| It used to be that the Whitney Biennial was the first and last word on the state of contemporary art in the country. It was also the most eagerly anticipated art event in New York City. No matter what hung on what wall or stood on the floor, be it awful, be it great, we were there to praise, to bitch and moan and see the very new. Bad or good, nepotistic or not, the Biennial was unequalled and unchallenged in the number of artists and works that it presented. It really was something exciting to look forward to. |  |
Drowning In Art – Edward Rubin
It used to be that the Whitney Biennial was the first and last word on the state of contemporary art in the country. It was also the most eagerly anticipated art event in New York City. No matter what hung on what wall or stood on the floor, be it awful, be it great, we were there to praise, to bitch and moan and see the very new. Bad or good, nepotistic or not, the Biennial was unequalled and unchallenged in the number of artists and works that it presented. It really was something exciting to look forward to. But times, as Dylan famously noted, are a changing and the excitement and the newness that the Biennial once single- handedly supplied has been usurped and co-opted by PS1, the Armory Show, -scope New York, Performa, Pulse, Diva, the entire Chelsea and Williamsburg art gallery establishment, American Idol, CSI and yes, the Iraqi war. It has gotten to the point where most everything, art and otherwise, if not actually seen somewhere else, appears to have been seen somewhere else. Call it a blur, call it shopping, call it history repeating itself, but that’s where we are now, up to our eyeballs in product, production and poop.
One of the tests of great art, perhaps even good art—and let me add, a great lay and a good meal—is that you really want to see it again and again. Another test might be that it takes no prisoners. Overcoming all obstacles, it goes straight to your soul where it lodges indefinitely. At the last Whitney Biennial three works of art burned themselves into my brain. Stored on my hard disk, they still continue to bring me much happiness. Yayoi Kusama’s Fireflies in Water, an enclosed, magically mirrored room with a water pond and hundreds of dangling stringed lights took us to another world. We were astonished as we watched Eve Sussman’s brilliantly costumed actors in her ten minute video 89 Seconds at Alcazar faithfully recreating Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas before our very eyes. Likewise, it’s already happened, Jim Hodges wondrously cut and folded photograph of a tree stopped us in our tracks. All three works, like reading a novel, demanded our participation. They invited us to reconstruct, recreate and rethink the world and in doing so we became both art and artist.
Unlike the last Whitney Biennial, which got critical raves, and previous Biennials that found themselves roundly trashed, this year’s Biennial, with some 101 artists, garnered middle-of-the-road reviews. Nobody raved, nobody trashed and very few cared, certainly not like they used to. If blame is distributed for such a lackluster reception, after discounting director Adam Weinberg’s choice of curators, it falls squarely on the shoulders of Chrissie Iles and Phillipe Vergne, the Biennale’s curators. They played it too safe, too fair and too close to the belt. In semi-defense, one can only imagine the pressure that the curators were under. They had to entertain the public, draw crowds, satisfy the critics, meet the competition, all while maintaining a certain level of seriousness. With so many blindsiding concerns, not to mention people, galleries and artists to please, it was inevitable that an exhibition of the familiar, predictable and redundant would surface. Unfortunately, in their rounding up the usual suspects and their facsimiles, we were given precious little to take home.
Dismissing the tired and huddled masses yearning to be free, which included many of the exhibition’s paintings, installations, sculptures and all of Robert Gober’s 22 tired and useless photographs, which the Whitney saw fit to give it’s own small gallery, this year’s Biennial did excel brilliantly in their selection of video and film presentations. In fact, the quality and inventiveness of the work in this medium was so high that it led me to believe that another curator on drugs or touched by the hand of God, was at play. The one work of extreme beauty and wonder that caught my soul was Pierre Huyghe’s A Journey That Wasn’t, a 21-minute film based on an expedition that the artist made to Antarctica in search of an elusive white creature living on an uncharted island. Mixing footage from the original expedition with a staged recreation of the expedition, filmed at night at Wollman Rink in Central Park, a totally new reality was created where fact, fiction and representation became one. Adding an invited audience and a 40-piece orchestra, the artist brought his film to operatic heights.
Rodney Graham’s 35-millimeter film, Torqued Chandelier Release, inspired by Isaac Newton’s famous experiment with a spinning bucket of water, which led to his theories about relative motion, centers on the incandescent image of a slowly spinning crystal chandelier. Shot with the camera and projector on its side “to explore a portrait rather than a landscape-oriented cinema,” and filmed and projected at 48 frames per second, double the usual speed, our eyes were mesmerized by twice the fidelity of a normal cinematic image. Another good curatorial pick was Ryan Trecartin’s delightfully rollicking video, A Family Finds Entertainment, which tells the story of a teenager named Skippy. Kicked out of his parent’s house because he was gay, Skippy attempts suicide, is run over by a car and ends up cavorting with a flamboyant coterie of drag queens and assorted weirdos. Though frenetically acted at high noise levels, by Trecartin, his parents, friends and his own real-life band, XXPL, the video as the catalogue amazingly notes, was “carefully choreographed from start to finish.”
The most fun to be had was supplied by Francesco Vezzoli’s high camp and very gay five minute film trailer for Gore Vidal’s Caligula. The cast alone, headed by Karen Black as Agrippa, Helen Mirren as Tiberius and a druggy-looking Courtney Love as Caligula, was enough to make you holler and hoot. Add a faux Roman palazzo in Bel Air, California, Donatella Versace costumes, over-heated music and language, lots of nudity, same sex couplings, a bowl of recently ejaculated sperm that is used as a face moisturizer and Vidal himself—well, you get the point. Strangely appropriate, since the film is a send-up of conservative social and sexual norms, the film ends with a quick flash, a modern day frieze, of Pope John Paul II.
The most subtle and chilling film in the Biennial was Jordan Wolfson’s 16 millimeter black and white untitled silent film. Here we see a man in a tuxedo, from bow tie down, performing in sign language, an obvious act of re-silencing Charlie Chaplin’s speech, “Look Up, Hannah” from his 1940 Nazi satire The Great Dictator. The film, released one year before the United States entered World War II, finds Chaplin who uncharacteristically broke character telling our soldiers not to give themselves “to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.” I couldn’t help thinking about Pasolini’s film Salò in which one of the characters, looking straight into the audience, warns of a new world order that is planning to unleash untold horrors upon mankind. Coincidentally or not, for their artistic efforts, Chaplin, refused reentry back into the United States, was exiled to Switzerland, while Pasolini was brutally murdered shortly before the release of Salò. Hopefully no artists in this exhibition will meet similar fates.
