InLiquid Articles - 2002 Whitney Biennial

2002 WHITNEY BIENNIAL reviewed by James Rosenthal

Roxy Paine, Bluff

The curators at the Whitney cast a wide net for the 2002 Biennial. Featuring 113 artists and teams of artists, they hoped to pay tribute to the variety of artistic practice and show some of the 'conflicting currents' prevalent today. This they do, but by focusing on variety the relationship between the individual artworks suffered from ambivalence.

Two works, in particular, stood alone. An extraordinary piece of public art, Roxy Paine's 50 foot steel tree, in Central Park, stole this show. Entitled Bluff, it hinted at how ideas, art and artifice blend, can be made real and eventually be taken for real. A truly inspired fake, down to the mushrooms sprouting from the trunk. Understated and superbly crafted, its presence in the park within the context of Olmsteads' 'civilized' nature was compelling, an odd twist on the usual wooly sort of environmentally friendly outdoor art made these days. It did not seem to bother the sweaty volleyball players beneath. A close second to this outdoor art, and another sort of hallucinatory piece, was Robert Lazzarini's distorted phone booth. With a severe physical stretch possibly referencing Holbein's The Ambassadors with its distorted skull and death metaphor, this was a masterful example of Photoshop and CAD made real. Nearly identical to the normally shaped object apart for the distortion, it seemed to be ripped out of some special effects sequence of a strange science fiction film. Highly dramatic. And, as in Paine's piece, the craftsmanship allowed the trick to work well.

As for the rest of the show? Major surveys like this serve a purpose but inevitably lack cohesion as exhibitions. Some heavy hitters seemed to be missing here but lots of young folk got a shot at the prize. Unfortunately, as art becomes as divergent as the individuals who produce it, it seems prudent to ask what is its purpose and is it too wide-ranging for mere curators to encapsulate. It is akin to a huge filing cabinet with too many files and too many categories. This latest attempt to collate these loose ends becomes a general mish-mash with tiny examples of each kind that are all over the map. This explains the overstretched quality of this show. Is this best work being done by the best new artists around? Yeah, maybe. Who knows? There are a lot of blanket statements about the state of the world or the state of America, and certainly a keen interest in its technological fetish. The constant re-evaluation of the state of art itself, a not very attractive self-obsession, is also in evidence. It purposelessly checks itself in the mirror to gauge its hip factor. Strangely, there's a mundane profusion of sameness rather than difference. The internet work with specially designed software is mostly fussy stuff with extraneous content that seems to say little. All the computerized works and games seem directed at readers of Wired magazine. Science projects don't necessarily make good art and all these finicky bits have a monotonous delivery that lacks soul. Perhaps, in 2004, there will be nothing left of art that one merely looks at. It will be all interactive, keys and screens in darkened rooms.

This disparity between low and high tech left not a lot in between. Luckily, there was little painting, because it did not shine. My bias is certainly with the low-tech installation which held its own against the more highly polished works. The late Margaret Kilgallon's graphic style was handsome as usual; the piece, Main Drag was a re-installed version which was last seen at "East Meets West" at the ICA in 2001. Also from "East meets West," Chris Johanson dominated the stairway and his installation worked on its own terms. Destroy All Monster's room-filled homage to Detroit was OK, but the Force Field piece by members of Providence's Fort Thunder got the funny award. Their darkened room full of space monsters, all glowing eyes, metal and fur, looked forward to this summer's Star Wars epic.

Par for the course. Contemporary American art proceeds outward onto a vast plateau with diverse commentary in no single direction, an inbuilt generation gap, and much political correctness concerning the spectacle that is our approximate environment, however benign. Only when some strange American ingenuity comes into play does anything worthwhile happen.