• Rita Ackermann, Black Out, 2007. Plexiglass, fabric, printed paper, bolts, linen, oil stick, oil paint, spray paint, synthetic polymer, graphite, tape, gesso, pen, staple, adhesive, 90 1/2 x 36 x 1 in (229.9 x 91.4 x 2.5 cm). Collection of the artist; courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Peter Kilchmann Galerie, Zurich

 

It has already been dubbed the “Facebook” Biennial.  New York Magazine’s Carly Berwick has charted how for the thirtysomething year old curators Shamim Momin and Henriette Huldisch, being spun from one artist studio to the next by the buddy system, or bypassing the convention of the studio visit altogether and “getting to hang” instead in the cafes and artist salons of the intensely social generation who are the focus of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, is a defining aspect of the selection process.  Many of the artists collaborate on projects, as often as not extra-studio ventures such as dance parties, community gardening, and running bars or radio stations. 

And, it turns out, in this celebration of artistic sociability, the public is invited too.  Anyone can sign up for the 24 hour dance marathon organized by Agathe Snow at the Park Avenue Armory, which is the official annex of the Biennial which fills four floors of the Madison Avenue museum.  The Biennial is hosting an ongoing series at the Armory of performances, video installations, a slumber party, a choreographed animal movement class for children and adults.  And yes, Eduardo Sarabia’s bar is open, too. 

This is, for sure, a boho biennial.  A neo-bohemian ethos reflects as much in the finished objects as the leisure hour activities of the many of the 81 artists on show.  Neo-hippy is another word for the self-consciously scrappy, ephemeral, loose-at-the-edges art that has attracted the hedonistic young curators (Ms Momin is celebrated as an artworld socialite) in their search to define the zeitgeist. 

By all accounts, that process was more an amble than a scramble.   The number of artists included is down from 106 in the intense, sprawling 2006 edition of the 77 year old institutional fixture.  As telling a statistic is that of the artists selected, 43 work in New York and 29 in Los Angeles or the Bay Area.  Of the ten working elsewhere in the US, three are in Miami.  It seems that in scouting the nation for talent, the partygoing curators were drawn to sunshine.

And in keeping with California cool, the pervading mood of the Biennial is of unintense idealism.  Much of the work is politically or ecologically engaged, but in place of the big statements, anger or urgency that some might imagine would characterize art in troubled times there is a sense that gentle subversion will help the revolution more than barricades, that sweet silliness rather than heavy ideology is the Molotov cocktail of choice.  Angst has given way to “whatever.”

Ms Huldisch characterizes the look and feel of the art she encountered in more formal terms, borrowing the word “lessness” from Samuel Beckett to account for its sense of dissipation and ephemerality.  In harmony with the thesis of the New Museum’s inaugural “Unmonumental” show, she stresses how the keyword is “local”.  It is art about little moves rather than big gestures.  It embraces failure, not in a heavy old existentialist sense of radical doubt so much as one of humorous solipsism: holy fool not tortured genius.  The recycling of locally found materials is important not just ecologically but as a statement against producing objects to deadline for biennials and art fairs.  Curators and artists alike are so fond of keeping things local (four cities for the curators, little sweat and cheap found materials for the artists) that this might also be considered the low carbon footprint biennial.

• Rashawn Griffin, "Untitled (Boo Radley)
  Pockets, blanket, fabric, wool, foam, fake flower, cotton, and wood , 84 ¾ x 82 x 10 ¼ in. (215.3 x 208.3 x 26 cm) Private collection

The installation that fills the first floor project room at the Whitney by the late Jason Rhoades,“Theareola”, with its scaffolds, office chairs, CDs and accumulated personal detritus, epitomizes the scatter aesthetic.  Decentered in a carefree cum careless way, with its visual and musical sampling, it has the typically Californian avant-garde fusion of lightness and abjection.  Fellow Californian Charles Long opts for a more rustic assemblage that recalls Anselm Kiefer and Cy Twombly but without the bombast of these big ego masters. Rodney McMillian, another Los Angelian, has a monumental scale but suitably unmonumental attitude towards materials and finish in a goofy untitled work of 2007 that uses dishevelled sheet of vinyl against the wall with what looks like an elephant’s leg, in the same material, protruding into the room.

New Yorker Phoebe Washburn is more overtly ecological in medium and message alike with her eco-system sculptural installation, “While Enhancing a Diminishing Deep Down Thirst, the Juice Broke Loose (the Birth of a Soda Shop)” (2008).” 
Rachel Harrison’s sculptures are low-octane riffs on Robert Rauschenberg’s combines. Rashawn Griffin’s suspended assemblages in fabrics and blankets gently mock 1970s pattern abstraction and New Image painting.  Joe Bradley’s schematically figural shaped canvases, that stretch synthetic polymer on canvas, achieve the “intentional shoddiness” to which the artist is reported to aspire.  They gently acknowledge the figural minimalism of Joel Shapiro and the abstraction of Ellsworth Kelly, though eschewing any of the tightness and rigour (bloody American spelling!) of these artists.  Generally, art that takes its charge from joking about other art is thin on the ground in this show, despite the inclusion of veteran 1980s appropriation artist Sherrie Levine.  Instead, it is simply the lack of inner formal cohesion that suffices as the deflationary, anti-heroic, anti-Art with a big A statement for most of these artists.

The cute, at once neat and flimsy personalism of Frances Stark’s collages fit this bill, as do the exuberantly ditsy tableaux of Rita Ackermann that collide illustration and collage.  Like Karen Kilimnik, whose faux rococo paintings are installed nearby, she represents a fin de siecle that insists the world is to end not with a bang but a whimper.

British-born New York-based Ellen Harvey dramatizes Ms Huldisch’s  Beckettian exaltation to “try again, fail again, fail better” with her installation, “Museum of Failure: Collection of Impossible Subjects & Invisible Self-Portrait in My Studio ” (2008).  The viewer encounters a wall of plexiglass, harshly lit from behind by fluorescent strips, with empty frames hand-engraved.  Through the on aperture you see a wall behind with a salon-style hang of actual, found frames each containing fragments, painted after a self-portrait photograph of the artist in her studio that used a heavy flash obscuring her own features.

Another telling statistic of this show is that of the 81 artists, maybe five – if you adopt a liberal definition – are painters.  Amazing, but yet again, painting is in trouble with the institution. The party-going young curators seem too nice, too laissez-faire, to seriously think that painting is dead or reactionary.  A more plausible explanation as to its relative absence is that painters do not make good networkers. Assemblages in flimsy materials are more conducive to socializing, collaboratively-minded artists.  Alone in a studio, dealing with the traction of centuries of precedent, you get too tempted to make work that is centered, original, strong – and thus inimical to the effort-free aesthetic of these curators.

In a Biennial where attitude trumps form, a pocket of formal resistance is to be found on the second floor, which visitors may therefore wish to save for last.  Jedediah Caesar was a discovery for this critic, with his head-cheese like sculptures that suspend found scraps of material in colored resin.  These are rich, strong forms in a show whose organizers willfully eschew such aesthetic virtues. 

The catalogue editors seem more intent that the fluid, ephemeral, and transistory have the first and last word, as they have gathered pages of end-papers at either end of the book to acknowledge that for their chosen artists, activities count for as much as objects.  One documentary curio from Michael Smith sticks in the memory.  He has saved what is evidently a student assessment of a course he taught.  In an adolescent hand (fat circles dot the I’s) she has recorded her disappointment at his habit of calling students “idiot” or their work “crap.” ”I don’t agree with this treatment & I felt the course was a waste of my time and money.”  It would be interesting to hear what the same student makes of the Biennial featuring her professor.

• Phoebe Washburn, It Makes for My Billionaire Status, 2005 (installation view, Kantor/Feuer Gallery, Los Angeles, 2005). Mixed media, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist; courtesy Zach Feuer Gallery, New York. Photograph by Gene Ogami

DAVID COHEN

David is the editor and founder of www.artcritical.com

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