The queue outside the Whitney Museum on Friday night is a twisting line of Versace high heels, quirky pastel suits, and metallic lipsticks perfectly coordinated with vintage tea skirts. Students and art critics alike move in quiet excitement as the ushers guide them.
It seems like they know where they are going. I feel underdressed and uncreative in my all black sundress and sandals.
The Whitney Biennial is the 78th installment of the longest-running exhibition of American art, including the weekend guests of installation artist Asad Raza. April 28th, Pakistani musician Rafay Rashid and his band Ravi Shavi were invited to play rock music inside Raza’s indoor forest of live trees. Simply put, it’s a live rock band inside an indoor forest inside a museum.
The main staircase doesn’t connect to the sixth floor, where the concert was held, so you must walk through the contemporary art floors first. I had never seen these artists before or heard Rashid’s music.
Cauleen Smith’s banners hang overhead from the first and fifth floors – guns and drops of blood sparkling in jewel tone glitter with sequined declarations about police brutality. There’s another exhibit of bloated snakes writhing around each other under glistening plastic. A virtual reality experience bar is above the floor where Asad Raza’s full stained glass window glitters. Projectors play audio installations next to entire rooms of painted notebook pages. The floors below the concert are echoing heavily with the whir of the projector fans and hesitant, delayed footsteps of spectators
Upstairs, the balcony and indoor forest installation slowly fill with people sitting on the hot pink carpet and staring up at the potted trees above them. The room smells green amid vegetation and the night air. Rafay Rashid steps up to the mic behind the balcony window.
Rashid is dressed in a floral shirt that blends a little too well with the vegetation. He could pass for Freddie Mercury, long legs twisting as he plays bass and stealing shy smiles behind a push-broom mustache. His band switches between synthesizers and percussion. Rashid almost whispers into the mic to introduce songs with a soft crackle in his voice.
The entire sixth floor is filled with the rock music. Even the most pretentious art on the lower floors – including an exhibit of HD televisions wearing pants – seems almost sinister in their silence. Now and then a door would open, and I could hear Rashid singing a love ballad while I stared at an installation of the police beating a beggar to death. I felt sick in my stomach.
The experience was a sensory Wonderland. Rashid’s cotton candy voice traveled to floors where people looked at portraits of women forced to be prostitutes and paintings of floodlights coming out of men’s anuses. My thoughts about the art coupled with Rashid’s about heartbreak as a wayward lyric would find its way downstairs. I have never experienced a concert inside an art installation. Finally, I had enough with my stomach was lurching at the sight of the snakes as Rashid began a song called “Accidental Mental Breakdown”. It was a perfect accompaniment as I found the neon hot pink coat room, slipped outside, and took a gulp of air. Now that’s how a museum visit is supposed to make you feel.