THE BROOKLYN RAIL

2004 Whitney Biennial
Whitney Museum of American Art
Through May 30, 2004
by Nick Stillman
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.

In the wake of backlash against huge group shows like Documenta 11 ("too political—where’s the art?") and the Venice Biennale ("too difficult"), this year’s Whitney Biennial, if nothing else, will be remembered as a Biennial for the people. The 2004 Biennial is a colorful snapshot of American art au courant, mixing lots of very young artists with vets like Yayoi Kusama and Paul McCarthy, whose work is framed as influential for younger artists working today. The Biennial is always popular to trash, and the curators usually end up serving as the critical punching bags. But with this year’s incarnation, curators Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer should be credited with assembling a Biennial that very accurately documents what’s now in American art, for better or worse.

The curatorial arrangement is very deliberate, with photographers like Alec Soth and Katy Grannan penned up in the same room and, similarly, "serious" political artists like Marina Abramovi´c, Andrea Bowers, and Emily Jacir all within a few feet of each other. The political gravitas of Jacir’s Where We Come From series (2001-2003) frankly feels out of place in this show. By offering to complete alternately weighty ("place flowers on my mother’s grave in Jerusalem and pray") and circumstantial ("play soccer with the first Palestinian boy you see on the street") favors for displaced Palestinians who aren’t able to re-enter the country, Jacir’s conceptual-activist project grimly exposes the very real hardships suffered as a consequence of the seemingly never-ending story of strife between Palestinians and Israel. Abramovi´c’s five-channel video installation "Count on Us" (2003)—which includes a screen showing her in a skeleton costume conducting a choir of children singing "The UN is now a symbol of peace"—hypnotically, if somewhat manipulatively, uses fresh-faced kids to promote a message of peace. Then, right outside Abramovi´c’s room, are Bowers’s drawings of female activists protesting nuclear test sites in the early 1980s. Whew! Now that the serious stuff is out of the way, we can move on.

A few other artists attempt political commentary, although their style is more in keeping with the glitzy pop that dominates the show. Sam Durant’s drawings of Black Panther protesters feel like teenage fan art, and Barnaby Furnas’s violent paintings of suited figures getting their brains blown out are spectacular and even sort of pretty, but do they really represent profound thought about American warmongering? A little obvious, perhaps.

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

Really, this is a Biennial about color, flash, and fun, and great lengths are taken to show older artists as (mostly formal) influences on the youngsters. Color-saturated films by Jack Goldstein and Stan Brakhage act as precursors for sensory-overload installations by assume vivid astro focus and Katie Grinnan. Similarly, James Siena’s meticulous formalism presides over much of the loopy installations, drawings, and paintings. Kusama’s "Fireflies on the Water" (2002) is the most epic piece in the show, although guards shuttled viewers in and out of the one-at-a-time installation like they were herding cattle. The piece is an entirely mirror-covered room with multicolored lights hanging from the ceiling, giving the impression of an infinite, peaceful, psychedelic, and utopian netherworld. A room of Raymond Pettibon ink drawings called "Title on the Line" (2004) is a showstopper, and proof that work made in a slack, doodling style can engage issues of content, as opposed to withdrawing into escapism that can only be judged on form alone. His signature ink drawings are especially nasty, all chest-thumping Americana and decontexualized quotes from political figures ("The girls too?"—George W. Bush, The Public Interest, Summer 2004) juxtaposed with proudly garish birds, like a peacock, over which Pettibon has scrawled "To make themselves heard." Muscular male nudes are buried in the room’s corners, triumphantly lofting torches—politicians equal Greek Gods equal state birds, all flexing and strutting, heroically acting with fiery impulse, like the drawing on which Pettibon writes, "There was a light at the end of the tunnel, so he shot at it."

*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.*

Julie Mehretu titles one of her large, doodle-y paintings "Rise of the New Suprematists" (2003). Perhaps the New Suprematists are myriad artists concerned mostly with style, fashion, and handicraft in this show whose concept of art totally rejects Pettibon’s engagement with the social, political, and economic issues "real people" deal with. The overwhelming majority of the work in the 2004 Whitney Biennial is dealing with issues of form and the freedom of materials—the craft of making art. Although much of this work is either completely personal or allusive to a masked narrative, several pieces have a vague element of danger about them—like David Altmejd’s sculptural arrangements including gothic werewolf skulls and Terence Koh’s small room filled with white powder, a small knife hanging on the wall. Sue de Beer’s video installation environment "Hans und Grete" (2002) contains similar overtones. De Beer has arranged the obligatory multi-channel video screens juxtaposing teens chilling in their bedrooms, reading magazines, smoking, twirling guns. The room’s carpet is fluffy and pink, there are amps hanging around, and there are big stuffed animals that the audience is invited to sit on. If the point is that suburban kids are bored and resorting to smoking and violence for sport, well, that’s not a new phenomenon, and the theme is pursed much more evocatively in Gus van Sant’s newest film Elephant as well as in A.R.E.Weapons’s music. The piece is heavy-handed, awkward, and blank without really meaning to be.

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

Hence the perfection of Cory Arcangel/ BEIGE’s "Super Mario Clouds v2k3" (2003). The piece is a projection of a hacked Super Mario Brothers Nintendo cartridge, manipulated so that you only see the clouds scrolling by endlessly, accompanied by "Rudy’s Cake Walk" a BEIGE-programmed techno song (utilizing only Nintendo sounds) dinkily emanating from a busted-looking sound system. Arcangel’s piece revels in vacancy and banality, conflating it with the art world’s ubiquitous retro-nostalgia. And the connotations are ambiguous and unsettling—like a big fat question mark hovering over couch-sitters who pass time with video games or television—but without preachy value judgments or lame nostalgia. Virgil Marti’s "Grow Room 3" (2004) occupies all of the adjacent room. A blandly psychedelic hall of curved mirrors with flowery print-on patination, "Grow Room 3" encapsulates the dim feel-goodism of this Biennial, which will be loved by soccer moms, NASCAR dads, and their kids alike for its colorfully vacant accessibility.