I've just survived three hours at the
Whitney Biennial press preview. And to tell
you the truth, I don't quite know what to
say.
I'd much rather write about the 1993
Biennial, four years ago, the one with the
fire truck parked out front, the machine-that-blinds-you in the lobby gallery and
the giant puddle of plastic vomit upstairs
(by Charles Ray, Chris Burden and Sue
Williams, respectively, all back for this
year's version, by the way). Now that was a
statement, even if everyone hated the show.
This time the Biennial is considerably more
soft spoken, much more eclectic, and
perhaps more thoughtful. According to
curators Lisa Phillips and Louise Neri, the
show focuses on the idea of artists'
cosmologies and the constant looping of
reality and fiction.
It's not a comprehensive survey, they say
right out. There's next-to-no abstract art,
except maybe counting Bruce Conner's black-and-white Rorschach drawings and Richard
Prince's computerized scribbles
(accompanying punch lines like "My best
punch was a rabbit punch but they wouldn't
let me fight a rabbit"). There's no
"factographic work," as Neri called the
kind of art that features lots of words on
the wall. And there's a distinct absence of
naked people.
Also, there's no political advocacy, though
there is political content, particularly
from black artists. I'm thinking of Kerry
James Marshall's paintings of kids playing
in city parks (Kerry is a great painter),
Kara Walker's silhouette scenes of a rowdy,
Brer Rabbit South (done life-size and
looking good), and the photo archive of a
fictional black lesbian filmmaker in pre-war Hollywood made by Zoe Leonard and
Cheryl Dunye for Dunye's film, Watermelon
Woman.
Watermelon Woman was funded by the National
Endowment for the Arts and attacked by the
right wing. "Jesse Helms called me flotsam
floating in the sewer," Dunye said, with
notable aplomb, considering.
But lets leave the serious overview to the
pundits and just take in some light
highlights.
String is popular. New artists include
Antonio Martorell, who has a beautiful map
of the world made out of tied white cotton
string by the Boriquen Laces workshop in
San Juan. Another new artist is Cecilia
Vicuna, a Chilean who's lived in NYC for
years. She has hung a black yarn web
shaped like a boat's prow overhead, and
posted a poetic fragment: "Our only legacy
was a net of holes but not even shields can
hold such emptiness."
Toys are big in this year's Biennial. Chris
Burden has made an entire model of L.A. out
of toys and props for model railroads. It
has a huge gallery all to itself, and a
guard keeps watch at the door to make sure
it doesn't get too crowded. This
Gesamtkunstwerk was done in the artist's
backyard, and is already sold to Austrian
Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. At the
press preview, every time I caught a
glimpse of the piece out of the corner of
my eye I thought it was a buffet. It was lunch
time.
Katie Schimert also made a miniature
mountain range out of tin foil. And Michael
Ashkin is present, with a toy-scaled desert
scene of a truck alongside a pipeline. He's
the Minimalist in this crew, despite the
work's literary roots.
Balloons are the stuff of art for Bryan
Crockett, who was just born in 1970. His
giant sculpture of balloons and latex hanging from the ceiling looks
like an Eva Hesse made of
sausage or Godzilla guts. Jennifer Pastor's
Four Seasons also is toylike. Using
fiberglass, wood and other materials, she's
made realistic, carefully painted "Think
Big" replicas of seashells, a moth and a
stand of ripe corn, and a smaller-than-
nature group of snow-covered firs. Both
these artists got juice.
Speaking of sausage, get ready for more
praise for Louise Bourgeois, who has a few
sexy stuffed fabric pieces and a tree hung
with clothes in her gallery. Don't worry
about getting old, everyone was saying, you
can be hip after 80. Her type of anal
biomorphism is also evident in the way-too-big table laid with little hard-looking
roundish knickknacks by Gabriel Orozco.
More to the point, what's the fun quotient
of this year's show? Scant, we would say.
There's Charles Long's room, a recreation
of the works from his installation last
year at Tanya Bonakdar, of sculptures with
earphones playing Stereolab and including
pink modeling clay for some 3-D doodling --
take a lump home as a souvenir. This work
is called Bubble Gum Station. I overheard
Charles telling Art TV about his water
cooler-Walkman sculpture. "You drink the
music in," he said, or so I thought, "and
later you piss it out." This piece is
called Bullop, Bullop.
And there's Jason Rhoades, with a gallery
full of brightly colored spackle buckets,
white-boards with writing, orange extension
cords, a smoke machine and turning disco
light and tons more junk. Especially
annoying at the press preview were the
other wretched scribes such as yours truly,
avidly taking notes on the accumulation.
Apparently, all this stuff can be parsed
metaphysically, like Joseph Beuys.
This piece, which he cleverly titles
"theater in my dick," is not new -- he had
a smaller version of the same thing in last
year's show -- and is smart-ass in that
trademark British way (even though he's from California.)
Its one redeeming
feature is the frequent references to the
`70s film "Car Wash," a fabulous movie.
But the funnest piece in the show is a
replica of Whitney Museum director David
Ross's original Marcel Breuer office. It
was made by Glen Seator, a New York artist
who doesn't show here much. He says it's
about presenting banal architecture as a
sculpture. Okay. But the fun part is that
the room is tilted up, at maybe 35 degrees,
and when you stick your head in the open
doorway the disorienting, dizzying effect
is incredibly palpable. Check it out.
Ilya Kabakov's hospital installation -- a
corridor with five or six rooms opening off
it, each with a bed and a slide projector
showing snapshots and earphones playing
homey narratives -- seems at first like
another illustration of the artist's
obsession with Soviet-style institutional
consciousness. Then I realized that Kabokov
says it's a replica of a kind of Russian
hospice that treated senility with slide
shows from the family album. Does this
really work, or is he kidding us?
When I first looked in on Diana Thater's
multi-channel installation of projected
video, Electric Mind, it was playing an
elaborate scene of a film crew trying to
get a chimpanzee to remember its lines. I
stuck my head in later and everything was
turned off, except two video monitors that
flashed words reading "A girl is a cat is a
mouse is a chimp," over and over. I liked
that.
Paintings, were there any? Three by Edward
Ruscha, one reading "Bloated Empire." Lari
Pittman's paintings, now focusing on the
city, are as fetching as ever. They're done
on "wood with attached framed work on
paper" in the upper right quarter. And Vija
Celmins had some of her night sky
paintings.
I like these things, but they're nothing
new, really. More apropos are Matthew
Ritchie's creation-myth paintings, which
combine a Matisse-in-camouflage hard-edge
pattern with sketchy, Tiepolo ink-wash
renderings of little beings and things.
They look like floating islands in the
cosmos.
Another less familiar name in the painting department
is Richard Phillips, who makes
big sexy oils of women's faces. His
Horizontal Blonde is one of the first
things you see in the lobby. You'll never
go wrong playing the babe card, I guess.
Look too for the ancestor paintings by
Annette Lawrence, who is from Denton, Tex.
They're dry and Duchampian and melancholic.
Oh, yeah, and Francesco Clemente has a room
of pastel drawings that show his usual
obsession with orifices and sex, such as a
woman's torso whose vulva opens to a sky
with clouds, or a man with an erect penis
about to do a Tinkerbell. I take back what
I said about "no naked people." I like this
work, don't get me wrong, but there's
nothing new about it.
Any sign of the abject? Yes, the women
curators haven't let us down. In the lobby
gallery is the first Biennial appearance of Paul McCarthy,
whose room-sized video installation is a
kind of Willie Wanker in the chocolate
factory. I have to admit, this stuff is
fantastic, and as funny as a loud fart. I have a theory in the works about flatulence and the patriarchal art economy. I'll have to write it down some day.
Finally, as the father of a 15-year-old, I
can testify that Sharon Lockhart's photos
of teens definitely echo the curatorial
notion of private worlds. They're deep and
melancholic and simple. Similarly are
Philip-Lorca diCorcia's "Streetwork"
snapshots of people hurrying down the
sidewalk, seemingly so casual and arbitrary
but each capturing what can't help looking
like "performance." It's so hard to make
interesting photographs these days that
advanced shutterbugs have stopped trying.
A show like this can't help but translate
some powerful works into museo-decor. A
case in point is the strings of light bulbs
hung down the lobby, presumably somehow
under the direction of the late Felix
Gonzalez-Torres.
The Biennial is sponsored by Beck's and is
open till June 1. There's more, go see it
for yourself.
And oh yeah, I want a Whitney Biennial
official tee shirt, made by Raymond
Pettibon, who has a giant drawing of a
locomotive hanging from the facade of the
museum. Written on it is "Simply the Truly
Human & Topsy Turvy." It's not funny, but I
still want a tee shirt.
WALTER ROBINSON is editor of ArtNet
Magazine.
