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Expanded Walls, Expanded Practices
Gillian SneedThe Whitney Biennial 2008 takes place from March 6 to June 1 at both
the Whitney Museum and the Park Avenue Armory, New York City.
Mika Rottenberg, Still from Cheese, 2007. Digital video, color, sound, approx. 12 min. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum.This year’s iteration of Whitney Museum’s signature exhibition, the Whitney Biennial, the biannual survey of U.S. trends in contemporary art, is an improvement on the 2006 edition, entitled Day For Night. The last Biennial proved to be an overly didactic curatorial attempt to squeeze an excessive amount of artistic content into both the physically limited space of the museum, and the conceptually restricted rubric of its politically propagandistic curatorial thesis. In contrast, the Whitney Biennial 2008 returns to its tradition of open-ended inquiry—no titles, no dogmatic curatorial proclamations—and like the 2004 Biennial’s inclusion of an off-site location (Central Park)—this year it expands its walls to encompass the Park Avenue Armory, which in collaboration with the nonprofit Art Production Fund co-hosts the exhibition, housing multiple temporary installations, happenings, performances, and events.
Working under the “oversight” of Chief Whitney Curator, Donna De Salvo, and in collaboration with a panel of advisors, this year’s co-curators, Assistant Curator Henriette Huldisch, and Associate Curator and Altria Branch Director, Shamim Momim, concentrated on artists working within a realm of “expanded practices,” or hybrid art-making approaches that involve working in multiple media, including installation and interactive performance. To this end, and of particular interest, are the panoply of events taking place at the Park Avenue Armory in March, which seem to echo the kind of programming that was on view at Performa, New York’s performance art biennial that took place in the fall of 2007.
Constructed at the end of the 19th century for the prestigious Seventh Regiment and now designated an historic landmark, the Park Avenue Armory has been recently re-dedicated to cutting-edge art. Though it is distinguished for its 19th-century regimental rooms designed in the ornate applied arts style of the aesthetic movement, it is most notable for its mammoth Drill Hall measuring 55,000 square feet with an 80-foot high barrel vaulted ceiling. Considered a marvel of engineering in its time, it remains one of the largest unobstructed interiors in New York. In fact, this was the site of Aaron Young’s notorious 2007 inaugural event entitled Greeting Card, an elite invitation-only happening involving the unleashing of a tangled race of high-performance motorcycles “painting” the hall’s floor with tire marks.
Less hostile in tenor, and more inclusive in scope (anyone in the general public can participate on a first-come, first-served basis), the roster of Biennial events slated to occur in this space include experiential offerings as varied as: a gypsy-themed feast and dance celebration organized by Rita Ackerman and Agathe Snow; a slumber party replete with blankets, pillows, snacks, and musical accompaniment hosted by DJ Olive; daily therapy sessions conducted by Bert Rodriguez; daily dance sessions culminating in a 24-hour dance marathon in the Drill Hall also organized by Agathe Snow; and a working bar serving homemade tequila hosted by Eduardo Sarabia, to name just a few of the many events planned for the site.
Despite its expansion to the Armory, the Biennial feels much more streamlined than in past years. With more space and less artists (81 to be exact, fewer than have appeared the last five Biennials), Huldisch and Momim proudly showcase their astutely selective curatorship and refined exhibition design, which is especially striking in the traditional setting of the museum’s Breuer Building. Here, installation, video, and hybrid practices dominate. It is also here that certain themes and trends really begin to emerge and coalesce for the viewer. One such trend is the modesty of materials used and artists’ tendencies toward minimal and conceptual practices. Carol Bove’s noteworthy sculptural installation, The Night Sky Over New York, October 21, 2007, 9 p.m., for instance, is an exquisite collection of thin bronze rods suspended seemingly effortlessly from the ceiling like wind chimes or rays of gold light flashing in the space they inhabit.
The reoccurrence of humble materials—especially plywood, mirrors, Plexiglas, and found fabric—is also evident in much of the sculptural work on view. Patrick Hill’s constructivist Between, Beneath, Through, Against combines constructivist slabs of glass and concrete embedded with fabric, while the wood, Plexiglas, and metallic paper constructions of Alice Könitz recall Bauhaus furniture design. Architecture is also repeatedly referenced, as in William Cordova’s wood beam structure based on the footprint of the house where two Black Panthers leaders were killed in a Chicago police raid in 1969. Heather Rowe’s Entrance (for some sites in dispute), a highlight of the exhibition, is similar to Cordova’s work in appearance, but much more engaging in its execution. It, too, consists of a series of plywood posts arranged as a series of skeletal framed wall supports. Yet, here, mirror shards are wedged into the posts at discordant angles, disrupting and fracturing the spectator’s views of the rest of the gallery with flashes of her own reflection, animating the tension between public and private experience. Similarly, Lisa Sigal’s The Day before Yesterday and the Day after Tomorrow, composed of drywall, wallpaper, house paint, and plaster combines painting, sculpture, and installation practices to evoke notions of both interior and exterior architecture, and the dichotomies of public and private, social and domestic. Mika Rottenberg’s delightful installation, a kind of rickety wooden chicken coop structure containing several monitors playing Cheese, a film synthesizing Rapunzel with farm imagery including long-haired milk maids, goats, cows, chickens, and other farm animals, similarly questions domesticity and women’s roles.
Such works also introduce the sense of fragility and ephemerality that emerge as other salient themes of the exhibition. Particularly eloquent is Mitzi Pederson’s Untitled, a curved sheet of wood standing perpendicular to the floor onto which delicate strings, wires, and tiny bells are strung and attached by shiny bits of aluminum tape. The ephemerality of light is exploited to deconstruct notions of the permanence of architecture in Adam Putnam’s light projection installation, Green Hallway (Magic Lantern), another jewel of the exhibition. Light is also central to Melanie Schiff’s subtle and enigmatic still life photographs such as Water Birth, which depict vaguely domestic scenes that resonate with an allusive ambiguity—in this case, a plant sits in a bathtub bathed in misty white light rather than water. Walead Beshty creates fogged photographic images that attest to the photography’s capacity to obfuscate rather than reveal by using a batch of film damaged by an airport security x-ray machine.
Despite these instances, photography and painting are scant this year, and when they do appear, they are often treated as installation, a mode favored among artists and curators. Cheyney Thompson’s large-scale photographs of photographic and book displays sit on the floor, propped against the wall like books themselves. Meanwhile, Karen Kilimnik’s charming small scale mis-en-scène paintings depicting ambiguous scenes of aristocratic environments plucked from fairy tales and 19th-century literature are presented together in a small annex room complete with a decadent chandelier, evoking a bourgeoisie parlor of a by-gone century. Hung innovately low on the wall, Mary Heilmann’s playful canvases engage with traditions of abstract painting while resonating with allusions to her everyday world. Such works feel fresh and relevant in comparison with Robert Bechtle’s staid photorealist paintings of suburban California, which feel antiquated and outmoded.
Other disappointments include Ellen Harvey’s installation mimicking a salon-style exhibition of framed “images” entitled Collection of Impossible Subjects from her Museum of Failure series, an attempted institutional critique aimed at commenting on art history and the relationship between the artist and the museum. The result is a clumsy and unsophisticated eyesore. Similarly, Fia Backström’s usually sharp conceptual work aimed at undermining notions of what constitutes an exhibition, here comes across as overly didactic in a faux display featuring advertising photos of smiling faces, wallpaper patterned with the Whitney Biennial logo, and poop-like clay lettering fashioned by the curators themselves in collaboration with the artist, spelling out terms like “communal” and “focus group.”
The fact that the curators actually contributed to the artwork themselves, while intended as one example of the kind of expanded and cross-disciplinary practices advocated by the exhibition, it also points to one criticism that has been recently launched—that of the cliquey-ness of the group selected. Over half of this year’s participants are under 40, with the majority living and working in New York (and to a lesser extent, Los Angeles.) When work on the wall in the Biennial can simultaneously be found in a Chelsea gallery, as is the case with Seth Price’s wooden wall pieces, which are concurrently on view at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, the exhibition feels more like P.S. 1’s Greater New York than a truly national sampling. Despite Museum Director Adam Weinberg’s claim of the Biennial’s ability to recognize “the possibility of being an artist and not being in the mainstream,” there are no real new discoveries here. Nonetheless, the curators should be lauded for their inclusion of a solid number of female artists, their choice of exciting programming at the Armory, and their willingness to embrace the attitude that “less is more.”
