Easily one of the most important art events of the year in New York City, if not the entire country, is the Whitney Biennial, “the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States.” From its inception, the Biennial has brought new, young artists unfamiliar to American collectors and viewers to the attention of the U.S. art scene while at the same time displaying established artists side by side with the newcomers. Some of the best-known of the artists the Whitney Biennial introduced include Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Jeff Koons. It’s been known as a showcase for less well-known artists, including those working in unfamiliar media and forms. In 2012, performance art was presented for the first time.
Since 2000, the Bucksbaum Award has been given to an artist exhibited in the Biennial “to honor an artist, living and working in the United States, whose work demonstrates a singular combination of talent and imagination.” Established by the Bucksbaum Family Foundation, the award is a $100K prize, the largest award in the world for an individual artist. (The 2017 Bucksbaum winner was Pope.L, also known as William Pope.L, a visual and performance artist known for his “interventionist” street art. In “Art as Intervention: A Guide to Today's Radical Art Practices,” Julie Perini defines this as art that “disrupts or interrupts normal flows of information, capital, and the smooth functioning of other totalizing systems.”)
As the name implies, the exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American
Art occurs every other year, but when it began in 1932, it was a yearly event
called the Whitney Annual. In the 1960s,
the plan became to alternate each year between painting and sculpture, but by
1973, the idea evolved into a biennial show that combined both art forms and
expanded to all media. As the art world evolved
over the decades and visual artists experimented with new materials and forms,
the Whitney Biennial developed with it.
The 2017 Biennial, for example, in addition to paintings in a variety of pigment types on a
range of foundations beyond traditional canvas, included assemblage art and
installations, films and videos, and many different kinds of computer-based
creations from screen prints to digital recordings (both audio and video)
displayed on monitors to kinetic assemblages programmed by computer to several
pieces in which a smart phone was a key component to virtual reality creations.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a wealthy patron of the arts
and herself a successful sculptor, founded the Whitney Museum of American Art
in 1931. As an art patron, Whitney’s
interest was in new American art, focusing on the avant-garde and the work of
unknown artists. By the 1920s, Whitney
had collected close to 700 pieces of American art and in 1929, she offered to
donate 500 works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met turned down the offer and, noting
that both the Met and the new Museum of Modern Art, opened in 1929, were more
interested in European art than American, Whitney founded her own dedicated to contemporary
American art.
The museum, which began with a collection of 600 works, has been
somewhat peripatetic over the years. Its
original location was at 8-12 West 8th Street, between Fifth Avenue and
MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.
(Whitney maintained her own sculpture studio nearby on MacDougal Alley.)
In 1931, Whitney had three townhouses on
the south side of 8th Street converted into a museum. One of the buildings had been the location of the Whitney
Studio Club, which Whitney had established in 1918 as exhibition space for
American avant-garde art. In 1954, the Whitney Museum moved to a small
building at 22 West 54th Street, directly behind MoMA’s 53rd Street location,
between 5th and 6th Avenues; the museum’s collection had grown to approximately 1,300
pieces at the time of the move. (The
West 8th Street space is now occupied by the New York Studio School of Drawing,
Painting and Sculpture.)
When the Whitney outgrew the five-story 54th Street building, it
made another move further uptown—and to the Upper East Side, the Silk Stocking
District. In 1961, the museum began
looking for larger quarters and settled on a location at 945 Madison Avenue. The museum hired Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith to design and construct a
new building to house the collection and the new Whitney Museum of American Art
went up on the corner of 75th Street between 1963 and 1966, a distinctly
Modernist building in contrast with the understated, mostly Beaux-Arts
townhouses and elegant post-war apartment buildings of the affluent neighborhood. Nearby, however, along with the up-scale art
galleries of Manhattan’s established art scene, were the venerable, city-owned
Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 5th Avenue, between 79th and 84th Street on
the west side of the avenue in Central Park) and the stunning, Frank Lloyd
Wright-designed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1071 5th Avenue at the corner of
East 89th Street). The Whitney Museum established
a policy at its inception that it wouldn’t sell any art by a living artist lest
it harm the artist’s career; it will, however, trade a piece of an artist’s
work for another by the same artist, and by his time, the museum’s holdings had
reached about 3,000 pieces of American art; the museum began a collection of
photographs in 1991.
The museum continued to grow in the decades it resided at 75th and
Mad and it occupied a number of satellite spaces such as at 55 Water Street
(1973-83), a modern skyscraper in the Financial District in downtown Manhattan,
or the gallery established in the lobby of the Philip Morris International
(1983-2007), the tobacco company (later renamed the Altria Group), at 120 Park
Avenue at 41st Street. (After the Philip
Morris deal proved successful, the Whitney made similar arrangements with other
corporations to set up galleries in their headquarters lobbies in the 1980s: Park
Tower Realty, I.B.M., and the Equitable Life Assurance Society.)
Constantly short of exhibit space, the museum proposed several
plans for expanding its Madison Avenue home, but cost, design problems, or
local opposition always defeated them.
Finally, in 2010, the Whitney Museum began construction of a new
building in the far West Village, the old Meatpacking District that had become
a trendy spot for boutiques, clubs, restaurants, and new residential highrises.
Designed by Renzo Piano at 99 Gansevoort
Street at the intersection with Washington Street, the southern terminus of the
relatively new and very popular attraction, the High Line park (opened in 2009;
see my blog article on 10 October 2012), the striking, new Whitney Museum of
American Art opened in 2015 (less than two miles from its first facility on
West 8th Street of 61 years earlier, and a very pleasant 20-minute walk through
the Village from my home).
The $422 million new building rises eight stories (plus one below
ground) above the surrounding structures, both the old 19th- and early
20th-century ones, former warehouses and meatpacking plants, and the new ones
that have risen up in the past five or six years as the Meatpacking District
has become trendy and popular with the 20- and 30-something crowd. It also stands out for its appearance,
silvery-metal clad and angular with what look from a distance like turrets and
bulkheads, as if perhaps the superstructure of a great ship were being glimpsed
from dockage on the Hudson a short distance away. (Coincidentally, like a ship, the building is
deemed to be water-tight, part of its flood-abatement system, designed into the
plans after Superstorm Sandy five years ago.)
There are walls of windows and the ground-floor lobby space is
glass-enclosed. From a block away, the
glassed-in ground floor makes it look as if the building were hovering over the
street like a weirdly-shaped mother ship.
Piano told people at the opening, “The new Whitney is almost ready to
take off. But don’t worry, it won’t, because
it weighs 28,000 tons”! (I wonder if the Guggenheim had people making
such comparisons when it was brand new and never-seen-the-likes-before?)
The new museum, the first totally new museum building to open in
New York City in many decades, has 50,000 square feet of indoor exhibition
space and another 13,000 outdoors.
(20,500 square feet of gallery space is dedicated for the Whitney’s
permanent collection.) A staff of 300
keeps the place running. Besides the
galleries and the terrace spaces, the new Whitney houses a study center, a
theater, and classrooms. The lobby
encompasses the book store/gift shop, café, and a free gallery open to the
public.
The museum’s current collection contains over 21,000 works of
art. The still-viable Mad Avenue
building was taken over in 2016 by the Metropolitan Museum as the Met Breuer, a
satellite museum for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. Over its 89 years, the Whitney Museum of
American Art has exhibited the work of hundreds of artists, many of whom have
become prominent. Among these have been Maurice
Prendergast (1858-1925), Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Josef
Albers (1888-1976), Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), Man Ray (1890-1976), Stuart
Davis (1892-1964), Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Louise Nevelson (1899-1988),
Mark Rothko (1903-70), Arshile Gorky (1904-48), Willem de Kooning (1904-97),
Barnett Newman (1905-70), Lee Krasner (1908-84), Franz Kline (1910-62), Louise
Bourgeois (1911-2010), Jackson Pollock (1912-56), Robert Motherwell (1915-91), Richard
Diebenkorn (1922-93), Grace Hartigan (1922-2008), Kenneth Noland (1924-2010),
Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Andy Warhol
(1928-87), Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Frank Stella (b. 1936), Mary Heilmann (b. 1940), Bill
Viola (b. 1951), David Wojnarowicz (1954-92), Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957), Keith
Haring (1958-90), Lorna Simpson (b. 1960), and many more recent artists with
whose names and work I’m not familiar.
On Thursday, 8 June 2017, I walked over to the Whitney to catch the
78th Whitney Biennial before it closed on Sunday, the 11th. (The exhibit, the first Biennial in the
museum’s new home, had opened on 17 March.
Because of the move to new digs, the Biennial is a year late, the
previous installment having been in 2014.)
I hadn’t been to a Whitney Biennial since 2004 when my late mother and I
went up to the Mad Avenue location because Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama was
featured among the exhibitors (see my report on this fascinating artist, posted
on 18 May). When the Whitney announced plans to
build a new museum within my cruising
range (Mother and I had walked the High Line twice when she came up for visits,
made the rounds of the Chelsea art galleries, and shopped the Chelsea Market a
couple of times), we started talking about checking out the new place as soon
as it was open. (We had made a beeline
for MoMA back in 2004 when it reopened after a two-year redesign.) Unfortunately, we never made that visit: the
new Whitney opened on 1 May 2015 and Mother died on the 26th after nearly a
month’s stay in a Maryland hospice. I
had made plans for an earlier trip to Gansevoort Street a few weeks before the
Biennial opened to see the new museum, but circumstances scuttled those
plans.
Museum-going had been one of the activities Mom and I did together
when I visited her in Washington, she came to see me in New York, or we
traveled together anywhere there were museums or art galleries (San Juan,
Quebec City, Vancouver, Istanbul). ROT-readers will know about this shared pursuit
from my occasional reports on art shows that sometimes accompanied my theater
reports. I hadn’t consciously stayed
away because of the association with my mom—but it may have been subconscious,
and it was definitely a transitory sensation I noticed when I entered the
Whitney Museum building that Thursday afternoon. It wasn’t all that strong—I had a more powerful
feeling of missing something when a friend and I went to MoMA to see Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934-1954 in February 2016 (see my
report, posted on 4 March 2016). Though
checking out the new Whitney would have interested Mom, she’d have loved seeing
that Pollock show. Less than a year
after her death (and the first art show I’d seen since then), it was just the
kind of exhibit we’d have saved to enjoy together, and I never entirely shook that
underlying feeling of loss. At the
Whitney Biennial, though, the feeling passed as soon as I got up to the fifth
floor to start my walk through the art.
(I must add,
though, that seeing an art show by myself like that is an experience I’m not used
to. I’ll go to a play or even a movie
alone and be perfectly content, but art, while it can be enjoyed in silence,
really demands to be discussed—at least for me and, as it happens, for
Mom. We would point out pieces we
thought the other should see—we didn’t stick together in the galleries—or
compare notes as we went along through the exhibit. Afterwards, of course, we’d talk about what
we saw and what we got from it—and there’d always be the customary plans for a
“Midnight Shopping Trip”! ROTters
will know what that little private joke means: it shows up in all my blog
reports on art shows.)
Filling the galleries on the museum’s fifth and sixth floors
(including outdoor spaces), plus scattered pieces throughout the rest of the
new building, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and
Mia Locks, over a hundred pieces representing 63 artists. Though some of the artists are established in
the art world, none is a celebrity yet and half of the participants are women
or artists of color. (Both curators are
Asian-American.) The museum identified a
“key theme” of this year’s exhibit as the “formation of self and the
individual’s place in a turbulent society,”
and the art on display was decidedly political, and left-leaning, making
clear critical, and often strident comment on current American society and
culture. Locks elucidated:
It
became apparent that the idea of ‘humanness’ or what it means to be a human
right now was an energizing force for the show. Many of the works in the show address
interesting questions about how we view ourselves as human beings and the
forces that bring us together and the forces that bring us apart.
The museum’s own description of the exhibit stated that it “arrives
at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and polarizing
politics.” (Lew and Locks actually began
organizing the Biennial in 2015, when Barack Obama was still president and it
was presumed that Hillary Clinton would be his successor.) A lot of the work on exhibit in the Biennial
was created within the current calendar year and, though Donald J. Trump rarely
appears in the art directly (his name comes up twice), is obviously meant to
reflect the artists’ response to his election and presidency and his stated and
implied policies on art and culture. The
day before the Whitney Biennial opened, President Trump revealed his budget plan
which includes his intention to zero out the entire budget of the NEA and NEH
(the first time any president had proposed that). Adam D. Weinberg, the museum’s director, even
includes a statement on the Whitney website declaring, “The National Endowment
for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities . . . now face the
threat of being abolished” and affirming, “As an institution specifically
dedicated to presenting and discussing contemporary American culture, the
Whitney Museum of American Art feels a special responsibility to speak as an
advocate for the continuing importance
of the NEA and NEH.”
My general response to the show was that it was more interesting
than artistically stimulating. Part of
that reaction comes from the unremittingly political nature of the art, which
got repetitive in its intent after a few dozen works, and part—perhaps a
greater part—because I find the latest trends in art, encompassing the
21st-century offerings, unengaging. This
is not a new revelation to me: I noticed my coolness toward the newest art when
I went to that last Whitney Biennial in 2004 and it was confirmed when I first
went over to the then-new galleries in Chelsea, which began opening in the mid-1990s,
in 2011. By the 21st century’s second
decade, the Chelsea art scene had entered its adolescence when, as New York Times art
critic Roberta Smith put it, there were
mega-bucks,
big-box spaces on the same block as holes in the wall not much larger than a
walk-in closet; great work within a stone’s throw of schlock; older art
alongside the freshly minted; and blue-chip brand names across the street from
young and emerging artists or forgotten and overlooked ones.
I viewed early and mid-20th-century art (Picasso, Pollock,
Rauschenberg, Noland) right up against work by artists whose names I hadn’t
even heard yet. There were canvases,
sculptures, and installations, and the pieces to which I responded most were
the older ones—it seems wrong to call them “more traditional” since they were
the height of radicalism in their days; these were the guys with whom so-called
modern art got started! Still, the newer
stuff mostly didn’t move me. At the 2004
Whitney Biennial, which I explained my mother and I attended because Yayoi
Kusama was one of the artists exhibited, I had the same reaction to the new works—and even the current works of
Kusama, as exemplified by the 2002 mirrored-room installation Fireflies on
the Water. It left me rather cold. I don’t have a problem with political or
socially-critical art per se, but the work in that 2004 Biennial didn’t
have the social and political critical component that the 2017 exhibit had, so
it was even less interesting than this year’s show. But the 2017 exhibit was unrelentingly
socio-political and, as I intimated, that got enervating.
So, how do I evaluate my art experience
at the Whitney Museum this year? Well, I
found myself more focused on the media and techniques, the forms, of the art on
display than the content or even the point.
I noticed, for instance, how much of the art wouldn’t really work in
someone’s home. That, of course, may
have been the message of some of the artists—to create works that no one could
own, that could only be viewed and shared in galleries and museums and public
spaces. (Conceptual art, which started
in the 1960s, was adamantly non-commercial and often transitory as well,
defying both ownership and permanence.)
There were a large number of works, maybe even half of the show, that
relied on technology of one kind or another, especially recorded and projected
images. That was another trend I
spotted.
I also felt that most of the art at the
Biennial was, for lack of a more precise word, angry. (That was also ultimately taxing—it’s hard to
listen to people scolding, berating, and protesting constantly, even
if their causes are righteous.
Eventually, it sours the artistic experience.) Any artist
in the Whitney Biennial who expressed something positive or joyful about
our present time—and there are some, rare thought they may seem—was drowned out
in the cacophony of discontent and deprecation.
It also muddies the protesting artists’ messages because they just
become part of the shouting.
I’m deliberately staying away from a discussion of the biggest
controversy of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the painting Open Casket by Dana Schutz (b. 1976). As most readers will know, this was the
artist’s 2016 rendering of the broken and mangled body of Emmett Till, the
14-year-old African-American teen lynched in 1955 by a Mississippi mob after a
white woman falsely accused him of whistling at her, lying in his coffin. Schutz is white and black artists and other
members of the African-American community demanded that her painting, based on
a contemporaneous photograph, be removed from the show and even destroyed,
arguing that she could not possibly capture the true horror of Till’s murder or
the feelings of his mother (who ordered the open-casket funeral so the world
could see what had been done to her son).
First of all, the controversy, which turned bitter at times, has been extensively
covered in the press both in print and on line—not to mention social media; besides
the fact that I have no standing, I couldn’t possibly contribute anything more
to this debate. Second, my own feelings
are dichotomous and confused at this point—I understand and agree with some of
the points of both sides of the disagreement, but I’m also, as I’ve often
stated, nearly an absolutist on the First Amendment—so I don’t know what to say
in any case. Third, my focus here is my
overall artistic experience of the show, not one or two works on display.
By most
critics’ estimation, this Biennial is the most overtly political since the 1993
show, which I didn’t see but which was roundly criticized for its focus on
issues of the time rather than the art.
While the 1993 “political” or “multicultural” Biennial, as it was
frequently dubbed, generated lots of journalistic opprobrium, the 2017 edition
was met with general, not to say universal, approval and praise. If nothing else, it’s a testimony to the
turbulence of our moment in history and the virulence of the artistic response
to it. Schutz’s Open Casket was inspired, for instance, by the Black Lives Matter
movement. She has two other paintings in
the show. Elevator (2017),
which appears to be a comment on Americans’ inability to get along with one
another, shows a crowd of people in an elevator violently tearing each other
apart. (Commissioned for the Biennial, Elevator, which measures 12 by 15 feet, greeted museum-goers as they exit
the lift onto the fifth floor.
Co-curator Lew drew a connection to the museums large art elevator,
which also carries passengers.) 2017’s Shame is a depiction of a monstrously contorted
woman, a comment, I decided, on the
state of female self-identity in our society today. Women’s identities, that is, where they fit
in society, has been a serious issue at least since the start of the modern
feminist movement in the ’60s (with echoes reaching back to the Suffragists of
the 1910s and even earlier), but in the era of Trump and his macho-posturing
followers and imitators, it has clearly become much more problematic. (By extension, Shame can be interpreted as a comment on all gender-identity issues. I don’t know if Schutz meant that, but art
can have extensions beyond the artist’s intentions. After all, I’m a man looking at her painting,
so I’m bound to see things differently from her or a female viewer.)
Among
the sculpture, I found myself intrigued by John Riepenhoff’s Handler creations. This is a series of papier-mâché sculptures
of the artist’s own body (from the waist down), dressed in perfectly casual
pants and shoes, holding paintings or video art by other artists in his
hands. (One was identified as a piece by Allen Ginsberg—the late poet, I
presume, but I couldn’t confirm that. He
also installed The John Riepenhoff
Experience, a box in the ceiling of the gallery that was purportedly a
little gallery itself, but viewers has to stand in line to climb up a ladder
one by one to stick their heads into the box to see the exhibit and the line
was just too long for me to wait on it.
Reportedly, in the box gallery was a miniature reproduction of one of
Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored Infinity Rooms.)
It’s meta-art, a theme that ran through
the exhibit often as a sidelight to the other socio-political issues treated in
the Biennial: Riepenhoff (b. 1982), who’s also a gallerist, is combining his
two occupations by spotlighting the art of other artists.
Another
project about art, but with less of an homage air, was Debtfair, an installation by Occupy Museums. Formed in 2011 as an offshoot of Occupy Wall
Street, this activist collective shines a light on the economic and
social justice failings of the art world in its treatment of and dealings with
artists. Debtfair, the work of 30
artists, shows how artists have gone onto debt to the same corporations that
have created the art boom among the wealthy who use art as investments. (The installation centers on artists of
Puerto Rico, an island that’s in precarious debt itself and where poverty is a continuing
problem.) While the corporate
manipulators, who make up the majority of museum boards and the art-collecting public, grow rich from
buying, selling, and reselling the art at ever greater prices, the artists go
into heavier and heavier debt from which they can never extricate
themselves. (The CEO’s and board
chairmen of these maga-businesses that own the artists’ debt are in Donald
Trump’s circle, possibly some are even his friends. Given the art and culture proposals he’s
already made, and his thin skin when it comes to protests and disagreements,
it’s a chancy tack to challenge this class right now, I’d imagine. I guess we’ll see if there are
repercussions.) Debtfair is an
exhibit taking up two large walls of a gallery, one filled with illustrative images
and documents of the companies in question and the other lined with three
computers which visitors are invited to use to log onto one of several sites
they can use to buy up some of the artists’ debts. This is the most straightforward of several
all-text exhibits in the Biennial that is not just more socio-politics than
art, it’s all socio-politics.
One of
the more remarkable works in the show is Samara Golden’s multi-story
installation The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes (2017). Taking a page from Kusama’s installation
manual, Golden (b. 1973) uses mirrors to expand space into infinity—in this
instance going up to the heights and down into the depths. But while Kusama’s mirrored rooms were
abstract and disconnected from the environment that surrounds them (that is,
the museum structure), Golden’s construction is conceived to seem part of the Renzo
Piano’s museum building. His environment is a glimpse
into a highrise, using the Whitney’s floor-to-ceiling windows and the view out
over the Hudson River from the fifth-floor gallery, that hosts incongruously
juxtaposed medical facility-cum- beauty parlor-cum-prison, penthouse, middle-class
apartment, waiting room, gym, restaurant, and office space. It’s a
vertiginous stage set—or, more
accurately, Hollywood soundstage with eight meticulously furnished interiors
available simultaneously for telling a complex story we can make up
ourselves. But it’s a funhouse set, the
various locations upside down and endlessly reflected in the mirrors. Which images are reality and which merely illusions
is impossible to discern, which doubles the sense of dizziness I felt. To add to the sense of being at a great
height and looking over a thin balcony or rooftop rail, Golden incorporates a
soft wind and sound effects. (I actually
had to hold onto the handrails in the slight incline that leads to and from the
artwork when I left. I felt a little
foolish, I admit.) The structure looks
solid, as if made from actual building materials—or, at least, movie-set
resources—but the list of materials for the work of art are all flimsy and even
ephemeral. It also looks full-sized, but
it’s really half-sized. Illusion upon illusion. Assembling The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes, a name that seems to match the fantastic
vision and the improbable story that
must go along with it, surely took hundreds of person-hours.
Another
installation, by Kaari Upson (b. 1972), was a collection of her soft sculptures
(Supplement II, T.T., Snag, Eyelids, In Search of the Perfect Double I, In Search of the Perfect Double II, all 2016). These look like distorted and upended pieces of upholstered furniture—I sure thought they were, like found objects Upson
repurposed—but they’re mostly constructed for the work of art. The assemblage occupies a gallery of its own,
scattered around the floor as if some kids had found an abandoned room and just
shifted all the left couches and chairs randomly. The curators asserted that the pieces suggest
“at once the interior and exterior of the human body.” I didn’t see it.
Claim (2017), the installation by Pope.L (b.
1955), the 2017 Bucksbaum winner, is a
large walk-through box constructed of whitewashed wood. On the walls of this room-within-a-room,
inside and out, are nailed 2,755 rotting baloney slices, each precisely
centered in a four-inch square—more or less: there was an error in the
installation and Pope.L wanted it left—forming a grid. In the middle of each baloney slice (pretty smelly) is a small
black-and-white portrait. Pope.L claims (in
a text mounted in the box) that each portrait represents a percentage of the
Jewish population of New York, a figure he’s arrived at by some arcane
formula. But the artist’s figures “are a
bit off”—the number of bologna slices is off by 2 and, what’s more, the photos
on the slices were taken without concern for the subjects’ actual
ethnicity. Not only is this a commentary
on the arbitrariness of identity, both what we claim for ourselves and what
others claim for us, but Pope.L is playing sarcastically with our obsession
with data and numbers, leading, perhaps to quotas (something with which Jews
are more than familiar) and how identity and data can be misused for nefarious
purposes such as representation in legislatures or access to the vote.
This
hardly even scratches the surface of what was included in the 2017 Whitney
Biennial, and it’s not even really representative of the art on exhibit. I didn’t even mention the works on film and
video, or the computer-driven works. I
can’t even say these few works were the ones that most impressed me for any
reason—though they were among the ones that I remembered most clearly after I
left the museum. The art critics were
more thorough, and more impressed. Adam
Lehrer called the exhibit “stunning” in Forbes
magazine and listed “10 of my favorite pieces and installations” in the
show. In New York magazine/Vulture,
Jerry Saltz declared this years’ Biennial “the best of its kind in some time”
and praised it for the way it shows “that artists are always addressing
and channeling issues of the day. With gravitas, grace, intensity.” Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker asserted that the exhibit “is earnestly attentive to
political moods and themes,” but caviled that it “already feels nostalgic.”
Nonetheless, Schjeldahl found the show “winningly theatrical in its use of the
Whitney’s majestic new spaces.”
Time
Out New York’s
Howard Halle made a curious statement about the very rationale on which the
Biennial is founded. Questioning why
“attention must be paid,” Halle wondered “why a subjective selection by a
handful of organizers necessarily constitutes a definitive snapshot of
contemporary art, which is how the show has always been sold. It doesn’t, of course, though that hasn’t stopped
people from thinking otherwise, especially since the Biennial has the
felicitous effect of stove-piping careers into wider art-market and museum
acceptance.” The man from TONY concluded with a back-hand
compliment to the Whitney: “The museum is to be commended for showing restraint
in using its facility, and for trying to strike a balance between its role as a
custodian of art and the compromises that follow. It will be interesting to see where the
Biennial goes from here.”
On artnet, Ben Davis stated in his opening
sentence: “Here’s a super-short, bottom-line, first-impression review of the
Whitney Biennial 2017: It’s good.” He
dubbed the exhibit “a stylish and professional affair” and affirmed, “There’s
enough cool painting to satisfy that crowd, but also enough
new media and other novelties to satisfy that other crowd.” Davis quibbled a tad that the exhibit “errs on
the side of seriousness,” but acknowledged that “that’s as it should be.” His one complaint was that “the Lew-Locks
formula . . . feels, maybe, a little formulaic, like the show doesn’t exactly
have a big hook or curatorial conceit beyond smart taste-making and the
expertly executed balancing act.” ArtNews’s Andrew Russeth called this year’s Biennial “an intensely
satisfying display” and reported that he “left it feeling shaken
and optimistic, with the exhilarating sense that exhausted tropes are
falling away, that art is being propelled headlong into an uncertain future.”
Peter
Plagens of the Wall Street Journal, proclaiming
that this year’s Biennial “offers rewards to all those groups” and “is
decorously political while at the same time good-looking.” At the end of his review, Plagens reported
that he asked how much the show had cost to mount, “mentioning that movie companies
provide that information.”
The response, which
came with a smile, was, “We don’t give that out, but it was certainly much less
than the $300 million Disney spent on its remake of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’” Which might be, by the way, not a bad working
title for the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
In the Guardian’s U.S. edition, Nadja Sayej
reported that the Biennial is “a politically charged show on the state of
America but without the predictable satire.”
Indeed, Sayej acknowledged that it “feels like a graveyard of the
establishment’s broken promises with glimmers of hope from some of its
suffering citizens.” Ariella Budick of
the U.S. edition of the Financial Times admitted
to approaching Whitney Biennials with trepidation: “I quail at the prospect of
entering a bubble full of belly-gazers, recent art-school grads obsessed with
arcane process, crude provocateurs and prolix polemicists.” This time, though, she “came away shockingly
content.” Budick found, “This Biennial’s
corps of artists soaks up the political energy crackling on the streets outside
the museum and converts rage into creativity.”
She concluded, “The divisions that demoralise citizens and supercharge
outrage also give art a bracing sense of purpose and make for a trenchant show.”
On
WNYC, the National Public Radio outlet in New York City, Deborah Solomon
declared this year’s Biennial “the show that everyone loves to love.” She explained: “It goes out of its way to
spurn fashion, slickness and unearned celebrity” so that “the show offers you a
genuine acquaintanceship with new art, rather than just some lame buzz about
who’s in and who’s out.” In conclusion,
Solomon asserted, “The show attains a high level of aesthetic quality, and
proves that making fun of the Whitney Biennial has become an obsolete sport.” Elizabeth Blair of NPR reported, “If you’ve
been out of [the] loop on the American contemporary art scene, the Whitney
Biennial is here to catch you up.”
She observed that the “range of this year’s contributors” included “many
new works that have never been shown before.”
In the New York Observer, David D’Arcy lamented
that “this edition of the Biennial was underwhelming.” He complained, ”The purported rise of
painting . . . doesn’t live up to its promise here. And the politics of the works on view, often
presented with art’s version of a megaphone, reminds us why our expectations of
Biennials are low.” Then D’Arcy added,
“But there’s work to like and to admire.”
Finally, the New
York Times’
Roberta Smith declared that the Whitney Biennial’s “strength and focus make it
doubly important at a time when art, the humanities and the art of thinking
itself seem under attack in Washington.”
Pronouncing the show “an adult affair” and “exceptionally good looking,”
Smith did add, “It needs a little more edge.”
At first look, she wrote, “it has some immature inclusions”; however,
“Once you really start looking, there’s edge all over the place.” At a time when support for the arts is in
danger, Smith asserted, “this exhibition makes and exciting, powerful case for
art.”
A new exhibit of the work of Bucksbaum Award-winning artist William Pope.L is running at Mitchell-Innes & Nash (1018 Madison Avenue, Manhattan) from 23 May-14 July 2017. The show, 'Pope.L: Proto-Skin Set,' features paintings by the provocative and innovative artist.
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