Installation view, Whitney Biennial (2012)
Looking
back at the time in which I was beginning to study art, one could describe the
motivations I shared with my peers as generally aspirational and humanitarian.
We felt different. We wanted to change the world. We thought of the institution
of art as a discipline in which alternative personalities flourish, critical
thinking is lauded, and that creativity (in all of its various forms) is
esteemed far more than financial privilege. Having participated in the art
industry for a number of years, these ideas now seem not only naïve, but
provide a blueprint for precisely how the art world does not operate; our
collective wills becoming inured to the faux-radical, contradictory reality
that the institution of art exists in today.
On
the occasion of the 2012 Whitney Biennial, Andrea Fraser writes of the crisis
of the art institution, ?The glaring, persistent, and seemingly ever-growing
disjunction between those legitimizing discourses [of art]?above all in their
critical and political claims?and the social conditions of art generally?has
appeared to me as profoundly and painfully contradictory, even as fraudulent.?
Her essay for the Biennial catalogue ?There?s no place like home,? painstakingly
delineates what she perceives to be the impossibility of participating in the
institution of art in good conscience due to its compliant enrichment from the
increasing financial inequality of the last decade. Acknowledging the fact that
this inequity is precisely what art purports to act against, Fraser considers
possible methods through which this quandary may be alleviated. She posits,
almost fatalistically, that ?Certainly it is less painful to resolve these
conflicts symbolically, in artistic, intellectual, and even political gestures
and position-takings, than to resolve them materially?to the marginal extent
that it is within our power to do so in our own lives?with choices that would
entail sacrifices and renunciations. Even these sacrifices may be preferable,
for some, to the pain of wanting what we also hate, and hating what we also are
and also love...? Heady prose for a biennial catalogue.
Dawn Kasper
K8 Hardy, May
20th, 2012 at 2012 Whitney Biennial
Taking
Fraser?s essay as preamble, 2012 Whitney Biennial co-curators Jay Sanders and
Elizabeth Sussman have approached the nearly insurmountable task of surveying
the art of the last two years by symbolic rather than material means. While
Fraser?s essay wills itself to question the increasing intermingling of the 1%
within the institution of art, and the resultant ethical quandary artistic
practice currently finds itself in, the visual component of the 2012 Whitney
Biennial installed in the Breuer building does little to directly comment on
our current economic precariousness or the Occupy Movement. Instead, within the
Biennial itself we see implicit critique in the form of a litany of objects. As
leitmotifs we see a return to craft, the privileging of the visual over the
logocentric, a concerted concentration on queer art, a rejection of sophistry
in approaching disciplines peripheral to object-based fine art, historical
excavations of ?lost? artists, and the blurring of the roles of the artist with
the curator and even collector. Sculpture, performance, dance, film, video,
installation, and painting all make appearances here, and sensational ?size
queens,? as Jerry Saltz has put it, are thankfully absent.
At
first glance, the 2012 Biennial seems precisely the sort an ex-dealer would
curate, privileging works that are imbued with obvious signifiers of value and that
are, well, easy to collect: we see the craft-heavy, hand-strewn, colorful and
intimately scaled. Most of the modest 51-person biennial is installed as airy
?micro-exhibitions,? providing little formal interplay between installations spare Lutz Bacher?s existential ?Selections from the Celestial
Handbook,? framed pages ripped from what appears to be a monochromatic
astrological guidebook, interspersed through the Whitney?s entire five floors. Individual offerings seem
to come from a neo-Modernist viewpoint, highlighting the artist?s subjectivity,
which often seems located on the fringes of society. In turn, for an exhibition
that is charged with task of culling everything au courant, the Biennial seems resolutely old?we see no slick post-post-Minimalism, no text-laden PoMo. On
closer investigation, the Biennial unfolds as a profound reaction against the
proliferation of what the curators term ?art school art,? or the work of
hyper-educated artists rooted in pedantry as much as artistic production.
Though it seems strange, if easy, to return back to a Modernist modus operandi,
the Biennial seems critical by negation, rather than decisive by augury.
Werner Herzog, Hearsay of the Soul (2012)
Sanders
and Sussman?s most distinctive maneuver is their inclusion of several artists
who chose to mount exhibitions of other artists? work, often in an effort to
correct what is perceived by the biennialist as a historical wrong. The most
obvious and talked about is Robert Gober?s curatorial installation of Forrest
Bess?s abstract paintings, alongside photographs of the artist?s self-inflicted
surgeries to transform himself into a pseudo-hermaphrodite. Bess frequently
sent these photos to his dealer, Abstract Expressionist patroness Betty
Parsons, to be mounted in proximity to his paintings, from which she always
shied away. Having mounted a brilliant retrospective of the work of saturnine
American painter Charles Burchfield at the Whitney in 2009, Gober has
effectively cast his involvement in these projects as not simply a curator or
an artist, but as something in between, demanding at once the insight of an
artist, as well as the collaborative spirit and commitment to research endemic
to a curator. Gober has paved the road legitimizing such a practice for other
artists, such as Nick Mauss, who, along with his own work, installed etchings
and drawings from the museum?s collection that are all variably queer in
nature?ranging from the well-known Warhol and Ellsworth Kelly to the
lesser-known May Wilson and Eyre de Lanux?as his contribution to the biennial.
And curiously, lastly, when the documentary guru Werner Herzog was asked to
participate in the biennial, he sought to abandon his usual filmmaking efforts
and install the paintings of the generally forgotten seventeenth-century Dutch
artist Hercules Segers (c. 1590?1638), a contemporary of Rembrandt who Herzog
sees as the originator of Modernism. Titled ?Hearsay of the Soul? Herzog?s
biennial contribution consists of a five-channel projection of digital
documentation of Segers? paintings, which are set to an epic violin score
composed and played by Dutch musician Ernst Reijseger.
Similarly
unique in approach is the Biennial?s film program, curated by Light Industry
co-directors Ed Halter and Thomas Beard, who organized a mini-cinema for films to
be viewed in their entirety, rather than chanced upon mid-film as an
installation setting would facilitate. Says Beard, ?The way that film and video
tends to be exhibited within contemporary art contexts reflects a shift in the
way we've come to relate to information after the advent of the internet.
There's this suggestion that a mere awareness of something is tantamount to
knowing it in a meaningful way. Wandering through a series of video loops, what
we're often left with, unfortunately, is the museum as link dump.? Speaking of
his decision to install the film program to be viewed in a theater setting,
each film running from start to finish, rather than in a loop, Beard posits
that it?s the very function of the 2012 biennial to circumvent the
superficiality with which the contemporary art world often approaches not only
film, performance, dance, music, and theater, but also object-based artwork
itself.
Moyra Davey, Darling, 2011. Chromogenic print
Although
the Biennial was generously inclusive in its range of practices such as dance
and film, it only treads lightly in the realm of new media, unlike past
biennials such as that of 2000. Rather, the curators include an array of
arguably nostalgic, analog technology-based works, namely in the form of slide
projections or celluloid film. Luther Price?s late-90?s works take found 16mm
film depicting documentaries, as well as medical and family footage. The found
film is then re-edited and used as a material base in itself, for scraping,
burying, staining, etc. More redundant and pretentious is Lucy Raven?s ?RPx,
2012 (in progress),? a slide collection of calibration charts and test patterns
that supposedly act as a ?formalist genre,? but really just look like wallpaper-level,
colorful geometric abstract painting one would find in a hipster Lower East
Side gallery. While Raven?s project illustrates two principles?that the
calibration slide is a unique object solely existing to ?make you see better,?
and that the era wherein human beings worked in tandem with a technological
apparatus to enhance its performance has largely now passed?the artist does
little to reflect upon the significance of these phenomena on a human level.
When taking into consideration contributions such as Fraser?s that cut to the
heart of what it means to be an artist?as well as a human?in our economic and
political climate, works as indulgent as throwing together a bunch of pretty
old slides read as fluffy in comparison.
Nick Mauss, Material Studies, (2008-11) (detail).
Circulating
around the Biennial, I attempted to come up with a profile of precisely what
breed of art Sanders and Sussman react against. In a breakthrough moment in John
Kelsey?s catalogue essay ?High Lines (for Sick Bees),? he writes of an hollowed-out
?emo style? propagated by young contemporary artists that may dictate the art
of tomorrow. He writes, ??in regards to the function of blogs like Contemporary
Art Daily[,] MFA grads are making cozy, nice, unassuming, slightly frazzled,
handcrafted works that are designed to speed like bullets (but without hitting
anything). Artworks are improvised in relation to all the information that
flies through them. Like dream catchers.? We all know this kind of work: it?s
hypersalable, slick, obviously learned, probably shown in the Lower East Side. It
works just as well in a gallery as it could a showroom, and only lightly
ironically. It?s created to communicate how intelligent it is, and to be sold.
It?s nauseatingly shallow. It may be sold at auction in five years at 500%
profit, or the artist may disappear entirely.
There?s
something about this model?which works for writers and curators as it does
artists on all levels?that?s universally familiar as it is upsetting: those who
have learned to play the game and strategize are generally rewarded by
exhibition opportunities, commissions, gallery dinners, those
impossible-to-find entry level jobs, et cetera. Yet this modus operandi that celebrates
strategy, money, power, and class, and disavows egalitarianism seems
existentially at odds with what we?re all here for: to look, and examine
closely, to generate ideas that examine why life is worth living, and to
attempt to understand with more gravity what it means to be a human being on
this planet. And while I?m treading in the dangerously reductive territory of
setting up a binary relationship between the ?good? subject and the ?evil?
other, there?s something fitting about such an idea in the harrying political
climate laid before us. To return to Sanders and Sussman, there?s a wholeness
that the biennial propagates, one that returns fine art to its primary impetus.
It?s refreshingly internal, sincerely rejecting the idea that art is simply a
luxury industry servicing a sea of unchecked egos. Yet, rather than looking
toward past, arguably outdated modes of artmaking, what are we to do with the
work of the present? It?s empty upon creation, and as Kelsey so aptly puts it,
so light that it zips through hands and time ?without hitting anything.? How do
we fill an artwork? To Fraser, the answer would lie in honest, engaged
discourse, and to Sanders and Sussman, time, compassion and dedication?all worthy
options on our path to 2014.
Marc Chagall
Chema Madoz
José Saborit
