Unmonumental

The Whitney Biennial is up and open to the public now, with showings at both the museum and the nearby 7th regiment armory building. This later is for site-specific installation works and live performances.
The main show at the museum features the works of younger American artists, and is almost exclusively the domain of sculpture and video. Despite the plethora of drawing, painting and mark-making going on in the outside world, almost none exists in the curator-driven utopia that is the Biennial.

The back-lash has officially begun.

Throughout the almost countless galleries of Chelsea, painting and drawing have been the dominant medium for a while now- and no wonder. They are saleable and portable. The market has been ripe to overflowing with collectors queuing up to by the works of young and established artists alike. There is a lot of work out there, not all of it particularly good or interesting, but it does fill wall space, and it does cost.
This, of course, led to lots of critical grumbling, mostly over issues surrounding quality of content.
Thus, there has been a shift, one that has been well in-line with the economic recession, to less commodifiable modes of art-making: performance, "conceptual" art projects using mundane materials, art that is neither transformative nor costly.

I am not against this: for a while now quantity has won out over content, and it has seemed shocking to me the extravagance of the artworld's outpourings given our own countries political climate and the fact that we are are engaged in a very ugly, controversial and expensive war.
Frugality and a more pensive mode seem altogether more appropriate for this moment in time. The glut of galleries, as well, the sheer mass of them right now is unsustainable for any length of time, and a paring down to the ones that are actually economically viable or are not market based seems only logical, and a bit of a relief.

Robert Storr's Venice Biennale reflected well this weight and pared down seriousness, though in an international arena. It also still included some drawing and painting, perhaps because Storr himself is a painter, or perhaps because it is just silly to exclude work on the basis of media. Painting and drawing are not responsible for irrelevant works of art to be clogging the current NY gallery spaces- artists, gallerists, dealers, collectors and curators are. The problem is at the production end- it is idiotic to turn on materials and media to stem the tide of excessiveness and banality. As the Whitney shows to good example, it exists in all formats, even video and installation.

Closer to home, a few months ago in NY, the New Museum inaugurated it's new downtown space to much fanfare with their show: Unmonumental. The exhibit is a large sprawling survey of international artists working with largely ordinary materials to construct seemingly temporary installations and sculptures. I was not a big fan of the exhibit, though I generally like this sort of work. In the museum setting it seemed pretentious and largely inaccessible to anyone out side of the art world. The architecture of the building dominated the show, and it all felt very elitist, which seemed at odds with the materials and precepts of the artist exhibiting. Another side effect was that it felt like way too much- so much actually looked so similar that it became boring, at least to my jaded eyes.


I confess I was grouchy at the get-go: I had eaten a mediocre and uncomfortable lunch at the museum cafe, which over looked a display of neon word art. The meal was spartan, expensive and pre-packaged. It was like dining in a very snooty airport. Then, Having waited for the elevator, took it to the top where we were deposited at some sort of reading room/ information site. This was an unexpected, but also uninteresting start, though I did like the display of kite-like sculptures floating above the table.


Having exited this area we found the exhibit, which has a lot of the usual suspects: Isa Genzken,
Sarah Lucas, as well as many I've never heard of. It was certainly a declarative statement from the museum, and daring in a way. The press largely adored it. This exhibit seems to have influenced the curators of the Biennial, or perhaps this is just the aesthetic-du-jour around here these days.


However,the Whitney show, by contrast, has none of the sizzle, elan, or slouching glamour of Unmonumental. Is that because it shows only younger Americans?
Unmonumental was filled with Europeans.

Is that what's wrong with the Whitney?


Sometimes it is not a question of WHO but WHAT they have on show: some of the participating artists have made compelling works in the past, but what was selected or made for this show just isn't that fascinating. This is really made clear by a look at the Biennial website, which has a page of images from all of the participating artists. Godd examples are Adam Putnam and Racheal Harrison, whose work in the Biennial is nowhere near as exciting as that shown on the website.

The show lies flat as a whole, and features lots of installations that look just like lots of other installations have in the past, and lots of cubicles for watching videos. I confess my tolerance for watching videos is pretty low, but these were my favorite offering of the Biennial- the most meaty, conceptually compelling and VISUAL parts were videos. That being said none did anything particularly new or innovative with the medium, most were in a pretty straightforward documentary format.


The Armory part of the exhibit was, over all, more FUN-meaning, more visually engaging. This was largely due to the fabulous Armory itself, with it's amazing, lavish rooms contrasting with the dilapidated and functional military parts. It's like an amazing haunted house, or as a friend remarked, the Bradbury building in Blade Runner. This made an effective foil for sound-works, installed objects and set-ups of all kinds. even the bar area was more fun, hipper, more relaxed.


Yes, I do think Biennials should be FUN, even if we are in sober times of reflection.

But sober and morality laden art was not really on the menu at the Whitney. This was a common complaint about the Venice Biennale: too much mortality, too heavy, too much death. This seems the order of the day to me and an accurate reflection of how dire things are in the world, so I'm fine with art that reflects that.
I am not really sure WHAT was being reflected at the Whitney.
I felt that it was meager, stale and dull. It made me re-think my caveats with Unmonumental.


Most of all, it made me think:
"Where is the drawing?"

Drawing is an affordable, accessible medium being used by artists of all backgrounds, economic and ethnic groups. It is not a big showy statement of wealth and taste like painting traditionally is, it is traditionally, the medium of IDEAS. It can be serious, playful, it can reflect left, right and center. There is A LOT of it out there, and yet it was absent from this show, this survey of US art now. Ultimately this says more to me about the curators minds than the state of the art in the USA right now. A sort of return of the repressed, with the specters of what was left out moaning and wailing to be let in.

The Whitney, on it's website claims that the exhibit : "characterizes the state of American art today". I certainly hope not.
As a cross section of the USA 's cultural output, this was one meager repast, and did not do a good job of reflecting our richness, diversity, politics, creativity and ingenuity.
It reflected instead the rather flat landscape of its creator's minds.

For a rather good review of the show by Holland Cotter, in the New York Times, go here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/arts/design/07bien.html

to look at Unmonumental go here:http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/3
to look at the Whitney Biennial site go to: http://whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=home
for more on the Venice Bienalle, see :http://www.labiennale.org/it/arte/