One videotape showed people casually spitting up blood. Many works
prominently featured men's and women's genitals, and showed both
transvestites and lesbians having sex. An enormous splash of
imitation vomit lay at the center of one room in a section devoted
to bulimia, along with another work that consisted of a pile of chewed
lard. A 45-foot toy Tonka truck demonstrated "the confusion of
sexualities that reside in the most commonplace early childhood
environments." A huge mural-sized photograph of several black youths
had the words, "What You Lookn At?" spray-painted on it. A
central feature of the show was a 10-minute videotape of the Rodney
King beating by Los Angeles police officers. In one video, a young
man flaunts his hatred of "fags" to the camera, but implies a
certain satisfaction in having sex with them. He then spits blood
and explodes, and his innards drop from his body. Giant letters
running across one room said: "In the rich man's house the only
place to spit is in his face." One exhibit showed three grotesque
casts of a larynx and tongue as if taken from the remains of
murdered women, accompanied by the sounds of women's laughs and
cries. The body parts were made out of lipstick to represent "the
silencing of women through the use of a specifically gendered
material—lipstick."
All who attended were required to wear small badges that included disconnected fragments of the phrase, "I Can't Imagine Ever Wanting To Be White," prompting wags to produce their own slogan that read, "I can't imagine ever wanting to be in the Whitney Biennial." Wall Street Journal critic Deborah Soloman, whose own tag contained the fragment of text that read "Ever Wanting," observed that this was an accurate description of the works she saw.
Two new shows that have been scheduled at the Whitney are "The Subject of Rape," and "Abject Art," which promise to feature such abject materials as dirt, hair, excrement, dead animals, menstrual blood, rotting food, and beeswax.
