[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: May 12, 2008]
Is it just me? Am I done with contemporary conceptual art installations? But this is unfair; there are some works worth seeing at
There are also an awful lot of works where your main concern is not to tread on or trip over anything.
Much of the art at this Biennial is scattered about the floor, or shown in screening rooms, or built to the scale of a garden shed. So much for the easel and plinth.
No news there, of course. The Biennial, with a few gestures to figurative painting, is largely a concentration of the kind of art the NMCA on the Bowery is devoted to showing on an ongoing basis. In particular, sculpture or "installations" which defiantly reject beautiful materials, grace or monumentality. Which would be fine enough - and indeed, nothing knew (see Duchamp, as everyone obviously has) - if it weren't that the works so often reject just any kind of aesthetic appeal. Note: one really does still find panes of shattered glass, large monochrome canvasses, as if the work of Duchamp and Malevich needed to be repeated, again and again.
I have been a booster for the conceptual in art for years. But if a concept is worth expressing in an artwork (and most concepts can easily just be written down instead), it must, I contend, make an aesthetic as well as an intellectual (or usually just political) appeal. This doesn't mean it has to be grand or pretty: but it is required to have some value which attracts the eye (or ear); something which inhibits aesthetic attention from just sliding off the surface and wandering elsewhere.
Two large-scale installations seemed to me successful, partly because the sheer scale and generosity of detail offered much to enjoy. In an alcove just off the first floor, Jason Rhoades' "The Grand Machine: The Aureole" is a neon-garish blend of factory and porn studio. A nine-step production line is layed out, with clumsy instruction panels; there are boxes and equipment and materials scattered about as if the workers had just taken a quick break. Pearl roe foam litters the piece, like white tapioca. A poster of Marilyn Chambers. You can spend time walking around it, exploring.
The same is true of Phoebe Washburn's "Birth of a Soda Shop". More like a greenhouse than a store, this is an unresolvable collision of fragrant wood, golf-balls, folded towels and flowers. The work has a delicious aroma, and again you can stroll around it, peer at the detail, enjoy the playfulness.
An installation you actually enter is the log cabin by Mika Rottenberg called "Cheese". As angular as a building in an old expressionist movie, the path through the cabin takes you past video screens showing a group of women on a farm, preumably involved in cheese-making, but also obsessed with their fairy-tale length hair. I have no idea: but at least there are things to look at and wonder about.
I was amused, at least, by Shannon Ebner's "Sclupture Involuntaire" - simply a large wooden box, with the title of the piece scrawled on the open lid. There are a lot of involuntary sculptures in this show; this, at least, was an honest one. Among the figurative paintings, shuffled off into side galleries for the most part, I liked Karen Kilminik's "The Castle" and the delicate abstracts by Mary Heilman.
Leslie Hewitt's imaginative and misleadingly tranquil still lives, showing a few books scattered on shelves, dealt in a more subtle politics than the various rooms filled with terrorist slogans and newspaper headlines. I was disappointed that Melanie Schiff, a photographer whose work I already knew, was represented only by two or three pictures which I thought, by her standards, unadventurous.
Making my way around the show for a second time, I suddenly heard a voice I knew. A gravelly market spieler's voice: "They're made in Switzerland. They never wear out." Entering the gallery, the voice seems to come from Johnny Depp, a scene from one of the pirate movies being projected on the wall. Not possible. Closer inspection discovered a video within a video. Yes, the potato peeler salesman from the streets of Manhattan. A rich character, here a component in an art-work called "Sops for Cerberus." Why?
Time to move on.
The biennial runs through the rest of May: the Whitney's website is here.
