Word: biennially
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...Whitney Museum's Biennial, which opened last week, is not a real salon. It is too closely preselected for that; entrance is by invitation only. Nonetheless, since 1932 it has been the closest thing to a salon that New York City has had. At least some of the names in the 1979 exhibition−which includes 110 objects by 56 painters and sculptors, along with programs of film and video work by 32 other artists−are not likely to be known to most museum visitors. What the five curators who chose the show have given...
...only "big" movement of the 1960s with an aesthetic that continues to be felt in the 1979 Whitney Biennial is, oddly enough, minimalism−a style made up of simple, primary, uninflected forms, usually garnished with tangled masses of oversubtilized criticism. Less, these days, does not seem to be more, especially when the work in question is yet another empty grid by Sol LeWitt, or something like Richard Serra's Toll, 1978-79−three walls of a gallery enclosure painted dead, oily black. In the past, some of Serra's sculptures have been memorable, their slabs...
Some of the minimal work in the Biennial, like Brice Marden's wax-encaustic panels, is beautifully made, but the craftsmanship is placed at the service of no discernible idea; it is art's answer to the well-made play, a kind of systematic decor-though (mercifully perhaps) with out the metaphysical pretensions of its ancestor, Barnett Newman's work. More likable are the folded tracing-paper drawings by Dorothea Rockburne, with their spare geometry of arc and line appearing through superimposed translucencies of paper−the product, if not of passionate invention, at least of rigorously...
...Biennial's sculpture tends toward a kind of monotonous and outsize wackiness. A lot of it has more in common with precincts or buildings than with the usual conventions of sculpture: surrealism, mixed with primitivist nostalgia, is its presiding spirit. Donna Dennis' large-scale model of a frame house−swollen doll's quarters, too small to function as a building−is one example of the syndrome, and another is Alice Aycock's 24-ft.-long construction of arches, ladders and drumlike wooden wheels, whose title (The Happy Birthday Day Coronation Piece) sounds as portentous...
...time it seemed as if the biennial general conference of the 146-nation United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris would be remembered for adopting Soviet-style curbs on press freedom. But last week, applauding delegates passed by acclamation a U.S.-supported compromise, lifting at least temporarily a threat that has been hanging over the West since...