The Personal Is Political

In 1993, The Whitney staged their art Biennial, featuring women, artists of color, and women of color who are artists, and helped to start what many called “the culture wars” that we now think of in terms of topics like diversity, mutliculturalism, identity politics and the politics of representation. Who gets to tell stories, who gets to determine what art is and isn’t, who gets canonized in the literary and artistic pantheon?

The art establishment critics were not happy, deriding the art at the Biennial as bad and whiny.

“That biennial marked the effective end of visual culture’s being mainly white, Western, straight, and male,” Jerry Saltz and Rachel Corbett said in New York Magazine. Not only was the artist and his or her experience part of the focus of art, that experience was often a marginalized one, examining the politics of racial and ethic identity.

Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman says, “I think it’s taken for granted now that biennials will take a political position. It’s almost a cliché now. They’re now seen as a platform for diversity and progressive thinking — if they don’t do that then it seems like they haven’t done their job. That wasn’t the case before 1993.”

How did movements such as the 1993 Whitney Biennial shape Generation X — either directly or peripherally — as they’re now heading into their 50s? Did the Perceptual Diversity being pushed by the artists open them up to otherness or close them down to its radical potential?