The title of the fourth 2024 Whitney Biennial film program, Sis, I Don’t Know: Remembrance a Summer Flower, International Portal of Artificial Maximum Results, is assembled from the titles of its short films. Like its amalgamate title, Sis, I Don’t Know is about the parts of ourselves that are sewn together, sometimes incongruously, other times harmoniously—our wants, our needs, our desires. The eight short films in this program, curated by the multimedia artist Zachary Drucker, comprise stories that explore the body, the physical experiences of desire and love, and the transformations that come with connection.
A body can be a torment. In Aron Kantor’s quirky Interdimensional Pizza Portal (2023), a man (Grover C. Whitmore III) manifests—and eats—a slice of pizza from another dimension. Just as his friend (Aliee Chan) warns him about the dangers of fucking with the universe, the pizza slice is torn out of his body, guts and all. If Kantor's short is about what can come out of the body, Nyala Moon's Dilating for Maximum Results (2023) is about what can go into a body. Dreya (Moon), a trans woman, finds herself scrambling to prepare to meet up with the man she's been having phone sex with for months. Problem is, Dreya hasn't had intercourse in years. After a frantic FaceTime call, YouTube tutorial, lube, and failed dilation attempts later, Dreya is even more nervous. But as it turns out, the secret to good sex doesn't have to do with Dreya's body at all, but with communication and reassurance. Both Interdimensional and Dilating are fun and snappy, adding a comic shape to this film program. Both films also speak to a theme in Sis, I Don't Know: living in a physical body comes with its own wonders and frustrations. Chanelle Tyson's Artificial considers the romantic potentialities of the human body from another perspective: Alexa and Siri. In Artificial is the idea that desire supersedes the human body; as their owners have sex, Alexa and Siri muse about what it might feel like to be touched and loved. Like Interdimensional and Dilating, Artificial has surreal edges, but is gentle and sweet at core.
Miranda Haymon's Sis (2023) is about the experience of brimming desire. In the film, Michelle (Kara Young) finds an immediate, startling spark with her white college crush's Black girlfriend, Sadie (Michelle Kariuki). All falls away when Michelle and Sadie meet, bland white boyfriend included. When they go to dinner, their white waiter misinterprets Michelle calling Sadie “sis” as them being literal sisters. Among the many peripheral white people in this short, Michelle and Sadie are speaking their own language, as Black women and creatives, as Virgos with September birthdays on low FODMAPS diets, and also through their own desire for each other, which culminates in sex. Young is delightful to watch, and the short doesn’t really lose a beat—it’s both whimsical and joyful. Penelope Spheeris’s I Don’t Know (1970) is more solemn. Spheeris films her sister, Linda, in the midst and aftermath of a relationship with a trans woman, Jimmie. Jimmie is hardly the reluctant star, embracing the screen and regaling the film crew and Linda with tales of past adventures and romantic exploits. Linda is obsessed with Jimmie; in the end, Jimmie leaves Linda for a man in New York. The nakedly verité style of I Don’t Know is difficult to watch at times and makes one wonder: Do Linda and the filmmakers understand and see Jimmie? The filmmakers uncomfortably implore Jimmie to kiss Linda’s hateful, cruel brother (“Just for the movie!”) in the middle of a tense conflict. Linda, a cis lesbian who had then never been with a trans person, constantly refers to Jimmie as a “unique being.” There are moments that make one feel that Jimmie is being filmed not as a person, but as a fetishistic spectacle.
In Edward Owens’s Remembrance: A Portrait of Study (1967), desire is mapped outside of lust. Owens had a brief romance with filmmaking as a young artist in New York during the 60's; after a worsening relationship with drugs and his own self, Owens moved back home to the South side of Chicago, never returning to New York or to filmmaking. His films were largely lost to public memory, and it wasn't until 2015, five years after his death, that Owens had his first one-person exhibition at Light Industry. In Remembrance, Owens films his mother, Mildred, and superimposes her with images of whiteness: a drawing of a white woman, a garishly white mannequin. “She did floors in white women’s homes, like Black women did to support their families in the olden days,” Owens told Ed Halter in 2010. Remembrance doesn’t have to do with romantic or sexual desire as in the other films; here, the superimpositions point toward the friction between being Black in a white America, and the desire to be happy as a Black woman and mother who must live within a white world—his mother laughs and drinks with friends, and then appears forlorn while alone. In the background, Dusty Springfield’s “All Cried Out” plays.
Then there is Winter Insect, Summer Flower (2022), created by Gbenga Komolafe and Tee Park. Winter Insect, Summer Flower, is bracing and otherworldly, offering no words but speaking the language of cycles, of seasons and transience. We meet a trans woman (Pia Davis) in the soil, and follow her through romance, loss, renewal, and her return to earth. This is the film that, for me, most elegantly houses the series’s questions of desire, the body, and connection. Komolafe and Park's short film is about the shapes of the self, ebbing and flowing with one's desire through the seasons; Drucker's program as a whole is about the fluidity of selfhood and the body. For whatever one might say about the possibilities of an individual’s existence, a body has no true borders; the self changes all the time. Even fear and want exist as seasons for us. We return to the soil all the same.
“Sis, I Don’t Know: Remembrance a Summer Flower, International Portal of Artificial Maximum Results” takes place tonight, July 12, at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the “Whitney Biennial 2024.”
