighties and nineties, continues to haunt us and grows ever more powerful with the years. Kelley used stuffed animals to engage with the passage of time, the commodification of emotion, what we discard in order to “grow,” and what no adult can entirely leave behind: the tattered, perhaps not so innocent inner child.
To that, Okoyomon, who is nonbinary, adds the issue of race. (One of the dolls is in blackface, and their installation “I wanted to kill but had nothing to kill” (2025) includes many stuffed animals hanging from nooses.) In the catalogue, all the Biennial artists are asked about their practice; reading through these interviews, we discover the ways in which theory has become a performance. “I think I’m always thinking through a noncoercive rearrangement of desire,” Okoyomon says at the start of their interview. (Like many of the interviews, Okoyomon’s doesn’t refer to other artists or influences.) But what are they trying to represent in their work? A self? And which self? The racial self? The nonbinary self? Or what the world makes of each and all of those things? Elaine Sturtevant told us a lot about how the (non-male) artist’s self can become distorted or buried in the patriarchal art world—and can then reëmerge, not whole but remade into something that questions and challenges the patriarchy that buried it, or thought it had. Okoyomon seems, in their work, to want to remake themself in Kelley’s image, by appropriating aspects of his surface kink, but without knowing what it meant and what it took for Kelley to become himself in the first place. ♦
This article has been updated to reflect the news of Agosto Machado’s death.