Whitney Biennial Makes History: |
by Robert C. Morgan |
Whether on the wall, on the floor and wall, or on ta-
ble tops, this genre -- at least in its material
manifestation -- has never looked so indulgent, so
bland, and so out of touch. Whether Chris Burden
or Jason Rhoades, the disquieting pretension and
hyperreal glut exceeds the limits of emotional
attraction on almost any level, ranging from
adolescent irony to anti-aesthetic excess.
Several years ago, I came to the conclusion that the
quality of an installation somehow had to match the
quantity of material, cost, and scale it was given. If
the equivalence was not there -- in other words, if
the amount of material, money, and scale given to
the work was out of sync with what the work
actually had to offer -- something was wrong. The
work was either ill-conceived or severely
overdetermined. As a reflex, one might consider
straightforward video installations as some kind of
solution. You could avoid the material clutter and
stick to the sensation of the image in a darkened
room. Yet the dematerialized counterpart to
excessive materiality exists on the same structural
level. The medium of video does not in itself make
the reality of viewing an installation any more
successful or capable of being received. Diane
Thater's piece is a clear example of a work that
suffers from the same confusion and technical
obsession found in Burden and Rhoades.
As for so-called "painting," I honestly do not under-
stand the rage over Lari Pittman's ultra-
convolutionary cyber-cartoons or the cynical face-lift
representations of Richard Phillips or the
academicized (Pollock-inspired) doodles of the
recent work by Sue Williams. All of these artists'
works reveal the end of a legacy that began around
1978-79 when Artforum started
devoting more attention to how the image of a
painting looked in print than what the quality or
significance of the actual painting might be.
In the case of Richard Prince, the faux-l'ecole de
Paris abstractions with stumbling post-Freudian jokes
captioned on the bottom -- presumably "to take the
mind to regions more verbal" (as Duchamp once
said) -- suggest a considerable conflict. Contrary to
whatever the non-intention of the work might be,
the real tension appears less a conflict between
language and image than a longing to paint a
painting that is more than a sign. This appears
augmented by a gnawing unbearable pressure
incited from within the marketplace to sustain some
vaguely deterministic Oedipal enigma where jokes
continue to persist as a most acceptable social
displacement.
There are some smaller, less attention-getting works
worthy of some real viewing time. One can search
out these rare jewels amid the omnipresent state-of-
the-art detritus with hastening glee. Examples would
include the ink blot drawings and prints by Bruce
Conner, the silver prints of Aaron Rose, the"desert
landscape" piece by Michael Ashkin, and the
incredible galactic (though small in scale) paintings
and related graphite works by Vija Celmins.
The effect of Celmins' work offers an overwhelming
satisfaction, a reverberation of thought and mystery
elevated to the level of profound feeling, an
authentic searching vision. The politics of fashion
are simply out of the picture. What replaces it in
Celmins' work is a sensory cognition transmitted
through the imagination, a private vision that speaks
beyond it, a vision where experience is not a matter
of cultural categories nor even a matter of privilege.
Instead Celmins reveals as intensity of meaning
through the most abbreviated effects -- a light
beckoning a sea of stars, a magnitude of energy
expressed as matter, a sign for humanity to watch
and to understand in order to go beyond the
economic limitations of exploitation and the naive
smartness that seems to be the origin of conflict and
incessant trouble and repeated tragedies. These
works are more than craft-like or technical feats.
The works by Celmins are a respite from the deluge
of the grotesque that occupies a good portion of this
exhibition.
If this Whitney Biennial makes history, its
noteworthy achievement will be the beginning of
the decline of "installation art" as a viable art form.
This would be a blessing -- and there is certainly
plenty of evidence in this exhibition to make the
case. Media and excess are two issues that have
been overdone to the gills. We don't need another
comment about what any intelligent person already
knows: commercial television and now the com-
mercial internet have become fundamental sources
for escapist violence, anti-erotic sexuality, and
orgasmic purchasing power. What else is new? The
result is the grotesque. And there is plenty of it
around. The galleries are consumed with it. If only
a few of its practitioners who are so fond of the
grotesque would sit down for a moment and study --
really study -- why first-rate artists like Louise
Bourgeois and David Lynch make it happen in a
way that is truly moving, the art world would be reju-
venated. You have to know something to make
something happen, and knowledge is much more
than the accumulation of codes and
information.
Perhaps there should be a study guide instead of a
gallery guide, a manual for how to differentiate
between art and the empty plethora of visual culture
that exists as a mindless sequence of political
solipsism. Now that the imagination has withered
from the vine, we have the endless seduction, the
incessant and unyielding givenness of cathode ray
light and mega-RAMs surrounding the planet Of
course, you will find indications of these depletions
throughout the museum.
Generally-speaking, the Whitney Biennial has
become a "no win" situation. This has been true for
more than two decades, and I don't see it changing
radically for the better. As I have said before, the
Whitney Biennial is not an exhibition that is curated
so much as it is organized. All the right ingredients
have to be present, and these ingredients are
becoming more complex year by year. To say that it
is an institutionally-driven exhibition would be a seri-
ous understatement.
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