WHITNEY BIENNIAL 5/23/14

WHITNEY BIENNIAL – 2014

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2014Biennial/

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 25^th 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.