Art from New York City is the focus of two spring biennial surveys of contemporary American art, at Washington's Corcoran Gallery and New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. But the shows, both major indicators of current trends, give quite different readings.
The dominant art in the Whitney Biennial is slick, cool, conceptual, and campy; Jeff Koons' stainless steel version of a silver balloon bunny might be the iconic image of the show. Homoerotic themes are also prevalent in photographer Bruce Weber's wall of American male pinups, Izhar Patkin's installations based on Jean Genet's play The Blacks, and David McDermott's and Peter McGough's parodies of 1930s art and advertising.
The Corcoran Biennial's choices are painterly and engaged; in Gregory Amenoff's El Santuario de Chimayo, ridges of oozing murky paint press back the upward growth of a rudimentary plant - an image that might refer to ecological concerns or even to the upward struggles of man himself. Sean Scully's tasteful architectural abstractions suggest the muted patinas of old factories and barns.
With a curatorial team of four, more space, and a big budget from the American Can Company Foundation, the Whitney put on a much more elaborate production. Counting its independent film and video section, it had 148 paintings, sculptures, mixed-media works, photographs, films, videos, and installations by seventy-eight artists.
The Corcoran Biennial, on the other hand, is a very slimmed-down affair that concentrates in depth on the works of only thirteen artists. In fact the show is really thirteen one-person shows with a common thread of devotion to the medium of paint.
There is also a major difference in emphasis. The Whitney Biennial traditionally focuses on emerging art; everything in it was created during the past two years. As the collaborative effort of four curators, it generally ends up responding more to market forces than individual connoisseurship.
This year is no exception. Responding to a market swing away from the Expressionist excesses of the early 1980s, the Whitney highlights a fairly compact group of young artists - Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Philip Taaffe, Annette Lemieux, R.M. Fischer, and Nancy Dwyer - who try to marry hard-edged abstraction with a cynical Duchampian twist. Many of the older artists in the Whitney are Minimalists and Conceptualists who seem to have been chosen with an eye to providing this group with a New York School pedigree.
The Corcoran show, on the other hand, reflects the curatorial eagle-eye of Ned Rifkin, now chief curator for exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. His choices are not one- or two-year wonders, but painters who have been working for a substantial period of time at their craft. In addition to their masterly ability in paint handling, most of Rifkin's choices have a real depth of content as well. Elizabeth Murray's beautifully orchestrated, shaped paintings read like poems. Terry Winters, who is also in the Whitney, muses on biological themes with an impresario's flair for rhythm and character.
Altogether Rifkin, with unusual acumen, has encapsulated the rich complexity and renewed
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