“Whitney Biennial 2010”and “Collecting Biennials”

“An Optimistic Biennial Year”

by Peggy Cyphers

The 2010 Whitney Biennial which opened last week, was a surprisingly optimist exhibition, partially due to the choices of the two curators, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, ...

 

but also due to its paring with the concurrent exhibition “Collecting Biennial ”on the top floor of the museum. The paring parallels the “of the moment” attitude of Biennial 2010’s fully loaded first four floors with the more cerebral weight of plumb choices (mainly men) from the museums holdings of works from past Biennials.

 

There is a theory in the art world that when the economy is down, the art world bears more evidence of the works of women artists. In 2010 Biennial, over 50% of the exhibiting artists are women, some showing stronger and with more maturity that others. Overall the show has an optimistic bend despite some “bad news” and tough subject matter. The political weight of past Biennials, with their blame game attitudes, is not as prevalent and what a relief. This show seems more revelatory in its politic stance, by posing solutions to issues current and highlighting the progress we have seen in areas of women rights, racial profiling, de-glorifying war and the uprooting of Capitalism’s “money grabber” mentality.

The transcendentalism we associate with early forms of American 20th Century art dominate the “Collecting Biennials” show. Barnett Newman holds a highly honored position here with the painting “The Promise. ” The title alone is emotionally vulnerable and a makes me a bit squeamish. Ad Reinhardt’s “Abstract Painting Red” and the Rothko “Four Darks in Red,” keep the poetic titles at bay but one can’t deny their references to transcendence.

 

In contrast, our 2010 Biennial purists are having none of the romance. Paintings by Suzan Frecon are associative of polished buffalo dung floors highly prized in Sri Lanka. Sarah Crowner’s sewn, zig zagged, b&w canvases are saved from being forgettable by their wrinkles. Tauba Auerback’s painted wrinkled images play with the look of street art spray paint, the visual vocabulary creating depth. The massive, seductive tapestry of Pae White is photographically derived from crimped foil and smoke, an eye candy piece monstrously heavy.

The romance of otherness has been re-labeled in the current Biennial with signs of clever process and form but without the mourning going on upstairs. These abstractionists never get messy like the de Kooning, (Landscape, Abstract) or Pollock (No. 17, Fireworks) or Rauschenberg (Satellite). Twombly’s “Untitled,” with its reference to language and the chalk board’s subtle grey- white imagery, gets closest to the post modernist vision of how American abstraction will evolve. Sherry Levine’s “Untitled (Golden Knots)” is the precursor for the appropriation that much of what the post-modernist trajectory of abstraction has its foundation on. Her format was not as commercially solid as the trajectory of Peter Halley, who is not in the Whitney show but has a stunning exhibition concurrently at the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea.

The drop dead amazing Edward Hopper piece “Early Sunday Morning,” on the 5th floor, isn’t just about that gorgeous sunrise illuminating the home town American street. Its about the quiet, you feel like you could hear a pin drop. Coming up to the almost empty 5th floor of the museum from the noisy opening downstairs, it struck me that quiet is an endangered species, regardless of whether you are a city or country dweller. Only the rich can isolate themselves in ivory towers with noise resistant glass or find a haven of county landscape that isn’t bombarded daily by low flying jets, highway hums miles away or construction. Vija Celmens cozy painting “Heater” is pleasurable isolationism.

 

There’s a quiet, intimacy of the hand crafted in many works in this years Biennial, specifically in works by Leslie Vance, R.L.Quaytman, Scott Short, as well as Julia Fish, Maureen Gallace, and Curtis Mann, except that the hum of the machine is not far away and is the starting point for each of these artist’s production. Vance’s press says that she makes a still life somewhat in the Dutch tradition and then photographs it and collages the photograph. From this she paints a high-resist painting which is all surface because the paint can’t soak in. (Like Peyton’s technique) This way of moving paint is sexy and intriguing to look at but all her pre-painting labor renders the paintings somewhat slick.

R.L. Quaytman’s paintings comprise a small room so the installation allows us to become immersed in the intimacy of the space and her process. They are clever inventions, protectively subtle and intellectually rigid at the same time. Scott Short’s large faux-intuitive painting that starts with a long evolution of Xerox degradations is slick on the surface, and compositionally “right.” It has that cool “medium is the message” quality, to quote Marshall McLuhan. Julia Fish’s interiors look photographically derived and have the same quiet, deadpan reserve we saw upstairs in the Sylvia Plymack Mangold painting “Floor With Horizontal Mirror.” Both artists use a minimalist strategy to hint at ultimately a Modernist expression. Maureen Gallace’s seascapes have that paint-by-number look that gives an edge. She uses carefully chosen brushwork to complete their deadpan dramas. “After the Dust, Second View (Beirut)” is an intriguing, grid format work by Curtis Mann. He cues visual experience to a mnemonic process, allowing his manipulated, painted photos to read as vibratory surface and only upon close examination the surfaces reveal their violent photographic subject.

Philip Guston should get an award for being in the most Biennials, 22 to be exact, and I can’t help think that he has influenced so many artists simply because he was always visible. As a painter only knows, we study his paintings surface from all directions; trying to figure out when the painting began and how the heck did he finally arrive at such a mysteriously evocative image. You just can’t unravel it, and that’s why we keep coming back. “Cabal,” on view on the 5th floor is no exception. It renders a highly psychological experience thorough the materiality of paint and simplified cartoon-like images, into an end-game question, into a reflection on the body’s mortality. In his famous film “A Life Lived,” Guston says we are all just “big dumb animals”.

In Biennial 2010, I like how Thomas Houseago’s monumental plaster sculpture “Baby” speaks to that idea of big & dumb. Nina Berman’s scary photographs of maimed veteran Ty get real with how big and dumb war really is. Another big and dumb is “Untitled (The Year We Make Contact)” by Piotr Uklanski; I enjoy it for that crazy, physical quality. David Hammond's wire, nappy coated sculpture "Untitled" offers the same materialistic enjoyment but with Hammond's signature critique of racial stereotypes Richard Diebenkorn’s “Girl Looking at the Landscape” upstairs, has that kind of self-reflection but more illustrative and decorative with its hopeful blue sky. Milton Avery’s “Sea Gazers” also on the 5th floor, has that philosophically meditative way, but his delivery, as always, is to delight with color any of the ‘bad news.” Allan McCullum’s painting installation “288 Plaster Surrogates“ is in your face obsessive, but the humor of his idea is comfort to all the painting purists. For Jim Lutes, human identity is floating in swirls of liquid mark making; the buried alive portrait might be referencing the insanity of most artists! Roland Flexner uses a sort of marbling technique in handsome small B&W abstractions that hint at detailed landscapes, and play the associative game that the human eye will always gravitate towards.

Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse’s sculptural wall works from the permanent

Eva Hesse installation 5th flr on opening night.

collection use absurdly complicated material constructions (and in the case Of Hesse, the poison resin fumes most likely contributed to her early death from cancer) that evoke mental obsession from the perspective of female artistic production. In Biennial 2010, Dawn Clements’ large scale drawing “Mrs. Jessica Drummond’s (My Reputation 1945)” with its crumpled surface, exposes psychological entrapment, in this case specifically that of a female. She appropriates 40’s and 50’s Hollywood film imagery of domestic spaces that are physically and psychologically claustrophobic. Hannah Greely humongous sculptural installation “La-La”, a surreal, discordantly detailed interior fragment, ironically overshadowed the view of Clements’s drawing.

The most heart wrenching series of photographs by documentary photographer Stephanie Sinclair, entitled “Self Immolation in Afghanistan: A Cry for Help” allow us to witness the up-close, personal despair of women who self-mutilate when in profoundly isolated, abusive situations. (Like caged birds in lonely confinement, who gnaw themselves to a state of suicide)? Despite their graphic nature, there truth gave hope by creating a dialogue of awareness of current and historical violence that has been tolerated against women.

Lorrain O’Grady’s very hip installation tribute to Michael Jackson and 19th Century poet Charles Baudelaire, works into a somewhat documentary format their parallel lives, the ultimate suffering of a rags to riches celebrity along side the tortured existence of the wealthy aristocrat, a poet abandoned by his family. The vulnerable nature of artistic individuals and the creative genus has no race, gender or economic boundary. Kate Gilmore’s performance video sees her hacking her way out of a self-imposed, self created physical prison, but her artistic story has a happy ending. Gilmore’s shoe shopping video that the Whitney posted on their web site is just about as mindless as the Aki Sasamoto and Ari Marcopoulos videos.

Sasamoto describes a donut’s fate in a pseudo-scientific spoof on the digestive system, her video, simply put, is bad adolescent narcissism a la Nickelodeon. Ari Marcopoulos’s short is worse. It shows him playing a video game with the curator and is boring and the sound track horribly annoying. Also ridiculously insulting to the viewer is the sound bite the Whitney’s uses to get us into the 2010 videos, three hard (antique cash register?) machine type bangs, which almost seem appropriated from the hit TV series Law and Order’s familiar double bang.

Ultimately all of this Nickelodeon, U tube inspired shorts, posing as pop culture, is disrespectful and a turn off. The “too cool” attitude is bad company for the Whitney Museum of American Art. My advice to the Whitney is “just say no” to this adolescent U tube type of advertisement. Biennial 2010 and the amazing array of works in the show deserve a more appropriate web based introduction.

Peggy Cyphers website

Peggy Cyphers at 2010 Opening

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