Less is more at 2010 Whitney Biennial
David Adamo, Untitled (Music for Strings), 2009 (Installation view, N.O. Gallery, Milan). Wooden stage, harp strings, nylon string, copper and brass fittings, wooden cane, wooden shavings, dimensions variable.
David Adamo’s whittled-down canes, which can be seen on the third floor of this year’s Whitney Biennial, could be taken as a kind of symbol for the exhibition in its entirety: a familiar object that attains a more poignant and poetic form through a process of reduction. With a greatly diminished roster (half as many artists as in 2008), a comparatively modest floor plan, and, most importantly, a greatly reduced sense of self-importance, this year’s Biennial demonstrates that common sense looks good, even on a top-tier New York exhibition.
The take-home message is that the art-world arms race is, for now, officially over. Bigger and faster is no longer better. The recession has finally settled in at the highest levels of the art establishment. If 2006 and 2008 were about the market crash and the anger, confusion, and fear that accompanied it, then 2010 is about what happens next. Curators are starting to note what was being made when the bubble burst, the market collapsed, and the sky came tumbling down. Who was still making art? The people who kept their cool. And that coolness comes through in the work, much of which is moderate in scale, self-reflective, and demonstrates a willingness to continue where the art-historical conversation left off.
I was surprised by how well the Biennial captured what I consider to be the feeling of our particular moment in time. Not quite optimism yet not exactly pessimism, it’s a certain kind (the best kind) of indifference—the spirit of artists and artworks that continue independent of their immediate political, social, or economic circumstances. Curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari attribute this directly to the election of President Obama, claiming in the show’s catalog that his “reassuring and inspiring” presence has “allowed people to focus on their intimate concerns again,” and that “traditional forms of protest and resistance were no longer needed as in the years before….”
Alex Hubbard’s Annotated Plans for an Evacuation seems to speak on this level. Calling upon our collective memory of recent natural disasters and our fears of the vague doomsday scenarios climate change and terrorism seem to promise, this 7-1/2-minute video shows a man making a series of bizarre alterations to a Ford Tempo in preparation, we assume, for its use as an escape vehicle. Yet, in this narrative, Hubbard trades in calamity’s standard emotional/political baggage for a simple, even humorous, take on the private politics of survival. Betraying neither anger nor resentment, the protagonist displays only an unflappable willingness to move forward.
Ari Marcopoulos, Detroit (still), 2009. DVD, 7:32 min. loop. Courtesy Ratio 3, San Francisco.
Ari Marcopolous’ Detroit illustrates similar tenacity. In this video, two young men skillfully play noise rock for what the catalog calls “an audience of family and friends.” The show, which takes place in one of the performer’s bedrooms, is shot in a casual, home-movie style. Detroit portrays a kind of art that persists despite difficult conditions. It speaks, in Holland Cotter’s words, “of life beyond the art factory.”
Taking this ethic to heart, the Biennial presents works that could be made in modest studio apartments, filmed in garages or on street corners, or cobbled together from industrial surplus. There are a few spectacular exceptions: big, expensive-looking things that belie significant logistical and temporal means. But these works, despite their individual merits, seem incongruous with the exhibition as a whole, like the last of the dinosaurs hulking about among the emerging mammals. Piotor Uklanski’s Untitled (Monster), for example, is a work that, despite its tremendous material sophistication and appeal, seems overblown in this context and in danger of being overrun by smaller, more mobile, and more adaptable works.
Despite the Biennial’s success in describing the mood of our current historical moment, I would, as an honorary Southerner, be remiss were I not to mention that it comes painfully short of providing a census. The suspicions of regionalism with which many have viewed the art establishment are, in this exhibition, absolutely confirmed. Jerry Saltz’ claim that the show “isn’t New York-centric” is a little surprising since a full 60% of the artists exhibited (33 out of 55) live and work in New York, NY. Artists from Los Angeles and Chicago account for 17 of the remaining 22. In fact, only two of the artists in the exhibition live in the South: Vietnamese-American photographer Tam Tran (Memphis, TN) and Alabama-born painter Verne Dawson who splits his time between Saluda, NC, and … you guessed it, New York, NY.
Of course, criticizing an otherwise successful curatorial effort because it isn’t inclusive enough of a particular geographical zone smacks a little of its own kind of regionalism. I will then, in the spirit of the 2010 Biennial, set aside these kind of macro-political concerns for the time being and get back to enjoying the show.
The 2010 Whitney Biennial will be on view through Sunday, May 30.
[...] definitively red, and no artists from Georgia were selected for this year’s Biennial, where 33 of 55 artists selected live and work in New [...]