The Washington Post, March 26, 1997, pp. D1, D12:
Art: A Turn at the Century
Above the Electronic Whir, Whitney Biennial Paints a More
Human Face
The spirit of Walt Disney also casts a happy shadow on the
show. It should be clear by now that you can't tell the
complete story of 20th-century American art while stiffing
Norman Rockwell and leaving out Disney, though most museums
try. The artists at the Whitney are in many ways more
tolerant. They bow to Walt in various ways--in the
artificiality of their installations, in their cartoony
markings, their sugary view of nature and in their deep
reliance on technology and toys.
Avant-garde artists once forged forward. The Whitney's seem
content recalling what they felt as kids.
By Paul Richard
New York. The sound of the 1997 Biennial Exhibition at the
Whitney Museum of American Art is the sound of a television in
the next room.
The galleries are stocked with cables, little red on-lights,
laser-disc projectors--audio-visual machines that aren't
particularly beautiful, or particularly high-tech, and will
soon be obsolete. They hum and whir and click. The style that
prevails is mechanico-theatrical. The characteristic scale is
that of the loft, the store window, the sound stage.
Coming as it mostly does from New York and Los Angeles, the
show is chic and brash. But it isn't Jeff Koons cynical, or
in-your-face political, or wanly theoretical. What's notable
in the '97 Biennial is the poignancy of its art.
The survey's a sort of storybook, a compendium of narratives.
Its tales tug the viewer to dreamland, back to childhood, to
the secret cave, the beach, the cabin in the hills. Remember
pawing through the toy box, or pondering such wonders as the
moth spread on the window screen, the seashells in the sand,
and the slow drift of the stars? Every picture tells a story,
don't it? Here, the answer's yes.
The '93 Biennial hectored, the '95 Biennial dithered. The '97
version--curated by Lisa Phillips and Louise Neri--is the most
humane in years, in spite of all its hardware.
You want to know what's new in art--at least in that small
realm of art known as "advanced practice" in Manhattan and
L.A.? Faces are back, that's what's new.
"It is impossible today to paint a face," the critic Clement
Greenberg told Willem de Kooning in the 1950s, but the
abstraction Greenberg championed, once central to the New York
scene, no longer finds much favor. Here, instead, the ruling
theme is: memories retrieved.
Gentleness is back as well. New art, so this show suggests,
doesn't have to shock (though shock is still permissible), and
it doesn't have to baffle (in that snooty David Salle
puzzle-picture way). In 1997, art is once again allowed to
reassure.
Unless you yearn to see great paintings. Vija Celmins, one of
the few painters who made the cut in 1997, once said that she
retained "great faith in people painting forever," but here
she's much outnumbered. Installations--transitory, vast, soon
to be unplugged, difficult to sell--fill the Whitney's
galleries. Flat paintings may still rule the richest New York
salesrooms, and the grandest art museums, but this is not a
painting show, hasn't been for years.
Some 1997 Biennial statistics:
+ Number of studios visited by the exhibition's organizers
(Phillips, a curator at the museum, and Neri, the
Australia-raised U.S. editor of the art journal Parkett):
nearly 500. Number of artists selected: 70. New Yorkers among
them: 41. Los Angelenos: 15.
+ Number of photographs displayed more than 200. Number of
canvases displayed: 19. Number of projectors (video, film,
slide, laser-disc) deployed: 17. Television monitors: 15.
Pairs of earphones: 37. Hours of film and video: 12.
Likely to be remembered as the exhibition's stars: influential
multimedia artist Bruce Nauman; influential sculptor Louise
Bourgeois; painters Kerry James Marshall, Sue Williams, Lati
Pittman and Celmins; sculptors Chris Burden, Jason Rhoades,
Glen Seator and Jennifer Pastor; and photographers
Philip-Lorca diCorcia and John Schabel.
(Cecilia Vicuna, who's hung a net from the ceiling; Sharon
Lockhart, who makes dull photographs; and Annette Lawrence,
who makes spiral jottings, are as likely to be forgotten.)
Nauman is represented by "End of the World," a video much less
scary than most of his, it's a three-projector piece in which
the Appalachian fiddle tune is variously repeated--on dobro,
pedal steel and slide guitar--until it weaves a kind of elegy,
part hymn, part Texas two-step, part Scotch-Irish lament.
Bourgeois (born 1911) is the grande dame of New York's body-
conscious feminist sculptors. As her newest straining figures
show, she's still working at full stretch.
Imagine a model-train layout with little bridges, little
buildings, little cliffs and little trees--and imagine it
expanded, exuberantly, obsessively, until it seems intent on
swallowing the planet. Burden's "Pizza City" is that sort of
sprawling world.
Sculptor Seator made the tilted room: His piece is a life-size
reconstruction of the Whitney director's office, still
carpeted and bookshelved, but balanced on edge. Jennifer
Pastor made the seashells, and, with admirable fastidiousness,
the big furry moth. Celmins paints the comets and the stars of
the night sky.
This year's Whitney show, the 69th, will be the last of the
millennium (they're skipping 1999 and a special edition will
be mounted in spring 2000). That this exhibit is the century's
last sets one wondering: Which artists matter most, what ideas
have slipped from fashion, what old conventions flourish?
Nauman and Bourgeois, as well as the late Eva Hesse and Edward
Kienholz, seem to loom behind the art on view as pioneers,
exemplars. "Treatment With Memories," Ilya Kabakov's stagy
re-creation of a Soviet state hospital, is a lot like a
Kienholz, though gentler by far, and much less succinct. And,
curiously indeed, the spirit of Walt Disney also casts a happy
shadow on the show.
It should be clear by now that you can't tell the complete
story of 20th-century American art while stiffing Norman
Rockwell and leaving out Disney, though most museums try. The
artists at the Whitney are in many ways more tolerant. They
bow to Walt in various ways--in the artificiality of their
installations, in their cartoony markings, their sugary view
of nature and in their deep reliance on technology and toys.
Tony Oursler's portraits--his blinking, full-face videos
projected on plastic eggs--resemble Disneyland's more than
they do Gilbert Stuart's. Pastor's giant shells and
cornstalks, like Disney's smiley nature films, have a way of
making grown-ups feel like kids. The bluebirds flitting
through Marshall's fine, sad-nostalgic paintings are
Disneyesque as well.
But while theatricalism is in, pure abstraction is out. The
whole Pollock-Newman-Stella line of abstract field
painting--which used to be a way of communing with the
void--isn't much respected here. When it shows up it gets
tweaked.
Williams ribs the genre by filling up her fields with high
heels and spread thighs; the cartoony line she uses in "Large
Blue Gold and Itchy" (1996) is nearly as whippy as de
Kooning's. Pittman fills up his with skateboards, radio
telescopes and garish L.A. colors, oranges and pinks. Rhoades,
whose fields are three-dimensional, has filled the one on
view, a zany and enormous piece, with orange cables, rag rugs,
clay-pigeon flingers, ladders, hot dogs, table saws, pork and
beans, and smoke--all as intricately interwoven as Jackson
Pollock's drips. Michael Ashkin's sand table, which winks at
Barnett Newman's monochromes, is a toylike reproduction of an
arid stretch of desert with a tiny blacktop highway (and just
as tiny trucks) cutting it in two like one of Newman's "zips."
Avant-garde artists once forged forward. The Whitney's seem
content recalling what they felt as kids.
Though abstract art is spurned, another old convention--that
of street photography--is treated deferentially, most
admirably by diCorcia. He, too, captures strangers passing in
the street, but he does so with a "flash trap," and with
color, in a way that gives his Ektachromes a kind of
other-worldly drama. Though his street shots pay due homage to
the Paul Strand-Andre Kertesz-Robert Frank tradition, they
still manage to seem new.
Schabel is as indebted to the example of Walker Evans. It's
been nearly 60 years since Evans began to ride the New York
subways, candidly recording the empty faces of the passengers
with a little camera concealed in his coat. Schabel shoots
through airplane windows using a long lens from 1,000 yards
away, and captures the expressions, half-alarmed and
half-resigned, of people taking off.
Once upon a time the planners of these surveys saw it as their
duty to reprise last season's hits. Not any more. This isn't
gallery art. Much of it is unsalable, or nearly so. It isn't
home art, either, for rare is the art collector who has the
room to show it, unless he takes the plunge and gives away his
bed. It is something else. The 1997 Biennial Exhibition is
mostly given over to contemporary art made for institutions
that theatrically display contemporary art.
The exhibition, sponsored by Beck's brewery, closes June 1.
[Four photos] Clockwise from above: Chris Burden's mixed-media
"Pizza City"; Lari Pittman's "Once Awkward, Now Spacious and
Elastic"; and Jennifer Pastor's foam and brass "The Four
Seasons: Untitled (Spring)." Kerry James Marshall's "Our
Town," like so many of the featured works, turn its gaze back
to the past and childhood.
[End]
To see B/W photos:
http://jya.com/wb1.jpg (Burden, Pittman, Pastor)
http://jya.com/wb2.jpg (Marshall)
This review archived at:
http://jya.com/wb97.htm
Art: A Turn at the Century
Above the Electronic Whir, Whitney Biennial Paints a More
Human Face
The spirit of Walt Disney also casts a happy shadow on the
show. It should be clear by now that you can't tell the
complete story of 20th-century American art while stiffing
Norman Rockwell and leaving out Disney, though most museums
try. The artists at the Whitney are in many ways more
tolerant. They bow to Walt in various ways--in the
artificiality of their installations, in their cartoony
markings, their sugary view of nature and in their deep
reliance on technology and toys.
Avant-garde artists once forged forward. The Whitney's seem
content recalling what they felt as kids.
By Paul Richard
New York. The sound of the 1997 Biennial Exhibition at the
Whitney Museum of American Art is the sound of a television in
the next room.
The galleries are stocked with cables, little red on-lights,
laser-disc projectors--audio-visual machines that aren't
particularly beautiful, or particularly high-tech, and will
soon be obsolete. They hum and whir and click. The style that
prevails is mechanico-theatrical. The characteristic scale is
that of the loft, the store window, the sound stage.
Coming as it mostly does from New York and Los Angeles, the
show is chic and brash. But it isn't Jeff Koons cynical, or
in-your-face political, or wanly theoretical. What's notable
in the '97 Biennial is the poignancy of its art.
The survey's a sort of storybook, a compendium of narratives.
Its tales tug the viewer to dreamland, back to childhood, to
the secret cave, the beach, the cabin in the hills. Remember
pawing through the toy box, or pondering such wonders as the
moth spread on the window screen, the seashells in the sand,
and the slow drift of the stars? Every picture tells a story,
don't it? Here, the answer's yes.
The '93 Biennial hectored, the '95 Biennial dithered. The '97
version--curated by Lisa Phillips and Louise Neri--is the most
humane in years, in spite of all its hardware.
You want to know what's new in art--at least in that small
realm of art known as "advanced practice" in Manhattan and
L.A.? Faces are back, that's what's new.
"It is impossible today to paint a face," the critic Clement
Greenberg told Willem de Kooning in the 1950s, but the
abstraction Greenberg championed, once central to the New York
scene, no longer finds much favor. Here, instead, the ruling
theme is: memories retrieved.
Gentleness is back as well. New art, so this show suggests,
doesn't have to shock (though shock is still permissible), and
it doesn't have to baffle (in that snooty David Salle
puzzle-picture way). In 1997, art is once again allowed to
reassure.
Unless you yearn to see great paintings. Vija Celmins, one of
the few painters who made the cut in 1997, once said that she
retained "great faith in people painting forever," but here
she's much outnumbered. Installations--transitory, vast, soon
to be unplugged, difficult to sell--fill the Whitney's
galleries. Flat paintings may still rule the richest New York
salesrooms, and the grandest art museums, but this is not a
painting show, hasn't been for years.
Some 1997 Biennial statistics:
+ Number of studios visited by the exhibition's organizers
(Phillips, a curator at the museum, and Neri, the
Australia-raised U.S. editor of the art journal Parkett):
nearly 500. Number of artists selected: 70. New Yorkers among
them: 41. Los Angelenos: 15.
+ Number of photographs displayed more than 200. Number of
canvases displayed: 19. Number of projectors (video, film,
slide, laser-disc) deployed: 17. Television monitors: 15.
Pairs of earphones: 37. Hours of film and video: 12.
Likely to be remembered as the exhibition's stars: influential
multimedia artist Bruce Nauman; influential sculptor Louise
Bourgeois; painters Kerry James Marshall, Sue Williams, Lati
Pittman and Celmins; sculptors Chris Burden, Jason Rhoades,
Glen Seator and Jennifer Pastor; and photographers
Philip-Lorca diCorcia and John Schabel.
(Cecilia Vicuna, who's hung a net from the ceiling; Sharon
Lockhart, who makes dull photographs; and Annette Lawrence,
who makes spiral jottings, are as likely to be forgotten.)
Nauman is represented by "End of the World," a video much less
scary than most of his, it's a three-projector piece in which
the Appalachian fiddle tune is variously repeated--on dobro,
pedal steel and slide guitar--until it weaves a kind of elegy,
part hymn, part Texas two-step, part Scotch-Irish lament.
Bourgeois (born 1911) is the grande dame of New York's body-
conscious feminist sculptors. As her newest straining figures
show, she's still working at full stretch.
Imagine a model-train layout with little bridges, little
buildings, little cliffs and little trees--and imagine it
expanded, exuberantly, obsessively, until it seems intent on
swallowing the planet. Burden's "Pizza City" is that sort of
sprawling world.
Sculptor Seator made the tilted room: His piece is a life-size
reconstruction of the Whitney director's office, still
carpeted and bookshelved, but balanced on edge. Jennifer
Pastor made the seashells, and, with admirable fastidiousness,
the big furry moth. Celmins paints the comets and the stars of
the night sky.
This year's Whitney show, the 69th, will be the last of the
millennium (they're skipping 1999 and a special edition will
be mounted in spring 2000). That this exhibit is the century's
last sets one wondering: Which artists matter most, what ideas
have slipped from fashion, what old conventions flourish?
Nauman and Bourgeois, as well as the late Eva Hesse and Edward
Kienholz, seem to loom behind the art on view as pioneers,
exemplars. "Treatment With Memories," Ilya Kabakov's stagy
re-creation of a Soviet state hospital, is a lot like a
Kienholz, though gentler by far, and much less succinct. And,
curiously indeed, the spirit of Walt Disney also casts a happy
shadow on the show.
It should be clear by now that you can't tell the complete
story of 20th-century American art while stiffing Norman
Rockwell and leaving out Disney, though most museums try. The
artists at the Whitney are in many ways more tolerant. They
bow to Walt in various ways--in the artificiality of their
installations, in their cartoony markings, their sugary view
of nature and in their deep reliance on technology and toys.
Tony Oursler's portraits--his blinking, full-face videos
projected on plastic eggs--resemble Disneyland's more than
they do Gilbert Stuart's. Pastor's giant shells and
cornstalks, like Disney's smiley nature films, have a way of
making grown-ups feel like kids. The bluebirds flitting
through Marshall's fine, sad-nostalgic paintings are
Disneyesque as well.
But while theatricalism is in, pure abstraction is out. The
whole Pollock-Newman-Stella line of abstract field
painting--which used to be a way of communing with the
void--isn't much respected here. When it shows up it gets
tweaked.
Williams ribs the genre by filling up her fields with high
heels and spread thighs; the cartoony line she uses in "Large
Blue Gold and Itchy" (1996) is nearly as whippy as de
Kooning's. Pittman fills up his with skateboards, radio
telescopes and garish L.A. colors, oranges and pinks. Rhoades,
whose fields are three-dimensional, has filled the one on
view, a zany and enormous piece, with orange cables, rag rugs,
clay-pigeon flingers, ladders, hot dogs, table saws, pork and
beans, and smoke--all as intricately interwoven as Jackson
Pollock's drips. Michael Ashkin's sand table, which winks at
Barnett Newman's monochromes, is a toylike reproduction of an
arid stretch of desert with a tiny blacktop highway (and just
as tiny trucks) cutting it in two like one of Newman's "zips."
Avant-garde artists once forged forward. The Whitney's seem
content recalling what they felt as kids.
Though abstract art is spurned, another old convention--that
of street photography--is treated deferentially, most
admirably by diCorcia. He, too, captures strangers passing in
the street, but he does so with a "flash trap," and with
color, in a way that gives his Ektachromes a kind of
other-worldly drama. Though his street shots pay due homage to
the Paul Strand-Andre Kertesz-Robert Frank tradition, they
still manage to seem new.
Schabel is as indebted to the example of Walker Evans. It's
been nearly 60 years since Evans began to ride the New York
subways, candidly recording the empty faces of the passengers
with a little camera concealed in his coat. Schabel shoots
through airplane windows using a long lens from 1,000 yards
away, and captures the expressions, half-alarmed and
half-resigned, of people taking off.
Once upon a time the planners of these surveys saw it as their
duty to reprise last season's hits. Not any more. This isn't
gallery art. Much of it is unsalable, or nearly so. It isn't
home art, either, for rare is the art collector who has the
room to show it, unless he takes the plunge and gives away his
bed. It is something else. The 1997 Biennial Exhibition is
mostly given over to contemporary art made for institutions
that theatrically display contemporary art.
The exhibition, sponsored by Beck's brewery, closes June 1.
[Four photos] Clockwise from above: Chris Burden's mixed-media
"Pizza City"; Lari Pittman's "Once Awkward, Now Spacious and
Elastic"; and Jennifer Pastor's foam and brass "The Four
Seasons: Untitled (Spring)." Kerry James Marshall's "Our
Town," like so many of the featured works, turn its gaze back
to the past and childhood.
[End]
To see B/W photos:
http://jya.com/wb1.jpg (Burden, Pittman, Pastor)
http://jya.com/wb2.jpg (Marshall)
This review archived at:
http://jya.com/wb97.htm