This year's Whitney Biennial was the worst I've seen in my 20-plus years of attending, which I guess makes 10 versions.
At least part of the blame belongs to Jay Sanders, the show's co-curator and a director at a commercial gallery, Greene Naftali, through November 2010.Two the Biennial artists are in the Greene Naftali stable (Richard Hawkins, John Knight) --and neither are big-time-biennial worthy.
Another surprise, if not a disappointment, is the throwing out of the window the idea that the goal of the biennial--held at the "Whitney Museum of American Art"--is to showcase the best work being done by artists in the U.S. A good chunk of the featured artists are foreign-based--which is all well and good, but then let's change the mission statement ("the Biennial provides a look at the current state of contemporary art in America") to more accurately reflect this global reality.
While the sheer amount of low-quality work is hugely disheartening, especially compared to the triumph of the 2010 Biennial, there is one room that bats, if not quite 1.000, then around .850. It's on the third floor, and three of its four artists deliver some of the biennial's best work, pieces truly worth spending some time with. The work of the fourth artist who shares the space is a little pedantic and obvious, but at least it's very of this Occupy Wall Street moment.
The three (neighboring) standouts of this year's Biennial:
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| Nicole Eisenman, "Breakup" (2011) |
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| A sample of Nicole Eisenman's monotypes |
Nicole Eisenman, who shows with Leo Koenig, is one of the best painters applying pigment today, and this gallery (on the far right as you enter the third floor) offers a few dozen of her mixed-media monotypes (each one of which gets a thumbs up) and one full-scale painting (pictured, right).
The same room also features work that, based on the lingering crowd it was attracting on my visit, would be a top contender for audience favorite. Sam Lewitt’s "Fluid Employment" demonstrates the unique properties of ferrofluid, a mixture of magnetic particles suspended in liquid.
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| Sam Lewitt, "Fluid Employment" (detail) |
The material, invented by NASA, gathers into globs of black goo, with a Jello-like, quivering consistency, in the presence of a magnet.
Spread across a half dozen or so mats across the floor, the blobs (some in the form of what looks like a telephone cord), are gently activated by fans. The blowing air also speeds up the evaporation process of the material; Lewitt reportedly will come back each Sunday of the show to replenish the ferrofluid. The video at right (shaky; sorry) gives some sense of the material's motion and the work's size.
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| Luther Price slide |
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| Still from Bill Morrison's "Decasia" |
But the big, new discovery for me: Luther Price, whose handmade slides were a transfixing revelation. He uses mostly found film footage that he cuts up and reassembles; key to the art is the detritus that he also sandwiches between the two glass plates of the slide, embedding ants, flies and dirt onto the projected image. I couldn't pull myself away until I'd seen every slide--one of the best uses--and transformations--of found film since Bill Morrison's "Decasia" (2002).
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| Kate Levant installation (detail) |
The fourth artist in the gallery is Kate Levant, whose installation is made from scraps of buildings salvaged from a burned-down house in Detroit. Nothing spectacular here or original here, but the work at least has the merits of underscoring both the continuing housing crisis--and Detroit's emergence, thanks to ultra-cheap rents, as a hotbed for emerging artists.
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| Andrew Masullo "5030" 2008-2010 |
Before entering this area of the third floor, I happened to see first paintings by Andrew Masullo, work which briefly (by default) held the "Best in Show" title before I encountered Eisenman and Price. The bright, geometric canvases are hardly relevations, but after the onslaught of schlock that I endured before, these paintings came as a relief from the refuse that had preceded it.
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| A sculpture by Michael E. Smith |
Honorable mention: the sculptures of Michael E. Smith, debris-encrusted everyday objects which look like leftovers from a nuclear wasteland.
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