Published 24.05.2008
The idea of 'taking the temperature' of the zeitgeist conjures
images of rubber gloves and rectal thermometers. And yet people
continue to curate the Whitney Biennial. And for what? Which
biennials do we remember? Only those whose organizers seized the
opportunity to do something bold-1993, the 'identity politics'
biennial; 2006, 'Day for Night'. The rest flow together into a
stream that we dip into only for occasional checking of
professional bona fides- Was she in the biennial? How many
times? When?
The curators of the 2008 edition, Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M.
Momin, chose to make their bid for history by extending the show to
an exhibition space outside the confines of the Whitney's Marcel
Breuer-designed home in New York. Although recent biennials
(including those in 2002 and 2004) have made use of Central Park,
this year they chose the grandiose and mildly decrepit Park Avenue
Armory, a fortress built between 1877 and 1881 that occupies an
entire city block. The building's once ornate interiors are now
maculate with age; its halls and chambers display cloudy oil
portraits alongside the occasional bit of exposed brick and bear
now quaint, once practical, names like Company Room F, the
Commander's Room and the Women's Balcony. The Armory's most
pronounced feature is the enormous Drill Hall, a space that induces
gasps of wonder among New Yorkers used to cramped apartments: it's
the size of a football field with a vault eighty feet high. An
interior balcony is enclosed by chain link, and at the exposed
stairwells in the corners, the fencing is very quietly topped with
razor wire, an inexplicable detail that enhances the sense that the
building is negotiating its way back from the world of the
condemned. Which it is. A year and a half ago, a conservancy leased
the building from the state of New York for 99 years, and it has
raised over a third of the estimated $150 million needed for a full
restoration.
All of which is fascinating, or would be fascinating if not for the
way the Armory and its semiruinous state were deployed as part of
the premier event for art in the United States. Regardless of good
practical reasons for choosing the building (ample space, location,
location, location), what it lent the show was atmosphere, in the
worst sense of the term. The inversion of values ordained by the
shift from concrete and brutalism to crushed velvet and vaguely
campy, rundown neoclassicism evoked in the exhibition organizers a
mood of the carnivalesque but one that unfortunately failed to
advance much beyond a license to ill. In the Armory, art lovers
could experience a full-tilt funhouse version of bohemia: a
weeklong dance marathon that culminated in a 24-hour hoedown; a bar
serving artisanal tequila; fifteen-minute portraits by conceptual
painter Ellen Harvey; music gigs by the de mode Gang Gang Dance
and, inexplicably, the démodé Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black,
plus a very bad installation by its leader, Kembra Pfahler. (Why
her ass prints deserve inclusion in the biennial, and why recent
similar works by Nicholás Guagnini involving his testicles do not,
is a question open to debate. Guagnini's absence, however, does
bring up the noteworthy fact that the clique of artists surrounding
New York's Orchard gallery, and their like-minded Whitney Program
associates, were one of the bases left uncovered by the show.) The
emphasis on sleepovers/slumber parties-the culminating dance event,
an overnight screening of movies about various sorts of apocalypse,
a sleepover-with-soundscape organized by another mildly archaic
figure, DJ Olive-lent an infantilizing cast to the whole, and
abetted an overall defanging of site-specificity as an artmaking
strategy. Some artists did attempt to take on the building's
identity through references to war and militarism, but these were
either half-hearted or silly; the project by Portland, Oregon's MK
Guth, for example, which solicited viewers to answer the question
'What is worth protecting?' on shreds of red ribbon that were then
braided with human hair and webbed across an old library, smacked
of the worst of community art. And even this and like attempts to
couch the armory as a 'site', when it's really just a couple of
coffer drops away from being an ornate vacuum (that is to say, a
gorgeous exhibition hall) reflects the apparently inevitable clammy
grip of institutionality. Those looking for sitedness might have
been better served by turning their attention to the residents of
the shelter for mentally ill homeless women that the building very
admirably houses.
Back at the Whitney proper, meanwhile, the curators put up their
show proper. The juicy and the ephemeral were confined to the
'other' space (the Armory), while the 'serious' elements took their
places in the white cubes of the official edifice. In the museum,
under the banner of the theme 'lessness', you could see a lot of
architecturally scaled and derived work; a lot of video, some of
which was excellent (ranging from Spike Lee to Harry Dodge and
Stanya Kahn, Edgar Arceneaux to Olaf Breuning); mediocre conceptual
japes and occasional nods towards an idea of political or social
counterculture (Rita Ackermann, I'm looking at you). Some of the
object-based works were good: Sherrie Levine's exquisitely concise
Masks hung at the show's center, their eerie pregnancy
frozen in bronze, seemingly attuned to the fact that they were some
of the most generative works in the whole biennial. Rachel
Harrison, too, was at her hilarious and depressing best with an
ugly parti-colored sculpture whose DVD element projected scenes
from the Pirates of the Caribbeanfranchise in alternation
with footage of a sidewalk showman hawking vegetable peelers. If
the Armory served up ecstasy, a quiet note of nostalgia sounded
through the Breuer building, fulfilling a dichotomy as time-honored
as getting old and dying. On one hand, the failure of modernism and
utopianism-still the definitive aspect of the current era of
artmaking-plays through many works, by artists as diverse as Leslie
Hewitt, Fia Backström, William Cordova, Heather Rowe, Carol Bove,
Amie Siegel and Jennifer Montgomery. The presence of Ackermann,
meanwhile, signified a desire for something like a near past, of 10
years ago or the last time you got high, danced, and got laid; and
Adam Putnam's work (which I like) is somehow made to sigh more
heavily than usual. The most nostalgic work in the exhibition
(despite any claims to being about nostalgia) was a
wordless, two-channel, 16 mm-to-video, three-hour-plus opus by Amy
Granat and Drew Heitzler. Sumptuous and well paced, it preyed on me
despite my suspicion of it. Even James Welling looks nostalgic in
context, perhaps because his Torsos are so uncommonly
beautiful, and because they are blue. My favorite work in the
dystopian vein lay around the corner from them: Phoebe Washburn's
day-glo While Enhancing a Deep Down Diminishing Thirst, the
Juice Broke Loose (2008), because, consciously or not, it
cribs from the misbegotten genius of Mike Judge's film
Idiocracy in imagining a world of people so brainwashed by
corporatism that they water their plants with sports drink.
Overall, the museum felt cramped, despite the curators' choice to
reduce the number of participants to 81 (from the last outing's
berserk 101) and spread them across two sites. Perhaps the sense of
claustrophobia was a mere effect of contrast with the Armory's
roominess; perhaps it was a byproduct of the inevitable
difficulties of making one connection after the next between
artists not terribly in concord. Too, I can't help wondering if
Huldisch and Momim did in fact begin with a strong vision that was
diluted by an atypical curatorial structure: their work was
officially overseen by Donna De Salvo, the museum's chief curator,
and they received advice from the Studio Museum's Thelma Golden,
Bill Horrigan of the Wexner Center, and independent curator and
writer Linda Norden. All four of these advisors are exceptional;
but the scenario implies insertions and deletions, "suggestions"
that cannot but be taken, that could only muddle what it was the
two curators were trying to do. Perhaps better the pair had crafted
a disaster on their own than fail by committee?
But for all the flaws and successes of the main show, the Armory is
what will be remembered from the 2008 biennial. There, if the
median quality was low, the average was raised by the paradoxical
presence of some of the show's best works, which did take great
advantage of what the setting allowed. Matt Mullican and Michael
Smith both made discomfort-inducing live appearances, the former
subjecting himself to one of his grueling hypnosis performances and
the latter inhabiting his Baby Ikki character. And two excellent
works took place in near invisibility. In fact, for all I know,
Matthew Brannon's work might not exist at all, given the artist's
scalpel wit. His The last page in a very long novel is
described as a screenplay for a haunted house movie based on
recordings made at the Armory overnight; the script was then
purportedly buried inside the Armory in a secret location. The
piece less sends up the spiritualism and softheadedness that
pervades some of the Armory works (DJ Olive, MK Guth . . .) than
illustrates how a shred of phenomenon may become fiction and how
fiction in turn may become myth, with the hidden manuscript now a
seed for a future generation's loopy beliefs.
The other 'invisible' high point existed behind a hidden door in
the Commander's Room. In this doppelganger exhibition, the
design-art outfit Dexter Sinister set up a doppelganger identity
for itself, Sinister Dexter, which in turn doubled the Whitney's
press office. For a three-week run, they produced daily 'press
releases' available at the front desk in both exhibition venues and
online. These bulletins ranged from a discussion of pragmatism à la
Peirce and Dewey to a reprint of Duchamp's Blind Man issue
one, reversing the publication's color scheme; a criticism of the
show itself by Jan Verwoert to a (false) announcement of a
Batman-like, inverted Whitney logo being displayed in the sky via
Klieg light; and a wiki link explaining the 'hundredth monkey
effect', whereby, when a critical mass is reached, all members of a
group suddenly learn certain behaviors. While inversion and
reversal dominated as motifs, the project was a world apart from
the carnival that surrounded it, using the idea of a secret command
and information bureau operating hidden at the heart of the show's
'other' space to its full metaphoric potency. To find Dexter
Sinister's true intent, look to the project's title, True
Mirror, and to the 'true mirrors' that they installed in the
restrooms throughout the exhibition. In them, one sees oneself as
one is actually seen by others, not 'flopped'. The glimpse provides
the kind of disturbing and virulent truth that might unsettle one
into different habits, might produce something creative and
concrete, and with a sense of humor, too-something that might
produce a limited but actionable optimism amid the 'lessness'. For
bringing this project into being, the 2008 biennial, and its
curators may well deserve to be remembered.
- Domenick Ammirati
