|
As Elizabeth Sussman, one of the curators of the current Whitney Biennial, recently confided to a New York Times critic about the exhibition, “We wanted to be incredibly open. We didn’t care if an artist had been in a biennial before. We wanted to show all different sorts of art.” And she has certainly succeeded. A lot of the art shown is unexceptional, but it displays an array of art inseparable from today’s anxious culture produced by artists living in today’s political and economic turmoil. Form, color, material: painting, sculpture, photography, choreography, film, music, dance – all different forms of art. Here they are. Fifty-one artists reveal the real strengths and tragedies of our time. |
|
“A lot of the art shown is unexceptional, but it displays an array of art inseparable from today’s anxious culture produced by artists living in today’s political and economic turmoil.”
Dawn Kasper has moved into the Whitney and will present live performances May 23-25
As Elizabeth Sussman, one of the curators of the current Whitney Biennial, recently confided to a New York Times critic about the exhibition, “We wanted to be incredibly open. We didn’t care if an artist had been in a biennial before. We wanted to show all different sorts of art.” And she has certainly succeeded. A lot of the art shown is unexceptional, but it displays an array of art inseparable from today’s anxious culture produced by artists living in today’s political and economic turmoil. Form, color, material: painting, sculpture, photography, choreography, film, music, dance – all different forms of art. Here they are. Fifty-one artists reveal the real strengths and tragedies of our time.
Joe Sanders, the other curator of the exhibition, explained the reason for the inclusion of artists: “We were reacting against biennials where too much was crammed into the galleries so that no artist was shown to their best advantage. We tended to hold back and only pick things that really spoke to us.” And what were the “things” that really spoke to the curators? Performance art. The fourth floor of the museum has been transformed into a 6,000-square-foot space for performances that will become, says Mr. Sanders, “the largest dance floor in New York after the Park Avenue Armory.” The dance floor – accompanied by German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s video projection of landscapes by a seventeenth century Dutch artist Hercules Seger (c.1589-c.1638) with music for cello and organ by Ernst Reijseger and choral works by Handel – is groundbreaking for the Biennial both because of the large breadth is allows each performance piece as well as the shift in focus from unchanging visual presentations to moving and breathing works of art.
Also of note at this year’s Whitney Biennial is Los Angeles artist Dawn Kasper who has taken up residence in the museum, molding it into her own private studio and bedroom and the sound truck of the poet and novelist Dennis Cooper – “I’m not dead unless this is death.” The late Mike Kelley’s presence is felt through three films relating to a reconstruction of his childhood home in a tumultuous Detroit. From May 9 to 13, a series of concerts will be presented by the soprano Alicia Hall Moran (currently understudying Audra McDonald in the Broadway production of Porgy and Bess) and jazz pianist Jason Moran. Georgia Sagri, an artist and political activist, will present Working the No Work, an ongoing installation and sixteen scheduled performances relating to labor and leisure issues in a capitalist society. Film will be conspicuously present in this biennial with week-log runs of the filmmakers’ work, and even conversations between filmmakers and film critics, writers, and the film program’s co-curators Thomas Beard and Ed Halter.
This year’s Whitney Biennial is an amalgamation of disparate tastes, desires, and perceptions of our surrounding world. With artists and art works spanning the entirety of the art world’s spectrum, there is not one clear overarching force tying any of them together save for the fact that the works displayed within Whitney’s stone walls could not have been created in any other time, but now.
