The Whitney Museum of American Art
11 March – 30 May
www.whitney.org
It's right to wonder about the Whitney Biennial's purpose: what's it supposed to do and how do you tell how well it's done it? As the signature exhibition of America's premiere museum devoted to American art, the biennial could be a lot of things: a survey of the best American work of the last few years (however curator or committee might define best or American), an opportunity to advance a particular curatorial thrust (as in the infamous political biennial of 1993), or an artistic 'state of the nation' address with an inclusive scope and some sort of objective selection process. It can't be all of these in the best of circumstances (whatever those might be), so it's bound to be riddled with imperfections.
My preferred version of biennial
imperfection is a 'state of the nation' hodgepodge with a 'best of' idea,
however contentious, filtered in during somebody's version of intelligent
organisation. Of course, the state of my nation may differ from yours – as
so many individual works in the current exhibition seem to declare – but
that difference is sure to be thought-provoking, even revealing. And a
precarious national summation accords with the Whitney's own complicated
position at a time when the concept of national identity – America's in
particular – is such a stick of dynamite. Ultimately, one wants some sense
of 'accuracy' in whatever imperfections one finds.
The 2004 Biennial is a masterpiece of negotiating these competing
possibilities. So far as my preferences go, its organisation and apparent
guiding principles make virtues of the exhibition's inevitable weaknesses –
a New York-centric bent, a relative lack of ethnic diversity, a deficiency
of gravitas in favour of lighter, more fashionable, market-pleasing fare,
etc. It is perhaps the best possible biennial at the moment and certainly
one of the best I've seen.
Lest such an assessment seem more Panglossian optimism than anything akin to Dorian Gray's horrific self-recognition, it's worth stating that the biennial's contents are profoundly troubling. Beyond the technical virtuosity in media both traditional and new and the overabundance of creativity in materials high, low, and most things in between, one has a nagging sense that there's not much meat on the bone – and what flesh remains is pretty putrid.
But that seems to mirror the way things are. The curatorial team of Chrissie Iles, Shamim Momin and Debra Singer (in-house curators selected for the gig by now-deposed museum head Maxwell Anderson) has given us a snapshot of what's going on, explicated by insightful catalogue essays, even if the works themselves often wriggle away from their words. Their biennial makes manifest this avowedly transitional moment, one characterised by nostalgia, myth-making, a Gothic sensibility, an interest in adolescence and the importance of work from the 1960s and '70s as sources mined for inspiration.
David Altmejd's fantastical, ghoulish work embodies many of these tendencies – an installation consisting of cadaverous werewolf bodies and heads decomposing into bejeweled, crystalline forms, displayed within and upon a room-sized, tomb-like platform qua architectural model. I can't see how this goth grotesquerie, a self-contained alternative world fastidiously devoted to its kitschy cult(ural) references, has anything to do with Sol LeWitt or Robert Smithson, as its current caretakers claim on morphological grounds. But its committed, almost solipsistic alterity is a prevalent artistic mode in the exhibition, one that seems to have a sort of talismanic function for its devotees, among which one could include a range of otherwise unrelated artists – from Ernesto Caivano and Zak Smith, both superlative draftsmen (there are many in the exhibition) engaged in epic efforts to detail their respective worlds, to the multi-sensory aesthetic trip of the collaborative assume vivid astro focus. Think of the cosmological ambitions of aretalogists like Matthew Barney or Henry Darger and you've got the structural paradigm.
It must mean something – something alarming – that politics hardly has a walk-on in the exhibition. If September 11th resonates, it's not overtly apparent, notwithstanding Julie Murray's filmic aestheticisation of 'towers of light', the temporary memorial at Ground Zero. If America's sorry state of affairs is a problem, that's hardly made visible, although there's plenty of discussion in the catalogue, where Susan Buck-Morris's contribution is particularly interesting, and the reprint of Smithson's depressing thoughts from 'The Artist and Politics: A Symposium' of 1970 seems all the more relevant today.
There are a handful of overtly political works in the exhibition, most notably a biting, multi-screen critique of the United Nation's by Marina Abramovic (Count On Us) and Emily Jacir's Where We Come From, the highlight of last fall's Istanbul Biennial, here presented in modest, truncated form. Hung in close proximity to these, in what seems the political sector of the exhibition, are Andrea Bowers' drawings based upon photographs of women's protests of the 1980s and Sam Durant's of civil rights protests of the 1960s. Some form of political engagement can be read into lots of works in the exhibition (Velvet-Strike's hacking of a violent multiplayer Internet game to offer messages of peace, for example), but it's weird that Bowers's or Durant's drawings (or Durant's large-scale light boxes that reproduce protest slogans from these drawings) pass for 'political' in this context. Mary Kelly's reconstruction of a photo of the May 1968 Parisian protests in lint harvested from her washing machine is even stranger.
If artists are concerned with critiquing the world – and there's no reason they bear any more responsibility for this than the rest of us – then propriety, obliqueness and modest ambition appear to be the guidelines. Better to just do your own thing – the idea of changing the world seems foolishly utopian when your own sub-cultural fantasyland is a potentially realisable alternative. (Is that the blague of Charles Fourier's inclusion in the catalogue?) 'How, then, can community be maintained in the context of that expanded individuality?' asks Shamim Momin in her essay. The majority of works in the exhibition beg that question. Few provide viable answers.
If the macro view troubles, one can nevertheless enjoy a preponderance of fascinating, accomplished works installed with great attention to neighbourly relations throughout the three-floor promenade. Cecily Brown's Goya-esque black paintings hold their own against a grand confection by the always formally inventive Laura Owens. Back from the Istanbul Biennial, a grand work by Julie Mehretu presides over a beautifully serene room I'd subtitle 'the unnatural landscape'. Tam Van Tran's undulating abstract reliefs, Cameron Martin's ice-cold landscapes, and another Mehretu are the setting for a peculiarly affecting sculpture by Erick Swenson of an albino young buck shedding the velvet from its antlers on an artist-fabricated oriental rug. Recent Fred Tomaselli paintings, which seem increasingly impressive, are positioned as thematic precursors to the psychedelic installation of assume vivid astro focus, and the impressive bloodbaths of Barnaby Furnas, prominently hung by the central elevator bank, are flanked by Velvet-Strike's antiviolence counter-intervention off the adjacent stairwell.
The inter-generational mix works well, with David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Paul McCarthy, Richard Prince and others included as dynamic, relevant inspirational sources. But it's that younger generation of artists, born in the mid-1970s, many of whom are embroiled in the music and performance scene, that best indicates the searching anxiety, disconcerting detachment, and subcultural devotions of this transitional moment: David Altmejd, Cory Arcangel, Sue de Beer, Slater Bradley, Aïda Ruilova, Banks Violette. By turns delightful, chilling, lyrical and bathetic, it's their work that makes the 2004 Biennial so disturbingly on the money.
Joe Hill