Last Stand

Every so often, an artwork speaks to you so directly that it seems to have been made just for you. Whatever I might (but won’t) say about the rest of the Whitney Biennial, it displayed one piece that it did something that no other artwork has ever done: It made me cry.
Most visitors overlook Hannah Greely‘s unprepossessing coat stand in the middle of a third-floor gallery, as if it were no more than what it seems—a mundane piece of familiar furniture, not meriting a second glance.
But from the moment I glimpsed it, I felt I knew what it represented. And the more I looked, the more I knew I was right. Hanging fornlornly from one if the coat stand’s hooks was an old-fashioned, light-blue fedora—an exact replica (made of fragile paper) of the shabby old cloth hat that my frail 92-year-old father insists on wearing every summer. Closer scrutiny of the coat stand revealed that it too was made of evocatively delicate material: It was fashioned from old bleached bone, with lacuna-pocked marrow visible along the edges.
Reading the work’s title, “Last Stand,” after having gazed with rapt recognition at this memento mori, prompted my tears. I was mourning for the man—her grandfather? my father?—who had hung up this hat for the last time.
This stark sentinel embodies all that is missing from most of the offerings in this Biennial—profound emotional resonance, expressed with spare yet telling symbolism. Ironically, this atypical artist was herself missing from the artists’ roster on the Biennial’s website, until I pointed out the omission to the museum’s press office.
Perhaps this under-the-radar status is only fitting for a young artist who recently told Peter Plagens of Newsweek that she didn’t want to be represented by a gallery because “I don’t want to be famous just for the sake of being famous.”
But maybe she should be famous—for her ability to illuminate universal truths about age and loss with such artistic economy and lucidity.