The high point of my visit to the Whitney Biennial last week had to be when one of the 3rd floor security guards convinced me to "accidentally" bump into Carol Bove's "Night Sky over New York," a work made up of bronze rods suspended from the gallery ceiling. After some hemming and hawing I did it. The security guard had been right: it made a beautiful, magical ringing noise. Why wouldn't it? It's a wind chime and should therefore chime. I've developed the theory that the security guard is actually a paid actor participating in the piece; this is a performance work that relies on the viewer to take a childlike leap of engagement with the work in order to complete it. How else to explain a wind chime located nowhere near any actual wind? That's my story and I'm sticking to it.



The Whitney Biennial is not a show designed for transcendence or epiphany. This is where most reviewers misfire. It happens to take place in a space designed precisely for those experiences (i.e., the museum of modernist design), but that's just a coincidence. The Whitney Biennial curators are always very clear that this survey is meant to "take the temperature" of the art world. Translation: to excavate and then codify that which has already been vetted by the gatekeepers of Chelsea galleries, the Times art pages, and the international art fair circuit. Nothing more, nothing less. Your stimulation is quite irrelevant. (Above, a favorite piece: Mika Rottenberg's "Cheese")



The 2008 edition paints a picture of an exhausted art machine. News Day's Ariella Budick calls it a "wasteland" in which "a sense of decline, decomposition, and chaos" prevails. Jerry Saltz has bemoaned the oppressive presence of 3 floors of "academic orthodoxy." Peter Schjeldahl meanwhile cites "impressions of a new, gray mood among younger artists." (above, 4th floor view, William Cordova at right, Mitzi Pederson at left)

Indeed, all exuberance, sex, and wanton irrationality seem to have been replaced this year by flaccidity and depressed sobriety. Look at a compilation of images from the Whitney Biennial 2006:



Now look at a compilation of images from the Whitney Biennial 2008:



Make up your own mind. A few other trends:

Abject Architecture
Artists used form architecturally, but with a consistent sense of failure and breakdown.

William Cordova at top of page, (l-r) Heather Rowe, Mika Rottenberg exterior view, Rodney McMillian, Daniel Joseph Martinez (with details; other plaques read "Central Intelligence Agency" and "Al Qaida")

Beautiful Video
The video works in the show often served as refuges of engagement, passion, honesty, and retinal pleasure. Mika Rottenberg's crazed, precarious shack (above) housed videos of women with fetishistically long hair, milking it, making cheese, and engaging in various irresolvable rituals. Javier Tellez had blind people feeling and then speaking movingly about an elephant. Omer Fast's 4 channel interview video of a soldier telling intermingling stories of a date gone horribly wrong in Germany and accidentally shooting an innocent bystander in godforsaken Iraq was a tour de force.



Rottenberg interior views and video, Javier Tellez; next row: Omer Fast, Edgar Arcenaux

People are Still Gluing Stuff to Paper
Um. Yep, that's still popular.


above, Adler Guerier, Frances Stark

Painting Limps Along, But Drawing is Comatose
Painting was rare and mostly represented by a few old heads. I can't think of a single instance of drawing, other than Stark above. All the reviewers I've read, however, consistently fail to identify Lisa Sigal as a painter. All the decay, wear, and decomposition in Sigal's installation is painted imitation--not real.



(above, l-r) John Baldessari, Robert Bechtle, Mary Heilmann, Lisa Sigal with detail

Meanwhile, Karen Kilimnik installed a little set of 3 paintings in a room with a chandelier. It was a sad little display. I wish she had installed them as theatrically as she did at the ICA in Philadelphia. See below for the Philly install:



Identity Politics Peters Out
In what might be the most diverse biennial since 1993, there were more overt references to gender than to race and more references to race than to nationality. But overall, there were few references to any of them, and almost no references to sexuality of either the hetero or homo varieties.

People Used Stuff They Found, Garbage Mostly
Jedediah Caesar casts studio debris in chunks of resin; Charles Long encases all sorts of trash, debris, and garbage in long, spidery plaster and papier mache sculptures that turn out to be 3D models of 2D stains made by the droppings of blue herons and white egrets along the L.A. river. I found them haunting, sad, and beautiful.


above, Charles Long with details

A Few Uncategorizable Projects that I Loved
Eduardo Sarabia's storage room of "tawdry contraband" that suggested travels to and exploitation of some banana republic as filtered through Andy Warhol. Leslie Hewitt's large scale photographs repurpose collective and personal memory.


(above, l-r) Sarabia, Hewitt

Walead Beshty's photographs of the abandoned Iraqi embassy in the former East Germany are made by passing film through the damaging x-rays of international airports. And his glass cubes are given their form by being shipped around the world and damaged in a box whose dimensions FedEx owns the international rights to.



above, Walead Beshty details

Although Henriette Huldisch and Shamim Momin began curating this biennial began over a year ago and the artists presented have been working in their modes for--in some cases--decades, the timing of all this decay and exhaustion seems somehow serendipitous. 2008 is the year of the subprime meltdown and the 5-year anniversary of a war that was officially over 5 years ago. 9-11 comes home to roost... again. Art falls away from engagement. Everything seems pointless and ineffective; why should art be any different? The artists seem to be running out of steam and at every turn are passing very bad judgment over the value of their own undertakings.

None of this is a value judgment on my part. If artists feel gray, then artists feel gray. There is nothing for curators, institutions, or critics to do about that but report it. If anything, there is a ray of hope here: a generation of the post-modern moratorium on value clears space for a much needed reset. We're free. The destruction of the old world contains the seeds of the new. There's reason to be happy after all.

Thanks for the pics - I read a New Yorker report on the Biennial titled "Lessness." I can understand the general mood of the Biennial - it makes sense to me. Lisa Sigal's work is incredible, and on purely aesthetic terms Beshty's work is beautiful (just conceptually a little too... I don't know... formulaic)

I had actually never heard of Lisa Sigal before running into her work here. You? It was pretty amazing stuff. And these pictures only show a small part of the entire installation. You walked in thinking, "just another anti-installation installation." But getting closer you see all this stuff created and manipulated in very tricky yet smart ways. As they say, you had to be there.

Yeah, there is some formulaic stuff there in Beshty. Process as content; yet another rereading of the high modernist grid/cube. It's a pretty good example of what Jerry Saltz was calling the "academic orthodoxy." But lately I've been trying to see around such things--as in, just because someone uses an orthodox formula doesn't necessarily mean the work must fail.

The photos up at Proclaim it Lost right now might be an example of working in spite of formula. After all, south of the Mason Dixon what's more formulaic than misty photos of decrepit structures? Can't say for sure since I haven't seen them "live and in person."