The Whitney Biennial — the survey exhibition of American contemporary art that takes place in New York every two years — is a bit like the Westminster Dog Show. It offers the public a chance to get an inside view of a usually closed-off, esoteric demimonde and, in the bargain, to see a whole lot of goofy-looking … er, dogs.
This year’s iteration, gathered by two young curators (Henriette Huldisch, 36, and Shamin Momin, 34), features the work of over 80 artists, of mostly the same generation as the curators. Would that the show were as cocky and peppy as youthful art should be. Instead, as critic Jerry Saltz notes in his review in New York Magazine, quoting the words of the curators, the works are “meditations on failure.”
This Biennial offers us — yet again — lots of darkened rooms containing looping videos with somber, droning soundtracks and fractiously self-conscious narratives. They all say more or less the same thing: Something bad is happening somewhere in the world or in someone’s head. For example, there’s Omer Fast’s 14-minute long film musing on two disparate tragedies — a young German woman’s self-mutilation and an American soldier’s accidental shooting of an Iraqi boy. Then there’s Mika Rottenberg’s “Cheese” (2008), which features a video of women who are said to have the longest hair in the world (does a 12-foot-long ponytail count?) as they fuss with it within the confines of a barnyard.
The static-object art (you know, that old-fashioned stuff that sits still so you can look at it) is often predicated on a “Wow, that’s sorta weird” insight, e.g. Amanda Ross-Ho’s gigantic replica of a cat litter box. It’s called “Inbox” — get it?
Most of the art in the show consists of installations that somehow look simultaneously abject (we’re talking polyurethane, vinyl, broken glass, papier maché, cardboard, lightbulbs, chainlink fencing, cement and wood studs) and privileged, as if they’ve been made by very advanced art-school students whose parents are giving them allowances that are way too large. At one point, while we were wandering through the show, my painter friend Kim commented, “There are enough two-by-fours in this place to build a McMansion.”
If you’re looking for single art objects made for aesthetic contemplation, you’re not going to find many. Most of the objects in this show are mere props for installations. And forget painting. The handful of paintings — there are maybe eight painters on the roster — seem like a half-hearted sop to “fine art,” and a perfunctory hedge by the curators against being caught out including no painting at all. In their seeming randomness (from the veteran photorealist Robert Bechtle to the cloying Ellsworth Kelly riffs of Joe Bradley), the pictures seem almost totally irrelevant — except for being poignant reminders that once upon a time, in the faraway past, people actually got something called aesthetic pleasure from looking at art.
If pushed, I probably could point out a couple of artists whose work possesses a bit of beauty, delight, or meaning. But what’s the point? Most of the artists in this show don’t seem to be aiming for those things. Nor do they arrive at them. The gestalt of the exhibition is one of fragmentation, disintegration, emptiness, and occasional degradation. Mostly, it’s about fatigue. The effect of seeing the show is one of mild displeasure coupled with a desire to head straight to Crate & Barrel, where you can at least see some shiny, handsome goods pleasantly arranged.
Because it’s a show by and for young’uns, Saltz notes, it inevitably reflects the worlds of YouTube and MySpace. To me, it announces the arrival of a post-Emo generation, where one’s personality is defined by whatever pale and weak neuroses one suffers, and young people make only limited and temporary life decisions about as little as possible.
The 2008 Biennial argues, in effect, that young, up-and-coming artists are making art whose subject is the meaningless of making art. Because art by nature functions at least in part as a mirror of its times, these artists reveal they are epigoni lacking convictions about anything — political, philosophical, aesthetic or otherwise. Without belief, who can build form? Art collapses from within, and we’re left with only a funky, dystopian shell.
