| An aura of deja vu hovers over this year’s mega Biennial. One hundred and one artists were invited but more than 400 more are included in the many collectives and the shows within shows that marks a departure in the curatorial style of this, the 73rd Whitney Biennial. We are presented with a made-to-order revolution—an exhibition that purports to showcase art that takes risks and pushes boundaries. What we see instead of being startling, new or rebellious is work and attitudes that we are only too familiar with. |  |
73rd Whitney Biennial, Day for Night 2006 – E.K. Clark
An aura of deja vu hovers over this year’s mega Biennial. One hundred and one artists were invited but more than 400 more are included in the many collectives and the shows within shows that marks a departure in the curatorial style of this, the 73rd Whitney Biennial. We are presented with a made-to-order revolution—an exhibition that purports to showcase art that takes risks and pushes boundaries. What we see instead of being startling, new or rebellious is work and attitudes that we are only too familiar with. The title Day for Night is taken from Truffaut’s 1973 film La Nuit Americain, which by the use of filters, changes day into night—Truffaut’s metaphor for the confusion that is the hallmark of real life versus the harmony that we look for in art. Indeed, this Biennial is short on esthetics and overwhelmingly political. However, the subversive elements have been domesticated (institutionalized) by the wholesale acceptance of the selected work and their underlying concepts.
Mark Di Suvero and Rikrit Tiravanija’s 50-foot Peace Tower located in the sculpture court just outside the museum greets visitors as they enter the exhibition. Over 200 artists were invited to contribute 2 x 2 protest signs which cover the sculpture and line the back walls. Forty years ago, to protest the Vietnam war, Di Suvero built the original Peace Tower in the streets of Los Angeles and invited some of the same artists. At that time, his work elicited violent responses and was physically attacked. That was subversive and effective political art. In the Whitney courtyard, his sculpture looks merely quaint and almost lovable, in a sort of nostalgic way. Everybody feels good—but in this hothouse environment it doesn’t have the same impact as it had 40 years ago. Nobody feels outraged and it won’t be defaced and it is even doubtful that it would be if it were in the street. We have, by now, digested both the art and this particular political strategy.
Down by Law organized by the Wrong Gallery includes work by more than 40 artists including several works from the Whitney’s permanent collection. It is another tepid show. The exhibition explores the myth surrounding the American outlaw. Once again, nothing here is startlingly new nor anything we haven’t seen before. Paul Chan’s riveting 1st Light is one of the more successful works in this Biennial. Within a surreal, trapezoidal projection on the floor, swim what looks like a detritus and history of our technological civilization—dark silhouettes of cell-phones, eyeglasses, cars, sperm-like creatures, electric poles and even human figures moving helter skelter over the surface, in the darkened space.
Lucas deGiulio creates a room full of imaginative and poetic works that also diverge from the party line of this Biennial and actually provide some esthetic content. Particularly compelling is a series of glass bottles embedded in the walls called Yeast-n-Jar Holograms. Inside, green aquarium-like views reveal strange three-dimensional growths. Pierre Huyghe’s A Journey That Wasn’t conflates fact, fiction and representation in a stunning film with an unusual musical score that recreates a journey to Antarctica in search of a mythical animal, staged and filmed, at the Wollman Rink in Central Park in 2005. Finally, Urs Fischer’s The Intelligence of Flowers is a particularly striking sculptural installation. Two hanging revolving horizontal sticks with lighted candles create giant circles with dripping wax on the floor. This phenomena can be viewed through a huge hole in a wall created by the artist (the leftover debris stands in another part of the space). In this regard, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, this spectacle is quite mesmerizing.
Overall, the Whitney Biennial is disappointingly weak. It’s an entertaining circus full of attitude and empty Duchampian gestures but “there is no there there.”
