The Whitney Biennial

2008-04-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

THE 2008 WHITNEY BIENNIAL

The Whitney Museum has several openings for its biennial. I avoided the first one because I thought that it would be a zoo. So when a friend called and invited me to a subsequent one I agreed to go thinking it would be less crowded. We met outside of the museum at 7:45 but there were about two hundred bodies all waiting under umbrellas in the rain to get in. They were held back because the inside of the museum was too congested. It was a hip, mob scene.

When we got inside, people were milling around, music was blasting, I felt like I was in a noisy, restaurant. That is not the feeling I like in a museum but hey, this was an opening.

I wanted to see the work. The theme according to curators statements had to do with the exchange of communication. I am still trying to figure out what was being communicated. The work looked vacant, empty, broken, scattered. Detritus and debris installed and strewn, not bad, not good, delivery crates, cracked glass boxes, ordinary plastic bottles of water. There was an installation of broken metal armatures with bits of plaster and torn plastic bags attached, the kind I throw in the garbage dump at the foundry after the mold has been made.

Nothing felt really bad but nothing felt really good either. People did not seem to respond to the work. No emotion was evoked. There was nothing spiritual. There was nothing tragic. There was no sense of sexuality, there was no sense of beauty. There was a lack of structure but maybe the structure was the lack of structure. Perhaps that was what was being communicated along with a sense of failure.

I didn’t feel angry as I had at a previous Whitney Biennial where a grotesque life sized Santa Claus stood on a ladder and defecated a thick brown syrup on people below. That artist was angry, he devised a depraved image to make a statement, albeit revolting. These artists were not protesting and there was nothing here for the viewer to protest or even feel angry about. Nothing to feel happy about either. Did the work they produced give them an opportunity to get better or was it a matter of collecting, arranging and installing more junk?
I felt sad, annoyed and concerned.

I wondered what these young artists do when they go back to their studios. Can they draw? Can they paint or sculpt? Do they even want to? It is a current phenomenon among younger artists to get other artists, computers or workshops to do their work. This concerns me most because there is no substitute for the hand - eye - mind connections that occur when the artist draws, paints or sculpts. The effect of these practices on the physical body, thought process, brain development and psyche is enormous.

Then there were the necessary dark rooms filled with video projections. People were sneezing and coughing, I wouldn’t go in, I had just gotten over a bad cold.

I looked up and to my surprise there was an old friend. Robert Bechtle was standing in front of his work alongside his wife, the art historian Whitney Chadwick. We were really glad to see each other.

“What the hell are you doing here?” We simultaneously asked each other. We all were trying to figure out why he was in the show. Bechtle said even his dealer didn’t know. I was glad to see his work there, it was grounding. I think Bechtle’s paintings of empty streets with empty cars must resonate with the empty feelings these young people have.

I did get some relief from an installation of fish tanks filled with golf balls and paper white narcissus bulbs growing in them. From the bottles of Gatorade lying around, I think Gatorade was used instead of water. At least here was something alive.

The golf ball installation was right next to the Breuer trapezoidal window and it was there that I ran into Alicia Longwell, curator at the Parish Museum in Southampton. We discussed the work and then I noticed rolled up towels along with rolled up sandbags lining the perimeter of the window.

“Must be for the condensation leakage.” I said and Alicia agreed.

But then we asked the guard who told us that the towels were part of the installation. Alicia seemed to remember the sandbags being there before. Maybe the artist combined them with the towels....who knows.

If all of the installations, which come from and look like trash, are to be trashed, is the message that nothing has any meaning or permanence? Then why make art? Henriette Huldisch, one of the curators uses words like smaller, slower, lesser and failure to describe the show. She quotes Samuel Beckett in her catalog essay.

“Perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story.....where I am I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on. I can’t go on, I go on.”
Huldisch talks about going on in the face of absurdity, in the face of feeling that everything that has been done, has already been done twice.

The Whitney has chosen to exhibit hopelessness, ephemerality and failure. These artists seem to be saying.....”I can’t compete with the masters so I’m leaving it all behind.” But to go on is to try even harder.

As for ephemerality, I understand the beauty of a fleeting moment. Sand paintings which are created usually by monks who painstakingly pour colored sand into exquisite mandala shaped patterns, are excruciatingly precise and take a great deal of time and meditative concentration to execute but they are wiped out of existence soon after completion. If the works exhibited in the Whitney biennial are pure ephemeral statements such as the sand paintings, then they should be wiped out of existence and not fed into the art market for glamour, money and fame.

The question is...Is the 2008 Whitney Biennial a true representation of what is going on in the art world? Is it true that all of the top younger artists selected by the curators are throwing their hands up in despair with no focus on a hierarchy of quality?

There are great numbers of young artists out there that don’t have that point of view. Why not consider them?

Audrey Flack

Art Notes and Chronicles

The Whitney Biennial