Toured the Press Preview for the Whitney Biennial today. The show manages to ask a question I thought was more or less irrelevant by now – Namely: “Yes, yes, but is it art?”
There is an awful lot of Art Poverra… which only works in a context and when you have too much of it, everything just looks like junk. There’s also a lot of post-Barney dressing up in animal costumes with an emphasis on antlers… a lot of home video stuff and in contrast a lot of slick video that hearkens to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There’s also some hamfisted political art that makes you think that War on Terror(sic) may never end, if this is best our cultural elite can come up with to protest it. Oddest of all, is a small ghetto of black political art that has some great work, but seems oddly isolated and tucked away…. like well… like a ghetto. It comes off as condescending to both the audience and the artists, but no doubt someone meant well. There are these things and of course an awful lot of Neostalgia (I made up that word today and am feeling proud of myself). You come out feeling like you’ve seen most of this before, made by someone else, a little more sincerely. Still, it’s worth a peek. It’s always worth a peek. I hate it less than any Whitney Biennial I can remember.
Note on images:
If I was a good journalist type, I would’ve jotted down the artist’s names of the pieces I used, but frankly I’m a narccissist and was more just responding to my own needs. I was interested to find a reference to ahref=”http://www.fasnacht.ch/?pm_1=21&mid=21″>Fasnacht so I snapped that (there’s a few okay paintings in the show)… I’d been looking for a chandelier for the audience of skullz, so I was glad to find the high speed film (real silver film with a projector that whizzes and ticks… this biennial is all about film) of a chandelier spinning. I put it in negative for my gif, because I think it looks more interesting for my purposes… and well the bomb is just so wonderfully irresponisble that I can’t wait to see if it beats out Serrano’s Piss Christ for mandatory op ed controversy… and let’s face it, you can’t sell an art show these days without a scandal. So maybe on a second visit, or after some research I’ll give attributions … if you know, leave a comment…. The show does make me want to watch Truffaut again, but when don’t I want to watch Truffaut? And should a show on contemporary American art leave you thinking about French cinema and Duchamp?
-ITIN
(By the way, since I’m playing around with so many narrative voices these days, I’m going to sign things that are meant to be more or less in my own voice).