I have to admit that the Whitney is my favorite museum and has been since I have had the privilege of going to art galleries in New York City. I like the size of the rooms. There’s just enough art to feel full but not overfed. And I adore the fact that between floors I step up or down in a dark limestone and granite encased stairway completely devoid of art. It feels like the Amuse Bouche that cleans the palate between courses, allowing me to enjoy the next round of gourmet delicacies.
The Whitney Biennial this year is a gourmet feast of contemporary art, mainly from New York City artists, and most of which I have never heard of. The cacophony of voices calling from each floor make this year’s Biennial a personal movement of reflection and statement.
The objective of the curators, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, as stated on the fifth floor of the museum, was to allow the art exhibitions to create a bridge between the generations of artists and their diverse historical, social and cultural movements. The curators chose not to present the work chronologically but as an interrupted moment in time in an attempt to capture the zeitgeist of American art in this day and age. They gave the exhibit the simple name of ‘2010’, a title that serves as a marker in time and acknowledges the curator’s limitations in the impossibility of their objective. It also gives them an out in my mind when at the end of the show I felt unresolved and overwhelmed.
The exhibition fills all five floors of the museum but as I meandered systematically from the first to the fifth floor, I didn’t find a linear thought pattern. I did find themes on each floor that were more in essence than in actuality.
On the first floor were works that seemed to entice me further up those beautiful granite stairs. On the second floor the work seemed personal and intimate. A powerful and emotional photographic series by Nina Berman depicted the return of an Iraqi veteran who had his face blown off by a suicide bomber. The resulting plastic surgery made him look like a monster yet his young almost childlike finance still agreed to marry him. Berman documented the marriage and the subsequent separation three months later. The series felt complete and I wandered out of that section emotional wrought into the other rooms. In direct contrast, the beautifully detailed drawings by Aural Schmidt, a transplanted Canadian, are humorous in a dark underhanded way. Her drawing of a Minotaur containing renderings of beer labels, condom packages, cigarette butts among other largely male symbols brought a smile to my face although not to that of my male companion. Although the audio recording by Schmidt states that she likes men and that she had no intention of belittling them, I think she is back peddling which makes the work even more humorous. I found her drawings a highlight of the second floor and wanted more work as opposed to the empty space chosen by the curators to surround the pieces. I have to ask, do we need all that empty space between works by the same artist considering the chaos that a biennial inevitably creates?
On the third floor, the work felt more process oriented and I marveled at the creativity of process that many of the artists explored. Roland Flexner’s exquisite surreal ink drawings pulled me into the tradition of their creation. Taking the ancient Japanese art technique called suminagashi (ink floating), in which a marbled effect is achieved by placing paper on ink floating in water and then modifying it with breath, gravity and chance, Flexner created worlds of abstraction and illusion. On the opposite wall, Scott Short uses an elaborately structured methodology to create a black and white abstract image. The process begins with colored construction paper, which he photocopies and then he photocopies the photocopy until an abstract image is created. He then meticulously copies the image creating a large abstract painting. I found the methodology much more important and interesting than the result which says a lot about the artist’s journey. Given that I cannot go on this journey and can only see it from the outside, I question the relevance of the art to the viewer.
Across the floor was a large accessible box created out of silkscreened panels that allowed the viewer to enter via sliding doors. Inside were projected slides of abstract watery images and in the center a 3D animation of the bust of John F. Kennedy circling over a turntable. The artists Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher appropriated some of the ideas and writings of two rather unknown American illusionists Black Herman and Sun Pa and the result is a poem approached through abstract figurative elements. But in the chaos of work of a Biennial, this piece did not give up its concepts easily. In the background, blaring in an overly demanding tone was Marianne Vitale’s video work “Welcome to the Future of Neutralism”. In front of a collaged paper background and staring directly into the camera, Vitale issues command after command at the audience in a pitched aggressive voice that permeated the entire floor. No artist’s work was spared making it difficult to focus or concentrate, not a good environment for a floor filled with art that gave concept the highest priority. In general I found the video in the exhibition uninspiring to boring.
On the fourth floor, I saw statement after statement of the American problem of materialistic denial and dysfunctional aloneness best expressed in my opinion by a nineteen sixties Cadillac by the artist collective The Bruce High Quality Foundation, roughly painted white with national clichés projected on the windshield. A female voice recites a prose poem in the background. It’s a desperate piece and seems to go nowhere but to the area of complaint. Next is a room punctuated by Sarah Crowner’s canvas paintings in a minimalistic explosion backwards to the abstract expressionism and especially the color field period. The fact that Barnett Newman was hanging on the fifth floor was a logical disconnect. I wanted these painting to go somewhere else and I quickly moved through the room to find myself immersed in Charles Ray’s ink flowers. Now I felt I had lost all idea of the curator’s intent. Beautiful colors and sweeping lines creating flowers in an almost graphic design manner jolted me back into the art mental space after spending so much time in American issues. I didn’t want them there. And then Stephanie Sinclair’s photographs of Afghan women who had burned themselves to escape intolerable lives of abuse and devaluation made all the American problems and American colorful flowers superficial and narcisstic. I don’t know what the curators had in mind but it didn’t work for me because it minimalized the other artists works.
On the fifth floor is a collection of works purchased at previous Whitney Biennial’s and coming from their archives. Single pieces by the super artists Rothko, Newman, de Kooning, Hess, Barney among others crowd the room and feel disconnected and disassociated from the works on the first four floors. Again, I am not sure of the curators’ intent, but for me the result was a floor disconnected from the meaning and feeling of the other floors. Because the curators had chosen to display the works in a non-chronological order on the other floors and then to group the works by American artists from twenty to thirty years ago all on one floor was a jolt to the logic and intent of the exhibition especially as the intent of the exhibition was stated on this floor as well as a zeitgeist of American painting in a non-chronological manner. I would have preferred a scattering of the contemporary American masters among the new and unknown and feel that this would have served their intention. I think the statement of where we were and where we are going would have been clearer.
Was this Whitney Biennial a success? Most of the art wasn’t pretty and it certainly wasn’t accessible to the guy on the street. The works imposed on each other visually and auditory, without really relating to each other. I left with a feeling of irresolution and dissatisfaction.
If I had the opportunity to curate this show I would have made different choices and created a more logical and less chaotic exhibition, that would, I think, have been more accessible to the viewer. But this didn’t preclude my enjoyment of the cacophony. It just made me sorry for the artists whose work was punctuated by the screams of Marianne Vitale.
