The Corcoran Biennial, 2005: Closer to Home
By Jonathan P. Binstock and Stacey Schmidt, curators
Kathryn Spence, Paper Towels, 2004–05, paper towels and thread, approximately 11 x 6 x 6". Image courtesy of Carl Berg Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo by Ian Reeves
The 48th Corcoran Biennial, "Closer to Home", takes place nearly one hundred years after the inaugural 1907 Biennial and is organized to reflect ideas relevant to the recent history of the Corcoran’s Biennial series. Throughout its long existence, the Corcoran Biennial has always been something of a mutable exhibition: a half-invitational, half-juried showcase until 1967; it almost exclusively featured American painting until the 46th Biennial in 2000, when it was transformed yet again.
That millennial exhibition, "Media/Metaphor," marked the start of what has become in subsequent Biennials an extended dialogue on technology as medium. "Media/Metaphor" explored the dissolution of traditional aesthetic barriers and the use or cross-pollination of new technologies for artistic expression. In 2002, "Fantasy Underfoot" further examined notions of media and boundaries with work exploiting technology for its ability to engage the viewer more transparently.
In light of these foregoing Biennials, one key decision served as a conceptual touchstone for us throughout the development of "Closer to Home:" we decided to let the pendulum swing in the other direction and explore the work of artists who, for a variety of reasons, utilize traditional media. This conception of the Biennial was inspired by the belief that a significant amount of noteworthy contemporary art succeeds through earnest individual expression, historically resonant aesthetic dialogue, the reinvention or revival of "old tech" methods, or the poetic use of prosaic materials. As we worked our way through our initially long list of artists, whose work we explored in studio, gallery, and museum visits over a period of fourteen months, these four criteria became our organizing principles.
All the artists in "Closer to Home" express one or more components of these principles in their thinking and working methods. Most significantly, their art is, in the best possible sense of the word, earnest. In what has been described many times as a "post-everything" world, these artists have little interest in the kind of detached irony that has become a clich� in contemporary art circles. Their work is by turns humorous, serious, critical, complex, or oblique, but never cynical. There is no inside joke being played on the viewer, no insincerity to guard against; this art is synchronous in its internal character and outward appearance, its lack of pretense both surprising and auspicious.
Leading the charge is eccentric portraitist George Condo, whose fantasy portraits interweave painterly styles that range from the 18th to the 20th centuries; the resultant disconcerting character of his pictures seems to transform the moribund Old-Master portraits into a relevant expression of contemporary malaise. Also working in imagined realms, painter Dana Schutz uses flattened distortions of form and gestural brushwork, combining black humor and an expansive array of art-historical references in canvases bursting with an aggressive riot of brushstrokes and color reminiscent of fauvism.
Kathryn Spence is among the artists in the exhibition who create art from commonplace items; in her case these are the rolls of paper towels that she hand-embroiders in dazzling detail, finding new possibilities in the banality of domestic paper products. Sculptor Richard Rezac takes domesticity in another direction, using architectural details such as Shaker motifs as a starting point for his works, and distilling these inspirations to an essential form that he deftly crafts and embellishes to minimalist perfection.
Presenting perhaps the most literal link to the domestic implications of "Closer to Home," Austin Thomas constructs architectural "perches" on which museum visitors are encouraged to climb, stand, or sit. Evoking home as a physical place, as well as a metaphor for a feeling of comfort, Thomas’s perches provide a cozy refuge in a very unexpected place.
Found and reused objects are at the core of the sculptures of Chakaia Booker and Jeff Spaulding. Booker’s aggressive assemblages are built of cut rubber strips culled from a variety of sources such as reclaimed tires, hoses, and tubes from automated milking machines. Meanwhile, Spaulding transforms a diverse array of detritus into finely tuned, formalist-looking compositions. In these assemblages, objects such as plastic toys, bicycle seats, and rubber buckets combine to form psychologically loaded wholes.
John Lehr’s photographs recontextualize familiar elements of the urban landscape, presenting profile views of large-scale commercial signs as highly considered frameworks for reinterpreting consumer vernacular. The Reverend Ethan Acres takes an altogether different approach to reimagining the familiar, uniting his hand-sewn biblical inflatables with ministry and performance to create a unique and mysterious trinity. Acres, nondenominational gallery sermons, performed alongside his artworks, reflect a strong and positive zeal to combine traditions of art and religion into a fun and accessible new whole.
Several of the artists in "Closer to Home" also adapt old-tech methods for new ends. Colby Caldwell uses vintage 8mm movies as the jumping-off point for creating manipulated stills and videos that express his fascination with the way history and life stories are passed from one generation to the next. Matthew Buckingham’s film and slide installations utilize imagery with a similarly low-tech flair, consciously undermining the fetish for new technologies in service of revisiting the circumstances and narratives that surround instances of memory.
Photographer Adam Fuss uses 19th and early 20th century photographic tools and techniques, including pinhole cameras and daguerreotypes. For Fuss, these techniques, however obsolete, are the most direct way of creating images suggesting themes of life, death, and transcendence. Conversely, painter Monique van Genderen employs new materials such as enamel paint and adhesive vinyl film in the service of the age-old challenge of creating work specifically for an architectural space, a challenge met in past centuries by mural, mosaic, and fresco.
It is important to note that advanced technology was never precluded in the development of this Biennial, and several of the artists finally selected do use video, digital equipment, or computers to create or present their work. James Huckenpahler makes digital imagery resembling metallicized futuristic landscapes; these images, however, begin with the body, as Huckenpahler scans the surface of a photographic portrait for a compelling detail to focus upon and intensively rework digitally. Deigo Manglano-Ovalle’s art has similarly corporeal origins; the sculptures in "Closer to Home" began as small balls of Play-Doh squeezed in the palm of his hand, then recast by a team of engineers as larger-than-life installations that remain embedded with the texture of the artist’s unique map of handprints.
In the final analysis, the exhibition presents artists whose work has a strong relationship to more traditional modes of artmaking, evoking the familiar beginnings, or home, of various forms of aesthetic practice. If art can be conceived of as an unending expansion of possibilities in media, form, content, and technology, these artists might be viewed as occupying a place near the historical antecedents of current trends rather than on their cutting edge. The objects in "Closer to Home" reveal, even in their diversity, the abiding truth that art exists at least in part to transport us elsewhere;back into our personal histories, to imagined worlds, or to places for considering where we might be going, or want to go, next.
