THE BROOKLYN RAIL

2004 Whitney Biennial
Whitney Museum of American Art
Through May 30, 2004
by Megan Heuer
April 2004

Marina Abramovi´c, still from "Count on Us" (2003), video installation.
Collection of the artist; courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Funded by the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan.

The 2004 Whitney Biennial is easy to like. A myriad of materials flies in a colorful array of forms. But as a whole, the show never moves beyond the decorative. Perhaps this is a function of the venue rather than a curatorial failing: installing a massive group show of contemporary art in a museum asks that the work appeal to a mainstream audience and fit into the antiseptic white walls of the institution in a way in which other large festival shows do not require. Or maybe it was the fortuitous convergence of the opening with the Armory Show, that massive weekend art-buying frenzy, which made the Biennial seem like more of a showroom than a thought-provoking survey.

The curatorial introduction notes the American political climate in the wake of 9/11. Yet politics are present either literally, as in Andrea Bower and Sam Durant’s drawings of 1960s protesters, or obliquely through a juxtaposition like Julie Merhetu and Tam Van Tran, two of a very select group of artists of color, who both work with abstract vocabularies that evoke identity through geography and material. Roni Horn’s photographs mounted on stanchions offer a piece of the artist’s continuing investigation of difference in identity with the motif of landscape and portraiture, but lack the subtly of her Thames pictures or her two part exhibition at Dia. Tom Burr’s "Blackout Bar" (2003) might be about the crackdown on nightlife, but it is ultimately frozen in its S&M aesthetic.

The darlings of the recent trend dubbed the Gothic, Banks Violette, Aïda Ruilova, and Sue de Beer, are all here, but their work feels more like surrealism than a romantic sublime in the obsession with literal depictions of dreams, violence, and sex. Violette’s theatrical installation hinges on the shiny black surfaces of melting musical paraphernalia, a stunning example of the superficiality of the curatorial notion of "materiality." The difficulty most of the work has transcending surface to explore materials and making is also evident in Matthew Ronay’s s neatly molded plastic body parts, which aspire to abjection but remain stuck in objectness. James Siena’s small abstractions, Amy Sillman’s colorful canvases, and Jim Hodges’s cutout photograph-cum-sculpture are better examples of the mania for making as they capitalize on the difference between obsession and control: the obsessive working of materials result in "flaws"—Siena’s wavering lines, Sillman’s gestural patchworks, and Hodges’s flopping leaves—that become the works’ surprising strength. Overall, there is little left to chance—a powerful, funny, tragic, and beautiful element to which the current sprawling Dieter Roth retrospective noisily attests.

Cory Arcangel & Beige, "Super Mario Clouds v2k3" (2003), hacked Super Mario game cartridge. Handmade edition of five. Courtesy Team Gallery.

Although it goes unacknowledged by the curators, the influence of long ignored twentieth century European avant-garde artists like Roth is present and more exciting than the rehashed minimalist/post-minimalist discourse. Ice Floes from Franz Joseph Land (2003), Catherine Sullivan’s five-channel black-and-white film installation of antic scenes of Cold War machinations played out in dada theatre is a brilliant example. Sullivan’s dada sensibility suggests the absurdity of nostalgia, rather than the sentimental melancholia present in Dario Robleto’s dusty objects or Jeremy Blake’s ode to 1960s London. Rob Fischer’s "dumpster" is reminiscent of an early Arman accumulation, a personal portrait made of waste, writ large with discarded furniture rather than lipstick and hankies. But the objects in Fischer’s version seem too clean to be trash: the dumpster is made of glass and it is difficult to fathom that it contains anything that would truly be considered garbage. There is nothing personal in such a glossy dustbin. Which points to the larger problem of influence: the similarities in the work of younger artists reveal formal imitation rather than visual dialogue.

*Barnaby Furnas, "Hamburger Hill" (2002), urethane on liner. Collection of Dean Valentine and Amy Adelson, Los Angeles; courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. Photograph by Jean Vong.*

In a reversal of Larry Rinder’s visionary (if misguided) approach to the 2002 Biennial, the 2004 edition seems to want to be a pulse taking of the art world rather than a show of unknowns. But the pulse is weak. Debra Singer, Shamim M. Momin, and Chrissie Iles do present a nice summation of recent work, but they have no vision of the future. Instead of the weird, shamanistic homemade craftiness of Forcefield in 2002, this year’s Biennial presents the slick anodyne rave installation of assume vivid astro focus. To say the show is decorative isn’t to say that the work is all pretty. But since it is so self-consciously striving to look good, the more disturbing and powerful work is subsumed under more superficial connections. The erotics of painting in both of Richard Prince’s sculptural car hoods, trashy-looking yet sensually covered with expressionist gray brushstrokes, and Cecily Brown’s prone nudes are lost for a more obvious grouping with Chloe Piene’s masturbator drawings, which have more to do with sensation than sex. The pathetic and the unrefined, epitomized by Paul McCarthy’s crude sexuality and physicality, is largely absent—cleaned up into a tidy installation by Christian Holstad—as even McCarthy is sanitized in two very public installations. For the most part, there is nothing that might offend and nothing willing to fail.

Piene’s feral sensuality and deft technological manipulation manages one of the only sublime visual experiences in her video "Blackmouth" (2003). Performance artist Julie Atlas Muz’s sparkling combination of kitsch, politics, and the body have a twisted, ferocious sexuality that highlights the timidity of most of the other work, but unfortunately her nude appearance at the opening party is not repeated daily for the long lines waiting to enter Yayoi Kusama’s installation like an amusement park ride (although Atlas Muz’s inclusion in the performance art schedule is indicative of the impressive lineup). Also strong are Catherine Opie’s Surfers. The photographs might be mistaken for four monochrome gray vertical rectangles with the subtle tonality of a Rothko, but at the right distance, the pictures reveal groups of surfers waiting for waves in a still ocean bathed in fog. Opie’s images have a subtle sense of place in their articulation of a relationship between surfers, ocean, and artist.

Julie Atlas Muz onstage in red bikini, Fez Under Time café, NYC 2001. Courtesy of Lisa Kereszi/Pierogi.

In the week following the Biennial’s opening, I saw Atlas Muz perform her signature piece "I am the Moon." Naked save for a thick coat of blue glitter, Muz dances to Mexican burlesque music, an animated ex-voto painting of a lunar goddess. Joined by a man covered in black glitter, they perform a duet in which he flies a spaceship to her moon. She bends over and he lands the shuttle on her back and, like a proud astronaut, places an American flag in her anus. Muz manages to make her exhibitionism gesture towards the vulnerable strength of the body in a funny yet political combination of visual and performance art. Unlike so much of the work in 2004 Biennial, "I am the Moon" is about sensation and experience, not literal renderings of events