WHITNEY BIENNIAL – 2014
Whitney Biennials - no matter
how mediocre always intrigue me. This is not one of the great Biennials by far,
but the three floors that I saw were as varied as the interests of the
curators: installations were diverse as were the conceptual underpinnings. The
three Curators were Stuart Comer (Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at
MOMA ), Anthony Elms (Associate Curator ICA Philadelphia) and Michelle Grabner
(Artist and Professor at School of the Art Institute in Chicago.)
Surprisingly I ended up responding to the
sculptural works over everything else. My favorites include Sterling Ruby's
ceramics which had such a bulky presence that they stood out for their ugly
aggressiveness. I could not take my eyes off of them. Carol Jackson - an artist
whose work I did not know - had wall pieces that were gentler than Ruby's, made
of wood, acrylic, paper mache and inkjet prints, but their strength lay in an
eccentricity of form and surface which drew me to them from
across a crowded room. Ricky Swallow displayed small elegantly abstract shapes
cast in bronze from cardboard. They were ethereal as were Shio Kusaka’s
noble installation of ceramic bowls and jars. Terry Adkins, who tragically
died a few months ago – at the height of his career - exhibited “Aviarium” –
sound based artworks that were silent. He used wave vectors of bird songs and
translated them into 3-D, hanging high from the ceiling visually shooting out of the walls -
trumpeting the vigor and robustness of nature’s music. Sheila Hicks’ monumental
cascading colored ropes dominated the room she was in, as did her exquisite
small paper and silk thread “drawings” on paper. Ken Lum’s fictitious Vietnam-owned
shop displays, based on suburban shopping plaza signs, invokes the splendor and
irony of Capitalism’s marketing of desire.
Paintings took second fiddle
to other work. Dona Nelson’s two
sided paintings were pugnacious and intrusive – Karl Haendel’s graphite
drawings felt familiar though beautifully rendered with some formal quirks
thrown in. Keith Mayerson’s salon-style room consisted of over 20 years of work
– the range of resolution varied and that gave the paintings a directness and
honesty, which felt personal and
refreshing in an age of over produced and mechanical art. Mayerson’s
skills and observations were out there for us to scrutinize and we felt their
authenticity. The series was entitled My American Dream and included portraits of Annie
Oakley, Abraham Lincoln, James Dean, Louise Bourgeois and Keith’s husband and
family.
Writers, critics, archivists,
and philosophers took their place in the sun. Included were former Village Voice columnist
Gary Indiana who showed us that he too is an artist; Triple Canopy, a magazine “…that
encompasses digital works of art and literature, public conversations,
exhibitions, and books…”; Joseph Grigley’s collection of Gregory Battock’s
writings and ephemeral;
Semiotext(e) founded in 1974 produced 28 pamphlets introducing French
Poststructuralist theory to the U.S. and the notebooks that David Foster Wallace used to “compose
early drafts of The Pale King (2011) the novel he was working on when he took
his life in 2008.”
Julie Ault’s room included
interviews with and paintings by Martin Wong, David Wojnarowicz’s “magic box”
and Danh Vos’ clipping of the marriage announcement of Barbara Pierce to then
Lt. George Walker Bush. “…A range of voices, energies, artworks, artifacts, and
texts, all displayed as equal participants, invoke themes of disappearance and
regeneration and the notion that subjectivity is an integral dimension of
archiving and historical representation…” Lots of reading, if you want to take
the time, revisiting recent art history through the intellectual journals of
the time.
Photographs and videos
involved experimentation, collage and animation.The exception was Dawoud Bey
whose clear, moving inkjet diptychs “…pairing portraits of African Americans
the same ages as the victims of the 1963 [Birmingham Alabama] killings with
pictures of adults at the ages that the victims would have been in 2012…” were
rich in tonal and emotional range. I also loved Stephen Berens’ multiple photos
printed on top of one another sequentially - entitled 40 Views of Rome
resulting in deeply resonant images. David Robbin’s videos screening
commercials advertising contemporary art, which Robbins produces and buys time for broadcast are both hilarious and poignant. Zoe Leonard's camera obscura
piece was magical but on a bright sunny day would have been even more so;
today's cloudiness made the darkened (almost black room) hazy with the
mysteries of the outside world turned upside down in the space.
Scatter school strewn
installations are to be avoided and yes they are present, and now they have the
most recent technology thrown into the mix – but in 2014 felt very déjà vu. The
paintings of Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, Suzanne McClelland
and Rebecca Morris were uninspiring,
but I thought that was due to weak curatorial decisions as they are all strong artists. In contrast,
Louise Fishman held her own ground, and seems to have separated herself from
the 25th generation Abstract Expressionists that continue to spring
up all around, finding her own voice. Jacqueline Humphries also shone with two
luminous glittering works.
The 2014 Whitney Biennial is
a mixed medley but one worth visiting.
I always have fun, but this time nothing made me want to rush home and
paint.
