Part One: The Serious and Ambitious Catalogue.
WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2004
By John Perreault
The three curators of the 2004 Whitney Biennial — Chrissie Iles, Shamim Momin, and Debra Singer — make an immodest claim in the jointly signed catalogue introduction. The current biennial, they write, suggests an art "sea change" as important as that delineated by the 1993 biennial (whatever that change was). The present change seems to have something to do with 9/11, corporate greed and dot-com collapse.
Alas, although I enjoy the new biennial a great deal, I don’t think this point is adequately demonstrated either by their text or their exhibition. All three, nevertheless, produced credible single-author essays, leading one to suspect that the introduction is a bit of an exquisite corpse (e.g., the surrealist parlor game in which one person draws the head, the second blindly draws the torso, and the third the feet). Notions from the invited essays also get thrown into the mix.
Tendencies discovered in their research include: "diverse approaches to process, narrative, materiality, abstraction, conceptual strategies, technology, and history." Well, that pretty much covers it all; these characteristics could apply to any random sampling of art for the last 50 years.
Fortunately, further on in the essay nostalgia rears its head, apparently embodied by new art that references art of the ’60s and ’70s. This is related to the intergenerational perspective offered by including a significant number of works, as was once done in the dark biennial past, by "oldies but goldies." However, mythmaking in the face of a "dangerous and alien" world turns out not to be all that intriguing; the so-called Goth sensibility even less so, if one can imagine such a thing. Mythmaking here seems to err on the side of the coy.
Singer’s essay, "The Way Things Never Were: Nostalgia’s Possibilities and the Unpredictable Past" is well worth reading. For some reason, I never knew that nostalgia was originally a medical term. Worse yet, it originates in the attempt to medicalize the not so inexplicable longing for home demonstrated by those in the military (which is probably not unrelated to the way homosexuality was made a disease). Cures for nostalgia involved opium and leaching. A certain Russian general’s corrective medicine was to bury the afflicted warrior alive.
Two faults intrude: Singer does not convincingly distinguish what she sees as nostalgia in contemporary art and good, old-fashioned appropriation — or before that, art about art. Someone also must eventually account for some of these borrowings by placing the blame on art schools, where professors, often artists themselves, routinely demand that students cite their sources, meaning the slide images of post-1960 art the students have borrowed from. This gives a new meaning to the term "academic art." Originality is suspect. The second fault is to use Svetlana Boym’s dreadful "restorative" vs. "reflective" dichotomy from her book The Future of Nostalgia.
But you should know that I do not speak objectively on the issue of nostalgia, since I find it akin to cheap sentiment. The only nostalgia I am interested in is The Nostalgia for the Infinite, which also happens to be the title of a painting by De Chirico.
The issue of ’60s and ’70s referencing also comes up in Iles’ essay, so I had better deal with some of the difficulties head-on. Robert Smithson, represented in the catalogue by his 1970 essay on the artist and politics, probably would have hated every last artwork in this biennial, so it is odd that he is referred to as a great hero for many of the artists on view, none of whom particularly exhibit Smithsonian traits. Then again, the dead can’t choose who will claim them as uncles or saints.
A much more telling inclusion is that of Jorge Luis Borges’ short tale "The Lottery in Babylon." Everyone admires Borges, including yours truly. His paradoxical parables are of the one-size-fits-all-variety but we love them all. Borges, who of course lived and wrote during the period of the Peron dictatorship in Argentina, felt that repression and censorship were good for art, since they inspired creative subterfuge. I have always hoped he was being ironic, but I doubt it. That the politics demonstrated in the current biennial is disguised by nostalgia for the ’60s is, I fear, a sign of the general cultural repression. Sam Durant, for instance, makes drawings of ’60s demonstrations, possibly as stand-ins for current actions probably too hot to handle. Even Mary Kelly is represented by a projection of her brilliant piece done long ago that recreated a photo of a Parisian student demonstration in lint from her washing machine, thus distancing the political instinct through technology.
Also in the catalogue is an homage to Charles Fourier, a reprint of the English version of his 1806 "Table of the Progress of Social Movement." ARTOPIA, of course, has long subscribed to his pre-Marxist theory of passionate attraction as a social principle, leading to utopia.
We are not going to have anything as unfashionable as even a simple utopian idea or ideal as long as timidity rules, yielding to the forces of censorship now apparently triumphant again. How else can we explain Wayne Koestenbaum’s mournful complaint in his perverse and subversive essay "Fag Limbo," that not even the more obviously gay artists in the exhibition would come out to him. I myself wonder if, even in the era of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," fear is still the explanation for the closet: fear, once again, that autobiographical honesty will jeopardize those highly mortgaged careers? Or that some time soon, in the name of the family and so-called family values, these quiet queer Americans will be forced to marry other gay men?
Writing about a group show that doesn’t have a clear-cut theme is always difficult, and the biennial has always been just that: a gigantic survey of whatever the appointed curators find of interest over a two-year period.
The curators are not to be envied the task of explaining their choices, usually guided merely by personal taste. Nevertheless, no matter how much I and others have railed against the biennials, the good done over the years far outweighs the persiflage and errors of aesthetic or political judgment. Some artists we have not seen before sneak in. New talent has always been the point, and, when established artists are included, so has significant work by old standbys. It is impossible to see every new artist showing in Chelsea or Williamsburg or, for that matter, L.A. or Houston. So the biennials are a kind of art world crib-sheet or tip-sheet. Even more important, the Whitney Biennial always stirs up a fuss and gets people thinking about art.
