Whitney Biennial 2008

On Wednesday, March 25th, I went to my first ever Whitney Biennial. I arrived at the museum five minutes before opening time, to find that people were already waiting in a line that wrapped around the northwest corner of the museum. To find so many people eagerly awaiting the Biennial’s opening on a Wednesday morning was somewhat surprising, especially as the Biennial had already been open for more than a week. For a while, then, I hoped that the large number of visitors might be due to the great quality of the show within the Whitney. (Later I realized that the Contemporary Art Armory Show opened on the same day, an important factor for the many aficionados coming into town for a week of contemporary art.)

While waiting in line, I recognized many foreign languages spoken in the crowd around me. I was reminded of my visit to the New Museum a couple of weeks ago, where the museum itself felt like a great tourist attraction. In fact, the Biennial shares more than an audience with the New Museum’s Unmonumental show. Similarly to Unmonumental, the Biennial’s three floors felt overcrowded with works. On one and, this is understandable: the Biennial seeks to cover new work over the past two years in a relatively small space. On the other hand, however, the pieces are distributed in a chaotic and overlapping way. Maybe that is part of the design: an attempt to represent in the art, as well as on the museum’s floors, the pervading experience of over stimulation and multi tasking, an experience the defines part of 21st century existence.

Overall, the Biennial presents a wide range of artists working with different media. Next to a window on the fourth floor, Phoebe Washburn’s While Enhancing a diminishing Deep Down Thirst, the Juice Broke Loose (the Birth of Soda Shop) (2008) recreates a surreal greenhouse/soda shop, in which bunches of daisies are fed Gatorade, while flower bulbs grow among golf balls. Next door to Washburn’s piece, Natalia Almeda’s Al Otro Lado (To The Other Side) (2005) is projected in a dark room, taking turns with films by other artists. The 66 minute documentary about drug dealers in Mexican culture offers an interesting perspective on the way dealers are glorified as heroes and martyrs within their communities. On the same floor, Heather Rowe’s Something crossed the mind (unembellished three times) (2008) creates a hypnotizing experience for the viewer. Using mirrors facing different angles and alternating wooden planks with empty space, Rowe creates a game of light, perception and reflection that is at once playful and disorienting. James Welling’s Torsos (2008) series reminds us of the important question of the unique for photography in an age of digital art. Welling uses photograms to create imperfect images that document the single event of the photograph. His Torsos focus on the bodily forms suggested by netting to create images that defy definition of form, but that simultaneously feel familiar and recognizable.

Throughout the exhibit, the Whitney offers an audio tour with commentary by the artists themselves. I found this an interesting and sometimes funny addition to the experience of the exhibit. In part, turning the artist’s commentary on, helps turn the visitors’ voices off. Furthermore, each artist approaches theur work differently. While some merely describe the process and concept behind their work, others use the audio commentary as an additional tool to contextualize their piece. Daniel Joseph Martinez, for instance, performs something like a manifesto for his Divine Violence (2007). The work, which has been smartly placed in a room of its own, consists of about 50 golden canvases about 1’x 2’, each one defined by the name of a guerilla movement written in black font reminiscent of comic books. Entering Martinez’s room while listening to his aural manifesto temporarily isolates one from the over stimulation of the other rooms and effectively narrows one’s focus to Martinez’s critical perspective.

Overall, the 2008 Whitney Biennial brings together artists of different sensibilities and political views in a very ambitious exhibition. Admirably, the Whitney has commissioned a lot of the works on show, giving artists as well as viewers a chance to see something new. With its expansion to the Armory for more performance based works, the Whitney is calling out for more room for its biennial exhibition. Could it be that, in the future, we will witness a Biennial that spreads all over New York? Something more similar to the way Performa organizes its biennial? The crowded floors of the Whitney demand a better space for the art work, let’s hope 2010 will bring more breathing room for art and visitors!

Whitney Museum of American Art
www.whitney.org
Through June 1

International Center of Photography: "The Collections of Barbara Bloom."

Humorous and playful, Barbara Bloom’s retrospective at the International Center of photography combines the light irony of Bloom’s work with a lively commentary by the exhibition’s organizers. The exhibition is refreshing from different perspectives. First of all, as a woman’s retrospective, it is a welcome exhibit in contrast with the many shows that focus on male artists. Furthermore, Bloom’s multi-media installations contrast the International Center of Photography’s traditional focus on the media of photography and film. In addition, The Collections of Barbara Bloom well complements ICP’s downstairs exhibition, Archive Fever- Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, by bringing to the forefront the artist’s own “collection” as an archive, hence approaching questions regarding the relationship of history, documentation and art from the perspective of the artist herself.

Collections covers a wide range of work by the American artist, who was born in Los Angeles in 1951 and lives and works in New York. There are many three dimensional objects, such as the broken Japanese ceramics restored with golden lacquer, or the carpet fashioned to look like the cover of the first edition of Nabokov’s Lolita, or the special edition of a breil Playboy. The mid life retrospective also shows some of Bloom’s photography, hidden behind semi-transparent curtains, as well as some of her installation work. To different degrees, all of the pieces hint to Bloom’s provocative approach to art, her work demanding that the visitor engage with it critically and with a sense of humor. Take, for instance, the V. Nabokov Butterfly Box (Blues), in which mirrored bluish images of Nabokov and other figures relevant to Nabokov’s writing are pinned to a wooden box mimicking a collection of dead butterflies. Bloom’s work speaks directly to the spectator, raising issues about the nature of collecting and the role of an artist in the curatorial process.

Unfortunately, while the material on exhibit is provocative and exciting, the spatial organization of the retrospective is itself somewhat startling. Walking into the exhibit initially causes a sense of disorientation: where does the exhibition begin? Are we supposed to feel like we have entered another space, a world made of Bloom’s imaginative sculpture and installations? Are we in a gallery? Texts by the art pieces speak to us intimately and in a casual tone, like characters within the exhibition itself, explaining the different themes used to group Bloom’s work. Yet the space never feels intimate or completely dedicated to Bloom’s work. In part, this is due to the fact that most of the exhibition takes place on the path to the lower floor. As a result, the experience of the show is repeatedly interrupted by those who cross the floors to go down stairs.

On one hand, then, Bloom’s collection is not displayed so as to do justice to her sense of humor and provocative perspective on the role of the artist in society, the spatial organization of the exhibit itself creating a fragmented experience of her work. Much of Bloom’s work has an interactive, theatrical aspect to it, which is somewhat lost in the way her works are displayed along long and tall walls, too dispersive to let the pieces interact properly with each other. Compared to Bloom’s exhibitions in the past, for example when the artist had transformed a whole room into an installation itself, Collections feels more fragmentary and the objectification of the art as collection partially detracts from the experience of engaging with the works. On the other hand, however, one could argue that the display of Bloom’s work at ICP is itself an ironic comment on the way an artist’s collection is dissected and re-organized by an institution such as the museum, or in the context of an auction gallery in which the works are presented to be sold (the show, we are told in the catalogue, was inspired by the auction catalog estate of Jackie Onassis.) In any case, Bloom’s interventions on and contributions to contemporary art retain a lot of their energy and it is a pleasure to visit an exhibition that jokes, flirts, and plays with the spectator.

International Center of Photography
January 18 - May 4
http://www.icp.org/site/c.dnJGKJNsFqG/b.732135/

New Museum: "Unmonumental."

The New Museum in Manhattan’s Lower East Side is still hot from its opening on December 1, 2007. You can feel the energy buzzing through the whole building, as large numbers of tourists walk from floor to floor, lovin’ it. Yes, loving the incredibly cluttered space, and the confusing and often disappointing arrangement of art that gives one the impression of a shopping mall rather than of a museum. As in a shopping mall, we are surrounded with objects, colors and textures, while sound plays overhead from hidden speakers. Unlike a shopping mall, however, the exhibit is not designed for the enjoyment and pleasure of the visitors, creating a claustrophobic and visually unappealing space. And yet, five out of the seven people I interviewed during my visit of Unmonumental, the current exhibit, really enjoyed the show. They loved the variety of the work on display, the fact that video, sculpture, and collage were all in the same room. One woman thought the arrangement of the art worked particularly well. And some found the sound installations, which fill the whole museum at set intervals of time, to be “really cool.”

Why? Personally, I found Unmonumental to be a depressing experience. For one thing, most of the work felt fashionable but not substantial. A mix of Dada aesthetics, such as in Rachel Harrison’s Huffy Howler (2004), and work that I had already seen, such as Martha Rosler’s revisited 70’s work in Gladiators (from the “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful” series, 2004.) Sometimes a piece would catch my eye, such as Henrik Olsen’s Anthologie de l’Amour Sublime (2007), a series of 82 computer printouts with 19th century images manipulated to highlight homoerotic moods or tensions. Abraham Cruzvillegas’ Matière Brute (2006), a hanging cluster of boes, and Marc André Robinson’s sculpture of couches and chairs, entitled Myth Mondith (Liberation Movement) (2007), similarly caught my attention for the beauty of the sculptural forms. Yet without more context for their work, and with so much stimulation from the neighboring pieces, it was hard to engage fully with the art.

Furthermore, there is little attractively new at the New Museum. The most promising section, entitled “Montage: Unmonumental Online”, exhibited works that were not as conceptually innovative as could have been expected. Oliver Laric’s 50 50 (2007), for instance, brings together fifty clips from amateur performances of songs by 50 Cent, a famous rapper. Yet how does his work with the medium of YouTube (from where he took the clips) differ from thousand of other collages already available through the same website? What kind of questions are artists asking themselves in the context of Unmonumental?

As for the popularity of the show amongst its visitors this past Saturday, then, we might conclude that in an over stimulating culture of television, internet, and continuous advertisting, people might find the New Museum a familiar experience of the senses. Yet in regards to art, Unmonumental presents a show about clichés: abstract work that does not make much sense to the viewer, work that shocks and confuses, without the depth of strong concepts behind it or the support of an intelligent design to make the work more accessible. The reasons for the arrangement of the pieces in the space are vague, though apparently intentional, as the exhibit seeks to exemplify the 21st century language of “fragments and of debased, precarious, and trembling forms, sounds, and pictures.” Ultimately, while Unmonumental attempts to address issues of fear and fragmentation in contemporary society, it lacks the clarity in vision necessary for a show that illuminates, rather than recreates and echoes, the complexity of contemporary art and society.

New Museum
December 1, 2007 - March 23, 2008
http://www.newmuseum.org/

International Center of Photography: “Archive Fever- Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art.”

Glenn Ligon, Notes in the Margin of the Black Book (1991-1993)

Until May 14, 2008, the International Center of Photography in New York will hold a very special exhibit on its lower floor: Archive Fever—Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. Placed in what we could think of as the museum’s basement, Archive Fever brings energy to the dark, underground space, in the same way in which the exhibit breathes new life into the concept of archive. As curator Okwui Enwezor mentions in the press release, the idea of an archive “evokes a dim, musty place full of drawers, filing cabinets, and shelves laden with old documents, an inert repository of historical artifacts.” In contrast, the works on exhibit at Archive Fever are contemporary, vibrant and very well displayed. The floor has been organized so that film and photography coexist with each other without fighting for the visitor’s attention. Visitors are offered short and informative explanations on the context for each work, making the show, archive of its own accord, accessible and attractive for the gaze and the mind.

In addition to some excellent curatorial decisions in the organization and display of the pieces, Enwezor has also succeeded in bringing together a great selection of artists and subjects. Archive Fever contains work by 25 artists from all over the world. From Mexico to Switzerland, from Albania to Cuba and the Bronx, these artists use the concept of archive on a wide range of topics. Some of the work looks at the Holocaust, such as Eyal Sivan’s edited version of Rony Bauman’s film on the trials of a German army specialist in Jerusalem. In The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem (1999), Sivan has cut and edited Bauman’s filming of Eichmann’s trial so that the film is no longer chronologically coherent. Sivan edits the original footage in order to shift the focus of Bauman’s documentary on the defensive strategy of Eichmann, rather than on the dramatic and emotional development of the whole trial. By doing so, Sivan simultaneously engages with archival material and creates new material based on a different perspective.

Other artists take different approaches. Rather than working with actual historical figures, Zoe Leonard invents a new character for The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993-1996). Leonard’s project takes the form of an archive that focuses on the fictitious career of a Black actress from the beginning of the twentieth century. Through Fae Richards, Leonard brings attention to race and gender politics in the entertainment industry, particularly Hollywood, while simultaneously hinting to the invisibility of those characters that are not acknowledged by mainstream culture.

To some extent, Glenn Ligon also invents a new archive by identifying Mapplethorpe’s Black Book as archival material. In Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991-1993), Ligon exhibits Mapplethorpe’s 91 erotically charged black and white images of young Black men, together with text from different sources: from critical thinkers, to newspaper personal ads, to Mapplethorpe’s own words. Hung next to each other, the images and the text create a visual conversation that opens up Mapplethorpe’s work for further critical scrutiny in terms of race, sex, and objectification.

Through this well researched and beautifully organized show, Enwezor succeeds in raising the temperature of our ideas and our thoughts. Archive Fever covers some of the hottest topics in contemporary theory and culture, its title a direct reference to Jacques Derrida’s own Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, and the exhibition offers a great occasion to view intelligent and provocative art. As the tension between the personal and the political is explored again and again throughout the exhibition, we discover the infinite possibilities for thinking about archives and documentation through art as well as through our own sense of the past and the present. From war and the Holocaust, to issues of gender and sexuality, to explorations of post-colonial and race relations, challenges our understanding of history through exciting and thought provoking pieces, infusing the intellectually complex concept of archive with new meaning through layered artistic distillations.

International Center of Photography
January 18 - May 4
http://www.icp.org/site/c.dnJGKJNsFqG/b.732135/