Whitney Biennial 06: An Afterword

Judith Rodenbeck and Trebor Scholz

The articles have been written and the doors of the Whitney Biennial are now closed.

It is an historical truism in cultural production that after World War II, but especially after the freedom struggles of the late 1950s and 1960s, to think of art along traditionalist lines as devoted to beauty (or even only to itself) became suspect. More pressing were questions of authority and interest, of exclusion and inclusion, and critical art practices took on such post-Duchampian topics as "Who conditions the context in which artworks are situated and by which they are certified?" Aesthetics for many became a productive problematic for art rather than a field delimited by notions of "the beautiful" as its proper expression; no longer attached to the ineffables of the beautiful or the sublime, a new aesthetics was, rather, addressed to the play of cognition and sociality. And this has been the case in advanced practices of the last 50 years.

Reviews of the Whitney Biennial of 2006, however, found much of the press up in arms about absence of beauty in the exhibition. (Though as Calvin Tomkins pointed out in the New Yorker, the one reliable thing about the Biennial, decade after decade, has been that Hilton Kramer will object to it on exactly these grounds.) Many critics writing about this Biennial juxtaposed the absence of the "pretty" with the presence of collaborative works, the latter understood as "political" sheerly by virtue of multiply-credited authors. But is collective or collaborative production necessarily a) "political" (whatever that means) and b) therefore un-aesthetic? (And is the "not-beautiful" necessarily the un-aesthetic? Kant himself wrote that the ugly could be sublime.) The question of beauty versus politics seems a smokescreen, or at least a critical misfire.

The question of beauty versus politics assumes that "beauty" equals aesthetics and does not equal politics. Yet the so-called "absence of beauty" at the Whitney (and there is plenty of beauty, actually) was not necessarily due to a presence of politics. In many of the works on view what was absent all too often was not only craft and precision and but historical consciousness; these were overtaken by (relatively) privatized narratives invested with semi-public anxieties--imagination for the "reality television" era. And even the "beautiful" paintings were more political in this show than the much touted but utterly dopey Peace Tower, which we can't even think of as "colossal" in its failure. Aside from its silly siting (for a real statement it should have been in the middle of Madison Avenue, blocking traffic and accessible to intervention) this nominally collaborative piece was clubby and the contributions, indexed together, came off as puerile and self- rather than message-centered, presenting as "democratic" and "free speech" something manipulated, in-crowd, and homogeneous. By contrast, working thoroughly within the art world and, unlike the Peace Tower, fully cognizant of that fact, the chocolate appropriations by Kelley Walker reinserted politics and a level not just of actuality but of contemporaneity into Warhol's race-riot silk-screens. Peter Doig's paintings also stood out. And the Francesco Vezzoli's Caligula trailer bears up over repeated viewings, becoming more and more sinister and hilarious each time; tired as it may have been after its trip from Venice to New York it cannot help but win fans.

Was there a different aesthetic that emerged because the show contained so many collaborative projects? While there were collectives like Bernadette Corporation, Deep Dish TV Network, and Critical Art Ensemble in the exhibition, the biennial was not a call for a collaborative aesthetics. The show merely acknowledged the fact that collaboration, cooperation, and consultation are important features of the contemporary cultural landscape. That such inclusion of collaborative practices or collectives "stretches conventional definitions of art and artist even further," as Holland Cotter claimed in the New York Times, is hard to fathom in 2006. Artists have not just discovered working together. Where were all those critics who suddenly discovered that artists collaborate (or even form networks)?

The post-readymade dialectic--between the display-as-art and the forensic trace--that seems to be driving much art these days was not only ever-present but seemed in fact to drive this Biennial, too, in both its selection and its installation, from the pairing in the Whitney's drab moat of the unfortunate Peace Tower with a visually and conceptually underwhelming piece by Natalie Jeremijenko and Phil Taylor to the installation of Francesco Vezzoli's Caligula-as-CSI trailer (complete with velvet cinema seats) nearby a popcult winnebago and alongside Ed Paschke's supremely good images of voyeurism. Forensic traces ranged from accumulations of data to arrays of painted mugshots (the 9/11 crew, dispersed throughout the gallery, anonymous artist) to photographic techniques (the brilliant "Left Behind" series by Angela Strassheim) to the list of desiderata for barter (Carolina Caycedo's art-by-telephone network) to faux pop star obituaries to the blobs of chewing gum stuck not only on specific works but also on random walls and artworks.

One might extend the notion of forensics towards the historical, for this exhibition presents a melancholic autopsy of the 1960s, from Walker's visually and conceptually smart riffs on Warhol to Otabenga Jones's strangely arid evocation of the Panther era. In one of the show-stoppers, DTAOT (Tony Oursler and Conrad, Dan Graham and Rodney, Laurent Berger, and Japanther) deliver an autopsy of 1960s hippie culture. While the satirical hippie opera touches on the artworld's imperative of youth, this is ported to the present and a certain bitterness is hard to miss. The biennial did not feature many works that we were crazy about. But works such as DTAOT's did counter the art world youth obsession and valued artists who are not the next big thing but have rather worked for many decades. More extrapolated still would be the repeated references to Warhol, Bruce Nauman, and Jay deFeo, all of whom serve as over-strong models for younger artists, along with the actual inclusion of 1960s bad boys Kenneth Anger, Tony Conrad, Ira Cohen and 1970s weird girls Sturtevant and Dorothy Iannone.

What exactly does historical consciousness do? We'd submit that it's here because that historical work emerged in an era with a serious political culture and discourse. Some of that historical work, looked at afresh, now gives forth its culturally critical secrets in a way that may not have been so clear then--the intensities of Ed Paschke's painting, for instance, or Tony Conrad's Flicker are striking. In this regard the strong and repeated citation in this exhibition of avant-garde music of the 1960s--work that dealt with liminality and limit experiences, with harmonics and the spatialization of the temporal, with collective production and experience--seems an interest, at least on the part of the curators, in exploring experiential models that have been obscured by the IPO frenzy of the art market. Yet so much of the reference material for today's young artists has been obscured in the pedophilic rush to the bank; artists reinvent the wheel, and usually not very well. And we live in an era in which mainstream popular music from U2 to the Strokes and the White Stripes has been largely devoted to the technical replication of the 1970s sound, while missing the radical experiential dimension of its production. One of the only chiefly-sound pieces, Jim O'Rourke's "Door," seemed to be largely opaque to its "viewers," who spent their time clustering at the entrance of the installation vying for the best static vantage point from which to watch a slow 3-screen projection rather than moving around and exploring the acoustic, spatial, physiological dynamics of the piece.

There were things in "Day for Night" to engage the masses (contrary to what some critics claimed), from the consistently narrative photography to the repeated citations of celebrity to the literal and figurative invocation of graffiti and bubble-gum. Visually much of the work focused on its own legibility, even lexicality. This had two aspects: the presence of language, either written or spoken, as keying device; and the predominance of figuration, either as bodily representation or as citation. One was struck by certain repeated motifs that appeared here, as if the individual artists participated in a hive mind (or mindlessness): the bunny puppet (recycled now through past works by Nayland Blake, Pierre Huyghe, and the film Donnie Darko and here present in photos of pseudo-Satanist ritual and in a pathetic knock-off of Schwitters' Cathedral of Erotic Misery), the phrase "eat shit and die" (it appeared in works by two different artists), the bottled excrescence motif (as perfume and as pickle), the apocalyptic desertification motif (from conestoga wagon to Unabomber hut to cities in the scrub to the subtle contribution of the Center for Land Use Interpretation), the apocalypse itself (not one but two works dealing with the Rapture), etc. The recurrence of individual riffs is interesting but irritating; yet more troublesome is their sheer obviousness.

Large exhibitions are 3D visualizations of the social network of the curators and the artists (and gallerists and curators) they know. Curators are legitimizers and editors of cultural content; they can be power-brokers. But what Chrissie Iles and Walker Art Center deputy director Philippe Vergne did at the Whitney was much more open, and clearly not about the articulation of a singular vision. If anything, it seemed clear that the curators had in mind an exhibition of something other than the single-author marketable artist: Reena Spaulings and the Wrong Gallery are complex projects; Sturtevant, and her redo of Duchamp¹s career, has always been difficult; and the Center for Land Use Interpretation produces no saleable object. Yet the institutional commitment here seemed inconsistent.

The biennial recognized the multiple roles that artists take on today, including that of the curator (Maurizio Cattelan's Wrong Gallery). But it was hard to overlook the crowding of the floors (including the Wrong Gallery¹s contribution, which made that crowding an aesthetic gesture). Curatorial decisions behind juxtapositions in the exhibition were often hard to figure out; there were perhaps just too many pieces in the show. (Globe and Mail: "What a bloody mess.") Often the juxtaposition of works appeared nonsensical; in other cases, such as the decision to place Jutta Koether's installation of pathetic disco-black panels next to the work of one of her historical models, Steve Parrino, the combined result was a deeply desultory slog. There were a number of collaborative works, but this show was hardly "long on" collaboration. The very few new media works were only awkward visual addenda to the spectacle of the styrofoam graffiti Stonehenges; sound from one installation leaked over into another (we were uncertain for a long time if the Paul Chan piece was supposed to be silent). The screen-based work by Carolina Caycedo used the computer as documentation device for a mobile barter project. Her piece and the superb work of The Center for Land Use Interpretation are hidden away in the maze of the exhibition. Squeezed into corners near an exit, overlooked by most, was their computer kiosk featuring the organization's 30 exhibits and many critical lectures, tours and publications on various uses of land over the past 12 years. CLUI's contribution to this biennial, one of the two working computers in the entire exhibition, documented their research and art initiatives. The computer kiosk served as archival apparatus. The performative artwork itself could not be shown.

At the same time, some of the more politically charged pieces were stashed away near toilets, the museum's gift store, or the stairwell, or neutralized by curatorial sequencing. While this might have been a self-conscious curatorial attempt to enliven the margins, it became especially painful with Deep Dish TV's very confrontational and amazing presentation of guerilla documentary, which was, ironically, placed between the knick-knack stands of the museum shop and the banks of toilets in the basement. If anything, this biennial fueled suspicions about the isolationist artworld and the new morphology of the white cube. The display of Richard Serra's Abu Ghraib protest poster as an oil drawing alongside Monica Majoli's gorgeous-and hyper-aestheticized images of intense bondage (and across from a bathetic photo-memorial to Matthew Shephard) runs serious risk reducing it to an object of what Susan Sontag called "fascinating fascism" discharging the political force it had when it was distributed as a multiple, its original display form. And Jerry Saltz, writing in the Village Voice, pointed out that only 25 percent of the individual artists on view in the Biennial were women. This seems lame and weird in 2006; while the nod to identity politics in the exhibition was strong and clear this actual gender imbalance nevertheless indicates that the Whitney is still fighting the battles of the late 1960s--another argument for the inclusion of all that "historical" work.

Biennials are easy targets and every biennial gets ritually trashed. Berlinale, Liverpool Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Havana Biennial, Sharjah International Biennial, the Texas Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, Capetown, Kwangju, Sao Paolo.... Every larger city seems to have its own biennial these days. Phillip Vergne himself pointed out that "there are now over 200 biennials in the world." New York itself has another biennial (the Free Biennial) and the Whitney Biennial even has a critical clone of its website. This rich landscape gives an event like the Whitney Biennial much less of an exclusive hold on cultural capital. Whitney director Adam Weinberg says that the museum has been rethinking its mission as a museum of "American" art in a number of complex ways. As for the Biennial, would it be possible for any show to be an adequate survey? We don't think so. Either you'd get something radically incoherent--an "adequate" survey of art activities using, say, a statistical model of distribution--or you'd get something coherent--a possibly adequate survey of a specific tier, arena, or niche of art activities. The curators acknowledged the limits of a best-of national biennial by expanding it to a more international focus while narrowing its thematic orientation. "Day for Night" juxtaposed internationally circulating artists, familiar from biennials worldwide, with others who had not shown in museums before (but don¹t lack gallery representation). At the same time, a topical show like this biennial cannot be simultaneously a signature survey, and the decision to turn "Day for Night" into a thematic exhibition was fortunate given that the concept of the Biennial as national survey has outlived itself.

And then there's a broader set of definitional and technical problems: the media art scene, for instance, is still only awkwardly incorporated in such museum spectacles. If one holds this biennial to its expressed mission of being the "signature survey measuring the mood of contemporary American art" as its website states, then one may wonder why a significant part of the contemporary art landscape is left in the dark: digital art, or what some call "new media art." The show highlighted video works (32 artists featured videos) and demonstrated a strong focus on photography (17 artists working in that medium were included). Is the demand for inclusion of new media art unfair as the inclusion of computer-mediated work was so clearly not the set goal of this exhibition? Are conferences, media art festivals or art + technology spaces such as Transmediale, the Subtle Technologies Festival, the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA), or the Beall Center at University of California Irvine the only venues in which computer-mediated artworks can rock out, isolated from the rest of the art world? Or do "new media" simply need new venues? The problem is amplified by commentators who, like The New York Times' Carol Vogel, don't acknowledge the existence of anything but traditional media when stating that "There will be a fairly equal representation among mediums: painting and sculpture, photography, film, video and performance."

The relative absence of new media art is striking for two reasons. First, the contemporary experience of those visiting this exhibition is deeply enmeshed with technologies and the Internet going far beyond TV or cinema screens. In 2006 it is hard to ignore the wealth of cultural production in the field of new media. The current explosion of art projects dealing with social networking (Golan Levin, Chris Barr), information visualization (Casey Reas, Lisa Jevbratt), or situated locative technologies (Julian Bleeker) is impossible to overlook. Second, the Whitney has a history of committing to computer-mediated art practices. In 2001, the museum put on two exhibitions: "BitStreams" and "Data Dynamics." The Whitney Museum also features the "Artport" website, a hub for "new media art," which is programmed by Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts Christiane Paul. The larger question is why able curators like Paul are not more central to institutions like the Whitney. They should be at least consulted when curating high-budget exhibitions that set out to represent the American contemporary cultural landscape.

It isn't interesting to say the Biennial is not a good survey. But it is worth noting that we are so painfully aware of this fact these days. In the not-so-distant past artists not from New York had a terrible time getting into the show. This year there's a cracker from Texas, lots of work from California, photos from the Midwest, etc; the curators are both European and the linchpin exhibit, Pierre Huyghe¹s film/installation on the groundfloor, is by a Frenchman. Another, more probing question to ask about these exhibitions is to what kind of cultural capital a show like the Whitney Biennial bestows on works, be they single-author objects or collaborative and multi-author projects, and how does that capital get used? To what degree do we need empathy and shared insight into particular art discourses--that is, accumulated cultural capital--to "appreciate" the aesthetic when we see it? And more broadly, to what extent is the aesthetic itself as a category begging (yet again) for redefinition--or, perhaps more to the point, revectorizing? Will Deep Dish Television suddenly acquire cultural cachet and a fat endowment? We doubt it, but if it did it might be a useful thing, beautiful or not.