Reparative Criticism
500-word contribution to a forum, “What is Criticism, Now?”, organized and edited by David Levi Strauss for the December 2016 issue of The Brooklyn Rail
Installation view of "L’Avalée des avalés (The Swallower Swallowed) Rhino/Bear," 2016, "View of Pariser Platz," 2016, and "L’Avalée des avalés (The Swallower Swallowed) Iguana/Sloth," 2016; courtesy Jon Rafman; Future Gallery, Berlin; photo: Timo Ohler. http://bb9.berlinbiennale.de/participants/rafman/
If, to give it a more generous reading, the biennial succeeded as a portrait of the present, it was due to its willed failure to escape the binds of its own curatorial framework, a hall of mirrors refracting and amplifying the rhetorical fictions and narrowly Euro-American, middle-class experiences of neoliberalism. But what is noteworthy here were the many extraordinary reviews of the exhibition that settled for neither condemnation nor celebration, that harnessed the show’s strengths, elisions, and contradictions to examine and critique contemporary culture beyond the biennial’s coordinates. Exemplary was Hannah Black’s Artforum essay, which sensitively articulates the theoretical premises of the biennial and radicalizes its political conclusions by probing the crisis of whiteness it left unspoken.