Word: biennials
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...this is inevitable. Compared with art's history, which is largely sorted out, the present is always a mess, full of dwarf stars and bit players. Any of-the-moment show is guaranteed to bring those in by the carload. It doesn't help that in some years the Biennial's organizers have had a weakness for the slapdash and infantile, and in others for the most schoolmarmish kind of political correctness...
Think of the most thankless jobs out there. Slaughterhouse cleaner. Involuntary drug tester. Russell Crowe's assistant. Here's one that's worse: curator of the Whitney Biennial. Every two years, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City attempts a survey of current trends among American artists across the U.S. and based abroad. Every two years, or just about, the whole thing gets terrible reviews...
...results of this is that the art world has reacted, producing in some quarters a deliberately low intensity art of humble materials and transient gestures. This is the quarter that the latest Biennial is coming from. The 2008 edition, which was organized by Whitney curators Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin, has no official theme. But one of its unofficial themes is what the pair calls "lessness"--work that's less bombastic, less puffed up and made with simple stuff...
Like a lot of people, I also hate what the market has done to the experience of art, substituting the verdict of cash for every other judgment. But when I first heard that this year's Biennial would be heavy on humble art, I winced. Small potatoes is a dish that the art world circles back to every decade or so, usually out of revulsion against a gluttonous market. The go-go gallery salesrooms of the 1960s led to the rise of deliberately unsalable performance art and earthworks. And the 1993 Biennial, the first to follow the Reagan-Bush...
...question for this Biennial, which runs through June 1, and for art at large, is whether lessness can amount to more than that. Without question, there's a tumbledown, slacker spirit among some of the 81 artists that Huldisch and Momin have selected. Yet they also chose just enough work in which the materials may be humble but the ambitions are larger. New York artist Heather Rowe has adapted ideas from the late Gordon Matta-Clark, who sawed entire houses into parts to expose their strange and poignant innards. Rowe builds her own wooden frameworks, embedded with shards of mirrors...