Thursday, March 1, 2012

Omnipresence, Overdrive

Elisabeth Sussman at the media preview (speaking for herself and co-curator Jay Sanders): "We share a common problem. We know exactly what we want to do, and we want to do everything all the time.”

Everything is just about as hard to do as Nothing. Together they form a daunting dialectic, a binary of either total presence or total absence, total immersion or total negation, the one essentially necessitating its opposite. It seems a reasonable starting point for the alternate filling/emptying of a museum with images, sounds, light and action. With an emphasis on exploration and process, on film programs for each artist screened for one week, dance companies in residence for two weeks, itinerant musical and fashion performers, a polymorphous pursuit of recombinant activity, the 2012 Biennial exists on the heady continuum of Be Here Now/Be Here Never/Be Here Always. It's the Baba Ram Dass of exhibitions and would happily Catalog the Whole Earth if you let it. With artwork that generously bleeds into realms of the organic, the scientific and the encyclopedic, this Biennial is also the closest in recent memory to connote a contemporary Wunderkammer.

Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
February 10–May 1, 2011

February 10, 2011. In a bit of serendipity that is hardly lost on the Whitney Museum itself, the exhibition they just opened, of work from the collection of Emily Fisher Landau, is mounted in fourth floor galleries that already honor her name. The estimable Fisher Landau collection, totaling over 400 works, was pledged to the museum in May 2010 by their longtime trustee, who has also established an endowment for continuing support of the Biennial. The show currently on view, comprising just over 80 pieces, is assembled by Whitney curators Donna De Salvo and David Kiehl, and ranges from signature work by Andy Warhol, Edward Ruscha, Richard Artschwager and John Baldessari to a vintage 1980 Susan Rothenberg new image painting, a wealth of Jasper Johns screenprints, pristine early 60s works on paper by Agnes Martin, Carl Andre concrete poetry on typewritten sheets, Felix Gonzalez-Torres jigsaw puzzles, assemblages by Nayland Blake, photo portraiture by Peter Hujar and Nan Goldin, and an early Richard Prince nurse painting, to name but a few.

text: Whitney Museum press release

NEW YORK, August 6, 2010. An artist who defies classification, Paul Thek (1933–1988), the sculptor, painter, and creator of radical installations who was hailed for his work in the 1960s and early 70s, then nearly eclipsed within his own short lifetime, is the subject of an upcoming retrospective co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Carnegie Museum of Art. Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective, the first major exhibition in the United States to explore the work of the legendary American artist, debuts in the Whitney’s fourth-floor Emily Fisher Landau Galleries, from October 21, 2010 to January 9, 2011; it travels to Carnegie Museum of Art, from February 5 to May 1, 2011, and then to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from May 22 to September 4, 2011.

James Kalm appreciates the efforts of the Whitney Museum and celebrity curator Robert Gober and is thrilled to bring viewers this glimpse of Charles Burchfield's "Heat Waves in a Swamp". Although classified as an "American Scene" painter during the 1930s, Burchfield was a true visionary artist. Using the humble medium of watercolor, his interpretations of the landscape and rustic urban settings, vibrate with a hallucinatory exuberance. Whether forest, field or street Burchfield's vision was open to cosmic harmonies that could overwhelm with their intensity or sometimes disturb with disquieting sinister qualities. Includes extended statements on the artist by curator Robert Gober.