Whitney Biennial ver 1.0 Midnight Dusters

The Whitney Biennial, ver 1.0

Wednesday I attended the less glamor more clamor, second, "artists'" opening of the Whitney Biennial. My first impression of the exhibition was that it was almost unbearably arch, clever, cold, soulless and ultimately depressing. I hated it. The focus of the show seemed to be very much about "issues" that the art world seems to care about, not all of which are formal, but which seem to have little relevance in the world at large (witness Matthew Day Jackson's handmade, kitsch-owl commanded covered wagon with its bonnet of sewn-together state flags and undercarriage of rainbow colored flourescent tubes.) Not to be outdone, the worst work in the show was a series of large fake monoliths by Dan Colen. Giant (6 feet or so high by about the same in circumference) gray zoo-rocks covered in chewed gum wads and graffiti rest on 6" high wooden triangles carved to spell out "phrases from the street" like "eat shit and die". Everything about the objects themselves is overly precious and, like the art direction for West Side Story, completely removed from the physical reality of its ostensible subject matter.

I did enjoy having the opportunity to revisit some old favorites, however. Kenneth Anger's 2005 video Mouse Heaven is a delirious meditation on Mickey Mouse, made even more strange by the fact that Anger, now 78, is the experimental filmmaker of the occult, though the sinister overtones of the film (and it's maddening soundtrack by the Proclaimers) were completely lost in the din of the opening. Troy Brauntuch's mesmerizing white conté on black cotton drawings were a singular point of arcane beauty. Rodney Graham's film Torqued Chandelier Release was a disappointment, if pretty, but the projection apparatus used for the installation was magnificent--I spent my time watching it instead. Paul Chan (whose name is mysteriously absent from the Whitney's website, hence lack of title here) presents a video installation (projected onto the rough flagstones of the Whitney's floor) of a black and white animation of telephone wires, birds, and rising detritus moving against falling bodies. That image, people jumping to their deaths from the burning buildings, was the most horrifying from September 11, 2001. Ever since Warhol the art world has had a complicated relationship to disaster imagery; more often than not the aestheticization of this kind of imagery renders it mute and thereby perpetuates a second offense against its victims. Artists like Kelly Walker, whose re-presentation of Warhol's riot imagery covered with chocolate, shrilly and heavy-handedly decry the ability of media images to have a real impact on a public so saturated with them, but Chan's installation refutes this: those pictures of suicides are so indelibly burned onto the collective retina of New Yorkers, at least, that a subtle and intelligent artist can use their power in a way that is quiet, truly poignant, and devastating.

Peter Doig's much anticipated paintings were shockingly old-fashioned.

Less devastating is the continued presence of "rock art". Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's Sweat Glands is a large video projection of a lady rocker playing a guitar around a monolithic amp. Maybe it's a 2001 reference? Who cares? Trisha Donnelly, a performance/installation artist from San Francisco, presents a big room with one panel of silver plastic curtain streamers from the middle of the room, a very large Marlene Dumas-ish ink on canvas of a naked woman on one wall, a silver swiss ball, perhaps a mirror ball? and a collection of shabbily-made flat-black wood panels with "abject teen" notes pinned to them. I wasn't present for one of the unscheduled performances, which are inteded to "disrupt the temporal logic" of the exhibtion".

I watched the Francesco Vezzoli trailer for Caligula.

I was embarrased for Richard Serra.

The Sturtevant installation remaking 12 of Duchamp's readymades made me realize that we have a crisis in graduate art programs that really has to be addressed.