Whitney Biennial 2008.

Weil, Harry Jacob

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY March 6 * June 1, 2008

This latest Whitney Biennial, perhaps the most lackluster in years, is enveloped in an air of serenity prayer. The prevailing mood seems to be one of recovery, as if past mistakes were taken on board and the whole process of choosing and exhibiting artists altered accordingly. So in comparison to its predecessors, don't look here for what is hot or up-and-coming on the national scene. There's a lot more space, fewer artists (thank heavens), but all at the cost of exhibition values teetering uncomfortably between so-so and so what. And even if this low-key approach seems a deliberate strategy this time round, it will still disappoint loyal Biennial watchers who love to hate the Whitney no matter what.

Shamim M. Momin and Henriette Huldisch, the main Biennial curators, manage to put together a well-structured show that despite its lack of a cohesive theme--much to the delight of those who carped at the 2006 "Day for Night" installment--presents a large conglomeration of young, at times innovative artists, even if one might secretly agree with Peter Schjeldahl's comment in The New Yorker that, "Two decades of academic postmodernizing have trailed off into embarrassed silence." But this apparent reluctance to play the radical card is the very thing that won't sit easily with most art critics and enthusiasts. This solemnity precisely contradicts the blockbuster mentality displayed by many of the Whitney's competitors (Courbet at the Met, Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim, and "WACK!" at P.S.1), allowing the Biennial to triumph for doing absolutely nothing at all. As if to echo Georg Buchner's sentiment that, "The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world," so the untitled Biennial's civilized restraint may prove a saving grace after all.

NY Times critic Holland Cotter describes the Biennial as being essentially about "a recession-bound time." And indeed, it is hard to say much more about the 74th Biennial. It is the slightest in recent memory, with only 81 artists, finally giving the exhibition some breathing room (certainly compared to the last installment's rather claustrophobic squeeze). Many of the artists have even received their own mini-gallery, providing an intimacy that was previously lacking. Yet the show still managed to fill three floors, with various installations in the lobby, outdoor garden, and small first-floor gallery. A series of events and performances also took place at the Park Avenue Armory during March.

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Critics have pointed out that this Whitney succeeds in presenting, not necessarily new talents, but new, site-specific works, adroitly avoiding, as Cotter says, "edited recaps of gallery seasons." As Momim bluntly states, "We wanted to include a broad range of work that feels particularly resonant within the current context. But this isn't a survey of any sort. It's more open-ended than that."

This more conciliatory and moderate tone is clearly evident in Matthew Brannon's installation of a near-dozen Letterpress prints encircling a draped faux-window, a cartoonish depiction of the New York skyline. Making visitors feel as if they are in a high-rise apartment, the artist's ironic commentary on consumer society and its anxieties comes across as eerily muted, further enhanced by two sound-canceling devices most commonly found in psychoanalysts' offices. Just above the door is a bookshelf well beyond the reach of the visitor, yet on closer inspection the books reveal themselves to be anonymous, devoid of individuality. The display ends with the excoriating words, "Is this really a job for an adult? Can you really speak of what you do without cringing? A grown man talking about his feelings."

Pointedly located next door is Alice Konitz's tongue-in-cheek reduxes of modernist furniture. Magazine Table (2008) is cobbled together from simple pieces of wood covered in metallic paper, with a pile of inkjet prints sitting on top. These inexpensive materials are a dramatic reversal of the industrial, streamlined materials used by the Eames brothers in their furniture, cleverly contrasting the front of the assembly line of American mechanical and cultural know-how with its kitschy, commonplace half-life. Raffle (2008), a hilarious send-up of Lotto draws, just blows around useless bits of clear plastic.

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In the center of Karen Kilimnik's pristine white room hangs an antique-style crystal chandelier, shedding a golden hue over four small paintings divided evenly between the walls. Ruffian, an Arabian horse at the side street near the bazaar, Marrakech (2006) depicts a horse decorated with a luscious red saddle. Its rough brushstrokes and vibrant color choices are reminiscent of Gericault's "Oriental" paintings of Arabs hunting lions. The castle great staircase, Scotland (2007) offers a Matissean exercise in kilted arabesquerie. As the artist readily admits, "Being so inspired by fairy tales, mysteries, books, TV shows, and ballets, et cetera, I like to make up characters myself as if I'm a playwright." Indeed, being a somewhat nested affair concealing multiple facets and sources, the Whitney's own press is correct in comparing it to a matryoshka doll.

Coco Fusco is a veteran of many past Whitneys, which notably included her 1992 Undiscovered Amerindians (with Guillermo Gomez-Pena), yet this time her exhibit seems mildly inadequate given a lot of other video work on show. Operation Atropos (2006), which coolly examines interrogation techniques and procedures, somehow fails to deliver on its patent reference to Guatamino Bay. Inviting six women to participate in her training program on the "psychology of capture," Fusco's video shows a cheerful group of yuppie-artsy women being ambushed in the woods by hooded men and eventually subjected to verbal and psychological abuse. The women sometimes even giggle a bit when accosted by the gun-toting men. Somewhat reminiscent of a TV reality show, all we are left with are the same didactic lessons fed to us by the media.

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The legendary Sherrie Levine's inclusion is similarly a bit of a conundrum. Beating the same appropriationist horse as she has for years, her reproduced "originals" come across as a joke that has been told too many times (unless you are one of her many collectors). After Stieglitz (2007), 18 pixellated lightjet prints, reproduces the famous photographer's Equivalent series of cloud photographs (1922-35). However, Levine's drab abstract renderings do little to "depersonalize and re-personalize" the originals (as the curators claim). Instead, their grid-like arrangement looks remarkably like a display of wall frames at IKEA.

Far more in the zeitgeist loop is Walead Beshty's series of chromogenic prints, photographed between 2001 and 2006 while visiting the new defunct Iraqi Diplomatic Mission in former East Berlin. They depict the decomposing building of a nation now engulfed by war in a country that no longer exists--or as Beshty describes it, "a displaced representation of the turmoil of the nation to which it is abstractly linked." But these are not just still lifes of abandoned offices with outdated furniture and litter strewn about, since the film Beshty used to shoot the building was damaged by airport security X-ray machines, making the result a hazy, uneven patchwork of reds and greens. In Travel Picture Sunset [Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in multiple exposures (LAXFRATHF/TXLCPHSEALAX) March 27-April 3, 2006] (200608), we see a lone typewriter atop an otherwise empty desk alongside shattered windows. The eerie red cast enveloping the image suggests Beshty has captured an apparition just as it is about to disappear. And just as the theme of disappearance seems to bind these photographs together, so it seems to be with the Whitney Biennial as a whole, which seeks to look beyond hitting bottom to some point where it might begin anew.

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