arts
Review
WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2008:
The “New (Art) World Order”
By Heather Corcoran
T
his year’s Whitney Biennial isn’t a
collection of great art. There aren’t
any apparent themes or stylish
trends, either. Together, the 81 artists
in the exhibition paint a very bleak snapshot of
the U.S.A. in 2008.
The bi-yearly survey of American Art, which
runs through June 1, fills nearly the entire mu-
seum. A chaotic installation by Jason Rhodes,
the L.A. artist who died in 2006, greets visitors
as it busts out of a small alcove off the side of
the lobby. Beads of Styrofoam litter a messy
office-cum-karaoke-lounge. It’s a good warm-
up for the rest of the exhibition, which favors
a cacophony of video and installation over the
traditional art forms that have dominated the
bullish market in recent years.
It’s not an easy exhibition to love – it’s messy
and, at times, ugly. Cumbersome installations
made of unusual materials fill the galleries, and
seeing everything is a daunting proposition. But
tucked within each corner of the museum are
the types of connections that reward careful ob-
servation.
Visitors are encouraged to begin on any floor
of the museum, or at the nearby Park Avenue
Armory, where the Biennial spills over into a se-
ries of installations and performances through
March 23. Curators Shamim Momin and Hen-
riette Huldisch offer no prescribed narrative for
their exhibition. It’s a “holistic enterprise,” said
Huldisch, meant to “unfold in multiple ways,”
Momin added.
At the armory, the audience is invited to
participate in everything from a dance-a-thon
to therapy sessions, in what feels somewhat like
a clever marketing ploy. The exhibition makes
the most of the armory’s creepy and recently
renovated corridors, with each artist getting one
room to transform. At the end of the cavernous
drill hall, a video of a forest by Mungo Thom-
son flickers in a tiny bunker. In a library off a
baroque hallway, MK Guth and her assistants
ask visitors to write down what is worth protect-
ing – before ritualistically braiding the responses
into plaits of long, blonde hair.
On its own, the armory’s performances and
installations would be a strong exhibition. As
part of the Biennial it seems like the freaky
sideshow to the otherwise coherent Whitney
main stage.
Back at the museum, there is no subtitle
and no concise theme to welcome visitors.
Rather, the curators offer hints of common
threads: mixed-up media, references to art
history, and studies of the topography of the
typical American city.
These themes are superficial, though.
In their own ways, each work in the exhibi-
tion speaks to the fear and nostalgia that come
with a pessimistic view of a country in the midst
of a war, an election and the technological age.
Together, the exhibition captures the apathy that
has come to characterize America today. We’re
clinging to a failed dream.
A sense of defeat and longing and even
disgust is everywhere. Today’s de rigueur pop-
culture references show up in Rita Ackermann’s
sculptural collages of tabloid icons. Hazy photos
of abandoned spaces are scattered throughout
the exhibition like whispering ghosts.
While politics mostly appears in subtle ways,
on video, it is loud and clear and most effective.
American xenophobia and indifference towards
other cultures seems to be on a lot of minds, like
in a video by Olaf Breuning, where an obnox-
ious white traveler can’t wait to get back to New
York.
The most powerful piece in the exhibition,
though, is also among the most overt. Omer
Fast’s video installation “The Casting” presents
the intertwined stories of a lover’s quarrel and
(Left) Mungo Thomson’s Silent Film of a Tree Falling
in the Forest, 2005-2006.
(Above) Walead Beshty’s Travel Picture Sunset
[Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in multiple exposures (LAX-
FRATHF/TXLCPHSEALAX) March 27-April 3, 2006],
2006-08. Collection of the artist; courtesy China Art Objects, Los
Angeles, and Wallspace, New York
a violent accident in Iraq, recalled by a veteran
for a Hollywood casting director. The overlap-
ping descriptions of confusion, frustration and
miscommunication become eerily similar. It’s a
good story, but who has the patience to listen for
30 minutes, Fast’s casting director says.
Another apparent source of artists’ angst is
the disappearance of nature, the artificial sup-
planting the organic. Phoebe Washburn domi-
nates the fourth floor with a mad scientist’s
laboratory where neon Gatorade feeds flowers
on a rustic wooden platform. A small part of the
installation’s (painfully long) title talks about a
“Deep Down Thirst.” That phrase alone could
sum up the entire exhibition.
All of the artists in this year’s Biennial seem
to be searching for something while quietly
screaming. Wandering the museum, you can al-
most hear them, like a chorus. We may be more
linked up and tuned in than ever before, but we
are seriously disconnected.
Resident The Week Of March 11, 2008 • 33