O Whitney, O Biennial (2010)

blah, blah, art is dead, blah, Biennial’s long dead—

Long live.

Storm Tharp, Jodie Jill, 2009. Ink, gouache, and colored pencil on paper.

EARLY DEATH

The Whitney Biennial’s 75th (sort of) edition, 2010, is truncated and tighter than recent surveys, manageable, more engageable. Experiencing it I realized that in many ways I have struggled with more than a few of past surveys—their immensity, unadulterated ambition, bombast. The 2010 Biennial by comparison is cozy. Reports of its death are, as usual, premature. As a survey it is a collection of random artists’ work, nothing more, cannot and could never capture anything holy, can’t save the world. It’s a meaningful art experience, if then forgotten.

REAL ESTATE

A number of works tackle the idea of home, the cultivation, design and building of, beauty and loss of, the mortgage crisis, visual landscaping, attempts at rediscovering the idea of one’s “home”. James Casebere crafts tiny model sets of house divisions and takes photographs of these small models and their surrounding neighborhoods in his Landscape with Houses series until they eerily resemble the real thing. Except they are not. Maureen Gallace paints small, serene houses from her native New England. These works are beautiful, and seem to say nothing—other than a love of a particular place (home), while Robert Williams makes twisted, cartoon-like watercolors of fantastical suburban landscapes.

Robert Williams, Astrophysically Modified Real Estate, 2009. Watercolor on paper.

AGES (or TIME)

I’d just begun to take in the painting floor, with low hopes, wary—I’m one of those—when Williams’ watercolors jumped out at me. They are fresh and imaginative. Figuring him to be a young buck—subversive, perhaps a graphic novel artist, I glanced at his age (date of birth is prominently displayed for each artist). He was born in 1943.

Lorraine O’Grady, born in 1934, places on gallery walls multiple photo diptychs blown up to poster size of 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire along with King of Pop Michael Jackson, from whose lives she spies similarities. As one might imagine there is not a plethora of Baudelaire photos, but there are enough to map his life side by side with MJ’s. Aurel Schmidt by contrast was born in 1982 and displays imaginatively contemporary paintings made from a cross section of disparate materials—dirt, graphite, blood, acrylic paint, beer, flies, urine, Pepto-Bismol. These are exceedingly detailed and once you get past the mini “shock” of the materials used, strikingly beautiful. Schmidt has a special booklet insert in the most recent issue of Purple Fashion that is pointless and perfectly obscene. Her work is practically performative.

Hannah Greely, stills from Dual, 2005-09. Mixed media.

PERFORMANCE / INSTALLATION / MEDIA

There are a number of performance works at the Biennial, most of them difficult to take in without concerted effort. Aki Sasamoto leaves remnants of an installation from her performance in one gallery, a room of found, haphazard objects. A camera projects video imagery onto the ceiling and one wall. Some of this imagery consists of the viewer watching oneself navigating through the installation.

R. H. Quaytman has a room to herself that was one of my most pleasurable experiences at the Biennial. Distracting Distance, Chapter 16 is a series of paintings that reference a window in the Whitney designed by Marcel Breuer, a carved alcove of sorts looking down onto Madison Avenue below. In these paintings Quaytman restates Edward Hopper’s 1961 “A Woman in the Sun”, owned by the Whitney, using as a setting the window in the very room you stand. Get it? Performance artist K8 Hardy (naked, contemplative, game, proud) stands in for Hopper’s woman in the sun. A series of paintings ensue, all riffing on the window, the room, and Hopper’s painting. Color, effect, angle, and pattern are altered and twisted and rethought. The works are dynamic. Hannah Greely’s Dual is a perfect life-size sculptural recreation of a typical bar, decades old and worn—seat booths, seedy paneled walls, with a lonely pay phone.

OBAMA

Only one work referenced Obama, to my knowledge. I don’t know whether to be incredibly relieved by this, or worried about its spiritual and political implications. The couch sculpture by Jessica Jackson Hutchins has newspaper images of el President attached like upholstery. Pottery urns sit on the couch (some missing on later visits). Cozy, Hutchins’ childhood couch. Mundane, or quietly reverential?

Nina Berman, “Ty with gun”, 2008, from Marine Wedding, 2006/2008. Pigment print.

Stephanie Sinclair, from the Self-Immolation in Afghanistan: A Cry for Help series, 2005. Digital print.

FROM VIDEO WITH LOVE, OF COURSE

Another of my favorites was Alex Hubbard’s “tightly” edited nonsensical* video, Annotated Plans for an Evacuation, which consists of a used Ford Tempo, sheets of dry wall plaster, jugs, and whatnot, as they are attached to, fall off of, and are run over by, said moving car—spackled tires, battered materials, spray painting, and silly shenanigans, ensue, all pretty insane. And beautiful. I loved it. Kerry Tribe’s split screen film recounts the case study of “H.M.,” a patient who underwent experimental surgery in the 1950s resulting in his short-term memory being restricted to events stretching back no farther than twenty seconds.

Jesse Aron Green stages a video incorporating movement from a gymnastics book written in 1858 with a set of exercises for a fitness regime. Male performers execute random exercises according to the book’s precise instructions, in what looks like an old-time gym. The exercises have a dubious legacy in that they are said to have adversely affected their creator’s son, who recounted a mental breakdown in a subsequent 1903 memoir. Press materials state this autobiography prompted several early psychoanalytic studies on paranoia, sexuality, and paternal authority. Photographer Ari Marcopoulos screens Detroit, consisting of experimental noise music performed by a band of friends. Someday Marcopoulos will undoubtedly pen video for the X Games, if he hasn’t already.

Jesse Aron Green, still from Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik, 2008. Hi-Definition video projection, color, sound.

THE WARS

Nina Berman’s photographs profile an American soldier severely disfigured by a suicide bomber in Iraq. Ty Ziegel, left with no skin or face, is shown coming back home to marry his twenty-one year old high school sweetheart, as if nothing had happened. The couple separated months after the wedding. Afghani women, self-burn victims protesting the state of their lives, grace the photograph series by Stephanie Sinclair, a photojournalist. I suppose only tangentially related to the Afghanistan War, and more about women and human rights, these photographs hit at a particular nature of the war.

Aurel Schmidt, Master of the Universe / FlexMaster 3000 (detail)

MOMENTS

Storm Tharp’s portraits are built from a confluence of random drippings of mineral ink slowly sculpted into shapes. Once dried, erasure and drawing on top of the paint manipulate the form further. The resulting portrait narratives are random and nonsensical*, but as familiar as TV characters. Pae White’s stunning “Still, Untitled” (from the series Smoke Knows), is a tapestry built from photographic imagery of smoke in motion. It takes up the whole of a gallery wall off the elevator and could be stared at for hours.

THE NONSENSICAL*

Who are you or I to say that a piece of art is “nonsensical”? Ania Soliman’s “NATURAL OBJECT RANT: The Pineapple” is a series of montages paired with text panels that explore the history of the pineapple as “exotic commodity”, filtered through the politics of colonialism. The works are keenly elegiac, very beautiful, and utterly indecipherable. Edgar Cleune and Ellen Gallagher have constructed “BETTER DIMENSION”, an enclosed room with impossible-to-find doors, unless you happen to catch someone coming out. Inside you enter a netherworld of JFK projections, whirling cameras, comfortable seating, twirling images, and doors everywhere. Ah, the craziness.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation, hearse installation We Like America, and America Likes Us

ELEGIA / bEAUTY / mOVING

The art collective The Bruce High Quality Foundation has planted a Ghostbusters/Joseph Beuys hearse/ambulance smack dab in the middle of a gallery, projecting onto its front windshield a cornucopia of video from the internet, movies, popular culture, and fringe film ephemera—frightening, lovely images, along with a recorded voice that recites monologues of indescript free associations concerning America’s desires, crimes, fall, and comeuppance. (You must also check out their BRUCENNIAL 2010: Miseducation, online, as well as its remnant of shows throughout Soho and Brooklyn, which I haven’t seen). Some of the imagery that flashes across the windshield (and audio) for their Biennial installation:

The fallen towers, Beuys, Ghostbusters, a dancing Obama (oops, another instance!), self-immolating monks, fat Elvis, The Birth of A Nation, WWE wrestling, Louis Farrakhan, North By Northwest, Reagan’s shooting, Mahalia Jackson, George Bailey, Avatar, Marlon Brando, the moon landing, Katrina devastation, The Flinstones, Dylan, religious/sexual imagery, an Olympic track dash (Jackie Joyner Kersey), the 1963 March on Washington, Tiger Woods, Divine, Bessie Smith, Internet porn star Gianna, the Rodney King beating, Stand By Me, Columbine video, Eddie Murphy Delirious, audio of sentimental Coltrane, Disneyland, cars barreling into civilians, West Side Story, the Space Shuttle, The Postman Always Rings Twice / Fatal Attraction / Midnight Cowboy / Asia Argento, Eastern European street fights, Supreme Judge Roberts, Rock Hudson, Citizen Kane, MJ’s “Black & White”, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Tyson biting Holyfield’s ear, River Phoenix, an American soldier in the desert dancing “the robot”…

Rashaad Newsome’s wonderful “Untitled” and “Untitled (New Way)” videos, with dancers demonstrating killer underground “vogueing” movement, tirelessly, are invigorating and elegiac almost to a fault. After engaging the electric movement Newsome re-contextualizes it, taking it apart, slightly, and putting it back together, imperceptibly, as something new.

Pineapple history, MJ/Baudelaire photos, self-burning women, it all begins to fall apart. (Was Michael Asher’s piece truly, and did he get, the museum to really open for 24 hours three straight days?)

APOLOGIST SCUM

I should admit that I’ve never “disliked” a Biennial, making me something of a pariah in some quarters. Because Art is dead. The Whitney Biennial, word has it, has long been dead. But they are not alone—it’s 2010.

Pae White, Smoke Knows (detail)

THE BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION

We Like America, and America Likes Us

(windshield video)

“We like America, and America likes us. But somehow, something keeps us from getting it together.

It could be beautiful with America, we couldn’t deny it. There was something there that kept us coming back. Maybe it was just comfort. Just a steady hand. Maybe just something to return to.

America started passing out on the couch in front of the television every night. We didn’t say anything. Everything was fine, America still went to work, and still took care of the bills, and the kids, and still told us she loved us. And every night—again on the couch. We’d go downstairs and try to wake her up, but she wouldn’t budge. He’d just say he’d needed some time alone, time to decompress, and he’d be up all night.

America must have been amazing. And we must have simply not been impressive enough to keep him around. America must have been amazing.

(cue instrumental “A Whiter Shade of Pale”)

And then we met America. Purely by accident standing in line for coffee. Not what we expected to say the least. America was so normal, so unimpressive. Just another series of decisions towards mediocrity.

We were married to America. And we had matching fighter jets, and mansions, and supermodel wives. Sounded like a simpler time, but it wasn’t. It was hard for us to watch. She’d always been so happy, so full of confidence, so ready for anything. But America was under a spell. It didn’t feel like skin—it felt like technology. And as best we could, we tried to superimpose an image of America—happy, full of life—over his now failing body.

There would never be another America. When we were asked what we wanted to be, we didn’t want to be anything. We wanted to be America.”