Dismantle the Platform

The video begins quietly, with a single quotation floating on a black background: “While my company and the museum have distinct missions,” it reads, “both are important contributors to our society.” An attribution appears below the words: “Warren B. Kanders, CEO, Safariland Group, Vice Chair, Whitney Museum of American Art.”

The next frame is of chaos on the Tijuana–San Diego border. Plumes of tear gas race across a dusty landscape, coils of barbed wire glint in the sun, and everywhere people are fleeing, scarves pressed to their faces. The footage is jerky and intense; you feel as if you’re stumbling beside them, caught in a hazy barrage unleashed by the agents on the US side of the border.

The narration, rendered in David Byrne’s soothing voice, draws the connection between this scene, in November 2018, and the opening quotation. The tear gas canisters deployed in Tijuana were manufactured by the Safariland Group, which makes equipment for military, law enforcement, and security purposes under the slogan “Less Lethal Solutions.” Because you are standing in a darkened room, closed off by a thick curtain, in a gallery that is part of the Whitney’s Biennial exhibition, you understand why this through-line—from violence to power to money to moving image—matters here.

What is more perplexing is what Byrne says next, after reminding you again that Kanders is the vice chair of the Whitney’s board of trustees: the museum commissioned this film.

Titled Triple Chaser after the name of the type of three-part tear gas canister that Safariland sells, the film is curious as a form of institutional protest, in that it was presented and intended as art sanctioned by the museum. The film—made by the London-based human rights and environmental research group Forensic Architecture in partnership with Laura Poitras’s Praxis Films—not only informs its audience, it challenges them to consider the funding sources for the Whitney’s pristine premises, and as such it functions as a means to center the Kanders controversy for the museum’s visitors. The film came out in the wake of months of protests against the museum and its connection to Warren Kanders and Safariland. In July 2019, Kanders resigned from the museum’s board.

When the Whitney invited Forensic Architecture, in February 2019, to present at the Biennial, the museum may or may not have...