And because it was the Year of the Mechanized Baptism, the Biennial occurred before the American capitalist class realized the inherent profitability in men who had sex with other men.
So the Biennial also included mega-homosexuals like William E. Jones.
Back in those days, William E. Jones was an excluded voice.
Now he’s a faithful viewer of Reality TV!
RuPaul’s Drag Race !
Things change!
Capitalism can eat anything!
The 1993 AD Biennial presented two particularly controversial representations of three-dimensional reality.
The first was a video of the Rodney King assault, which was shot by a plumber and depicted the Los Angeles Police Department beating the shit out of a motorist descended from people brought in chains to support America’s original economic scheme.
The second were the admissions badges, which everyone had to wear if they didn’t want to be kicked out of the Whitney Museum.
The badges were designed by the artist Daniel Joseph Martinez and spelled out various iterations of the following phrase: I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE.
Everyone freaked out.
They freaked out so hard that they created a physical, and conceptual, environment of malice and paranoia.
If you think this is an exaggeration, reader, then I recommend that you read contemporary reviews of the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial. If you can find anything more positive than qualified sneering and affronted guilt, then you are a much better researcher than me.
And remember: the qualified sneering and affronted guilt came from people who were sympathetic to the show.
Fern and Anthony paid their collective $12 and were given admissions badges.
Fern’s admissions badge said: EVER WANTING.
Anthony’s admissions badge said: IMAGINE.
They wandered through the rooms and galleries of the Whitney Museum, bombarded by abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
When Fern and Anthony arrived at the Cindy Sherman photographs of mannequins and exaggerated plastic genitalia and reproductive organs and BDSM masks, Anthony looked into Cindy Sherman’s abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
And Cindy Sherman’s abstract representations of three-dimensional reality looked into Anthony.
“Here we find the nature of knowledge,” said Anthony.
“What?” asked Fern.
“We can’t know anything that isn’t first filtered through our senses. There is no knowledge beyond that which is observed. There is no first truth. Sherman is presenting us with a moral lesson on instructive epistemology. This is the real nature of sex. This is the desire of all men. It may arrive disguised, but this is what happened when you allowed yourself to be fucked by beasts. The constructed nature of sex, informed by the media, informed by society, informed by ten thousand years of patriarchal society. Cindy Sherman has stripped it away. Now you can see them how they saw you. This is the truth of letting yourself be fingerbanged by animals.”
For centuries, people had been dragging Fern to exhibitions of abstract representation of three-dimensional reality.
She’d been stuffed full of the nonsense that people said in salons, in museums, and in galleries. She’d suffered through endless men talking about abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
And Fern was nobody’s fool.
She hadn’t endured these exercises in tedium and learned nothing.
She had cottoned on to the underlying, and unjustifiable, delusion that animated every one of these discussions: the religious belief that art, rather than money, was the most influential thing imagined by human beings.
And here was the only person with whom she’d ever fallen in love and he was condescending to her with an even older bullshit than discussions about abstract depictions of three-dimensional reality, and he was disguising it as bullshit about abstract depictions of three-dimensional reality.
Fern cast another spell on Anthony.
Right there in the Whitney Museum.
Right there in the Biennial.
It was one of the weirdest spells cast by anyone from Fairy Land.
The underlying nature of art was the ability of human beings to perceive an implied whole from the presentation of its parts.
Imagine the human face abstracted to the furthest degree:
No human face has ever looked like this.
And yet your brain, reader, has interpreted it as a face.
Fern’s spell was intended to scramble Anthony’s ability to apprehend the whole from the presentation of its parts. When the spell took its effect, and Anthony looked at the above, he would see this:
The spell was designed to wear off when they left the Whitney.
Its assumed virtue was this: it would make Anthony stop condescending to Fern about epistemology when really he was telling her she was a slut for sucking so much dick back in the suburbs.
But something went wrong.
For two years, Anthony had been saturated with the radiation of primal magic, and those two spells had sat in and on his body. They had done peculiar things to his biology.
This wasn’t like messing up the mind of a landlady in Udine.
This was magic without precedent.
Anthony’s biology rejected the third spell.
When Anthony’s biology rejected the spell, the feedback caused an invisible magical explosion.
This explosion created a magical avatar of the 1993 AD Biennial.
In its most abstract form.
Here was the abstraction: the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial, focusing on artworks touching on issues of identity and social discord and presenting a critique of how very rich people had constructed the world, existed entirely as the largesse of very rich people.
The Museum and its Biennial were gifts from beyond the Cash Horizon.
All of the bad reviews, all of the upset, all of the guilt, all of the empowerment, all the renewed focus on marginalized voices.
It had happened because some very rich people wanted bragging rights. Through the arcane processes of those who had passed the Cash Horizon, the social capital of these bragging rights would be transformed into an actual capital.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration, reader, then you could always look at the patrons listed in the catalogue of the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial.
The list is this: Emily Fisher Landau, The Greenwall Foundation, Philip Morris Inc., Sony USA Inc., Henry and Elaine Kaufman, The Lauder Foundation, Mrs. William A. Marsteller, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mrs. Donald Petrie, Primerica Foundation, The Samuel and May Rudin Foundation Inc, The Simon Foundation, and Nancy Brown Wellin.
Andrew W. Mellon was a war profiteer. He made a killing during the Spanish-American War, a conflict that was precipitated by an imaginary attack on an American sea vessel.
Primerica Foundation was the philanthropic wing of Primerica, a multi-level marketing operation that targeted lower- and middle-income Americans and got them to buy term-life insurance, as opposed to whole-life insurance, and invest the difference in mutual funds operated by Primerica subsidiaries. Multi-level marketing, by the way, was almost indistinguishable from a pyramid scheme.
Philip Morris Inc. sold a very pleasurable form of suicide.
Nancy Brown Wellin was the daughter of George Brown, who co-founded Brown & Root, which ended up as a Halliburton subsidiary.