Looking for comics at The Whitney Biennial: Are they still in the gutters?

Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better
than the Real Thing (Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York, March 20–August 11, 2024). Holly Herndon &
Mat Dryhurst, xhairymutantx Embedding Study 1, 2024.
Photograph by Audrey Wang

Even Better Than the Real Thing, the 2024 Whitney Biennial's subtitle, positions the show as an exploration of authenticity—a word that is degraded in a world rife with hyperreal generative AI output, and weaponized by conservative notions of identity pertaining to gender, race, and ability. So what are we to take away from the first image encountered upon stepping off the elevator onto the 6th floor: a character resembling a grown-up Pippi Longstocking in a Starship Troopers uniform who shares a name (and general countenance) with one of her creators, Holly Herndon? Despite featuring in a pair of thermal dye diffusion prints that look expensive (please read that last word in the approving tone of Heidi Klum in a Project Runway critique), the pictures’ aesthetic is pure Hi-Fructose. I’ve spent enough time in rarefied art world spaces to be disconcerted by the presence of something so illustrative at the Biennial. That is, until I realized these images were AI-generated, signaling that this kind of thing is okay (or maybe even better than the real thing!) as long we dispense with the unfashionable notion of human illustrators.

I ventured further in, finding Nikita Gale’s TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME)—a player piano sitting in its own gallery, modified to produce no sound beyond the thumping of the keys as they’re depressed—and enjoy the piece by sitting on one of the benches provided (“DO NOT STAND,” my editor's email said). I dutifully made my way there and sat down, at which point I could indeed feel the ambiguous allegory of (dis)embodied performance, authorship, and ownership of art in the AI era as the muffled rhythm of the piano’s keys produced a gentle rumble under my ass courtesy of some hidden mechanism. The wall text indicates that the artist worked with an attorney and ASCAP to create the piece, reminding me of a story John Mejias once told about watching a young kid ask an exhibitor at the 2007 Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo in Ohio how to make a comic: “First,” the artist explained, “you have to go to the patent office.” We thought it was funny at the time but now I wonder if that guy was closer to the head of a vanguard than we could have known.

If the majority of the Biennial embraces disembodiment and detachment, there are a few works I can recommend in good faith to the Comics Journal readership that buck the trend: Takako Yamaguchi’s paintings are landscapes in an Agnes Pelton tradition, and whose forms exist on a continuum of abstraction that includes cartooning—their satisfyingly solid spirals, waves, clouds, and inlets could probably be found somewhere in the upper right side of Scott McCloud’s Big Triangle. Maja Ruznic’s eerie tableaus shot through with gorgeous color exist in an adjacent territory occupied by those of artists like Paul Klee and Gladys Nillson, and Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s exuberant paintings derive part of their inspiration and expressive power from an uninhibited narrative imagination, explained in the wall text by the artist: “…watching [two whales], I thought, imagine the tons of water they must displace when they’re fucking!”

Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better
than the Real Thing (Whitney Museum of American ArtNew York, March 20–August 11, 2024). Mary Lovelace
O’Neal, Blue Whale a.k.a. #12 (from the Whales Fucking
series), 1983. Photograph by Audrey Wang

And in a show with no shortage of large video installations, the always-excellent Isaac Julien’s five-channel 4K video Once Again… (Statues Never Die) conjures a powerfully dreamlike narrative field for a critical dialogue between avatars of Alain Locke and Albert Barnes. Any viewer who enjoys beautiful, well-composed images framed in a sequence of thin black rectangles combined with words (and, as bonus, music and sound and a couple of sculptures) would appreciate it.

Best of all for comics fans is Pippa Garner’s third-floor installation Inventor’s Office, which features a huge number of printed drawings, cartoons, and storyboards taped to wood veneer paneled walls. Sketches for satirical inventions that call to mind related work by Al Jaffee or Rube Goldberg are genuinely funny (not art-world funny), many having been made for the back pages of Car and Driver, a venue (and an audience) quite a ways from the Whitney Museum. Themes of commercialization and consumerism as they relate to gender and Garner’s own transition beginning in the 1980s are handled unambiguously in deftly-drafted sketches created roughly between the 1970s to 2010, making it a small but comprehensive retrospective exhibition in its own right. Perhaps because the installation reminded me of Mike Kelley’s paintings of flyers-taped-to-wood-paneled-walls from the 90s, I thought about what Kelley might have had to say about why the Whitney had waited until now to include Garner’s work in its 2024 survey of contemporary art given that much of it is decades old and originally published for a mass audience. As he states in his 1992 essay on Paul Thek: “Museum culture lets time do its work for it,” even in its surveys of the current and contemporary.

Within the same essay, Kelley also states that “official art culture is much more effective in its control of history than Republican strategists, for it knows the best way to treat contradictory material is not to rail against it, but simply to pretend it didn’t happen.” The Comics Journal promotes the view that comics are fine art, and of course the French tend to agree—a major comics exhibition is open at the Centre Pompidou as I write this—but the Biennial would suggest that the U.S., or at least the museum dedicated to cataloging its art, is more reluctant to bequeath this designation.

In 2011, I was fortunate enough to be included in one of a couple comics-related programs the Whitney ran coinciding with their Lyonel Feininger exhibition that year. It’s worth noting that Feininger was not only a comics artist, but taught at the Bauhaus and had European cachet—what Kelley called a kind of “tasteful old world spice” that more delicate Americans use to flavor their own country’s countercultural history. Similarly, while the biennial has often included comics-adjacent work over the last couple decades, it has only once, in 2002, included the work of an artist whose primary medium and profession is identified with comics: Chris Ware. The only comics I could find among the 26,000+ works in the Whitney’s online collection database were one each by Ware, Karl Wirsum, and Jim Shaw. Meanwhile, the representation of AI-generated work within the collection, the Biennial, and even solo shows at the museum, continues to grow.

Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2024: Even
Better Than the Real Thing (Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York, March 20–August 11, 2024).
From left to right: Takako Yamaguchi, Issue, 2023;
Takako Yamaguchi, Catalyst, 2023; Karyn Olivier,
How Many Ways Can You Disappear, 2021; Takako
Yamaguchi, Proxy, 2022; Takako Yamaguchi, Clasp,
2022; Takako Yamaguchi, Formula, 2023. Photograph
by Ron Amstutz

But instead of asking “why aren’t there more comics in the Whitney?” maybe the more important question is: Is the neglect of the fine art establishment worth sweating? While money and prestige have their appeal, they tend to issue from power—and power can usually be found sitting on top of a giant pile of skulls. Indie comics are bought, read, and kept on shelves by people who genuinely love and enjoy them, yet work sold by blue chip galleries is as likely to stay wrapped in a high-end storage unit and treated as a trading commodity—like the gold- and silver-age artifacts that often serve as a synecdoche of "comics" in the popular imagination—as it is to end up on a wall.

The 2024 Biennial’s stated theme of even better than the real thing may call to mind Bono in wraparound sunglasses drinking a Pepsi, but an aspiration to sociocultural relevance is arguably the single thread that ties the eclectic exhibition together, and it’s a pale shadow of that enjoyed by comics out beyond the art world’s walls. This year the Biennial takes up the genderqueer banner to an unprecedented degree in its curation and conceptual framing, but the scope of its social impact will likely be a tiny fraction of that of Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer.. Alison Bechdel's cultural influence is enormous, by virtue of both Fun Home and her eponymous test. Art Spiegelman’s Maus continues to demonstrate its long-term significance, eliciting recent bans by school districts in areas dominated by right-wing politics 33 years after its initial publication. Meanwhile, Fantagraphics is planning a major reissue of Joe Sacco’s monumental Palestine, just months after Artforum sacked its editor for publishing a letter supporting Palestinian liberation. And, for my money, the single best artwork in any medium made during and about the COVID-19 pandemic is Simon Hanselmann’s Crisis Zone, which began serialization on Instagram in mid-March 2020 and found a large audience while much of the art world jet set was cut off from the teams of interns and assistants they rely on to produce their work.

Let the American fine art establishment have its fantasies of superiority—comics repeatedly demonstrate that they’re the real thing.

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