Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go to the Whitney Museum trip with the class last Friday because of allergies. However, I really wanted to go visit the Whitney Biennial, and just the Museum itself because I heard its a MUST GO place. A lot of my friends know and have been to the Whitney, but I’ve never been there before. So, I decided to go on my own this week and it was a great decision.

First off, the building itself is a work of art. It has all these different dimensions and huge windows that give sneak peeks of the wonderful works inside. Also, it’s a plus that I was able to go in for free with a Student ID. The Whitney Biennial was quite overwhelming. There were floors and floors of arts displayed. They were all unique and beautiful, but I’m not going to lie. I wasn’t a fan of everything.

I love films and visuals with motion, but I’m also a huge sucker for paintings, sculptures, and photographs. Something about still framed arts make me think harder, feel deeper about them. One of the pieces I found capturing was a painting called Elevator. The painter is Dana Schutz. I really love this piece. It’s so detailed with different colors and textures. So many things are going on with so many different people, and yet, they’re all forced to be in this space to get to a specific destination. When I think about elevators, I feel like my time within that space is frozen. It’s a mindless ride. But for the time I’m on the elevator with the many people inside of it, too, I feel like, for that moment in time, everyone in it has the same goal, same feelings, same thoughts about whether the elevator will fall and our lives will end together, and just sharing a specific moment of being there together. Also, elevators are this closed space where anyone in it knows everything going on inside, while everyone outside has no clue. Playing with the use of privacy and being “revealed” to the public, almost like all of today’s hidden government issues, and even metaphorically like our hearts being closed and hidden of its chaos and brokenness. I feel like I’m babbling, but I’m sure I was going somewhere with this. Elevator is “that deep” for me. It just gets me thinking more and more. Just amazing!

As for film, I really enjoyed The Lesser Key of Solomon by Tommy Hartung. The reason why I really like this film was because of all the use stop-motion animations and just the overall color of the film. I read that Hartung created this film to capture this “hallucinatory reflecting themes of racial inequality, power struggles, systemic violence, and religious fervor”. Basically, it has A LOT going on in it. Although, I’m not a fan of dark demonic magic or anything the first part of the film talks about. I solely enjoyed this piece because of the aesthetically aspect of it. Stop-motion was a great touch to really give that distorted, breaky, unsettling feeling, which is something we feeling when we talk about “racial inequality, power struggles, systemic violence, and religious fervor”.

Whitney Biennial was very very interesting and I’ll definitely recommend more people to go before the exhibition ends! Maybe I’ll go again and maybe I’ll see new things I haven’t realized my first time there.