The “Identity Biennial” & the Politics of the Interstice

The 1993 Whitney Biennial of American Art, known as “The Identity Biennial,” earned its moniker for the role it played in the late-century culture wars, multiculturalism, and renewed debates on the quincentenary of Columbus’ 1492 “discovery” of America. Yet, artworks like Willie Varela’s film A Lost Man (1992) and Miguel Gandert’s photo series Tierra O Muerte (1988) remain under-examined despite representing strategic formal challenges to these very late-century debates and notions of culture and identity. Drawing on insights and methods from art history, critical museology, and Latin American and Latinx studies, the case studies reveal two formal approaches of the interstice: graphic and disjunctive image transitions and partitions and borderlines. For Varela, editing plays a crucial role in the film’s insistence on the presence of a particular individual struggling with and within a world of others. Varela uses the freeze image, negative shot, and the abstract transition to order and hold together the narrative structure, modeling the contingency and negotiation of inner and outer relationality of Varela’s Chicano personal cinema. For Gandert, the empty spaces and borderlines separating each picture in the series become a hinge between individuals that figures the space of historical action. The work does this through the photo essay format, gazes, and borders of the photograph, offering a model of intersubjective relationality that unfolds in time and is characterized by the vulnerability and reciprocity of Gandert’s window-cum-mirror philosophy. Varela and Gandert deployed art’s interstitial spaces to suture form and content as an index of the embodied individual-collective relationship and as a model of interdependency. By doing so, their artistic strategies made a number of interventions. They revealed the construction, dynamics, and distribution of power within self and group formation, thereby interrupting modern and postmodern conceptions of the self-other relationship and its gazes as inherently hierarchical or conflated. Their strategies challenged the absolutism of culture war rhetoric between schools of traditionalism and progressivism while problematizing reductive, liberal multicultural representations of identity. Significantly, their interventions facilitated productive conversations in the art and intellectual debates of the 1990s and offer lessons about the benefits and drawbacks of identity politics for our day.