The 1989 Whitney Biennial is not the worst such exhibition in recent memory. That honor goes to the Whitney Biennial of 1985, which was so utterly awful that the present exhibition can only be seen as an improvement, however marginally.
The Whitney's biennial exhibitions are the closest we have to an official Salon on the American art scene. In the cramped spaces on the second and fourth floors of the Marcel Breuer structure on Madison Avenue, the curators have tried to show what they believe to be the best and most representative art created by Americans over the past two years.
Nobody actually likes the Whitney Biennials, although, paradoxically, everyone does enjoy them. People dislike them because their venue confers a quasi-official status to the art exhibited, and many in the art world are congenitally allergic to anything smacking of officialdom. In addition, everyone can think of artists whose exclusion seems as pointless and unfair as is the inclusion of those few who have passed muster with the curators.
These exhibitions are popular precisely because so much prestige surrounds them. No one knows what will go on exhibit until the doors are opened to the expectant public, and the works themselves are often created in situ just days before the opening, thus lending a sense of urgency and drama to the whole affair. Until the seventies, these exhibitions were an annual event; it might not be a bad thing to revive that periodicity.
In the aftermath of the 1985 exhibition, critics, including the present writer, have become more indulgent with the Whitney. We are perhaps as weary from throwing punches as the curators are from sustaining them, and at this point we all want to rest in peace. What is most remarkable about this latest exhibition, as expressed in the introduction to the surprisingly useful and well-thought-out catalog prepared by the three curators--Richard Armstrong, Richard Marshall, and Lisa Phillips--is a sense of wounded world-weariness. Aware that they are exposing themselves to ridicule, the curators apparently hope to deflect and defuse it by confronting it head-on. Admitting for the first time the meretriciousness of the art market, they state that "capitalism has overtaken contemporary art, quantifying it and reducing it to the status of a commodity. Ours is a system adrift in mortgaged goods and obsessed with accumulation, where the spectacle of art consumption has been played out in a public forum geared to journalistic hyperbole."
The present exhibition features paintings, sculptures, some photography, works in mixed media, and videos. It is less cluttered than former biennials: Forty-one artists are in the show as compared to fifty-four in 1985. Most are represented with three works and some with only one, as opposed to two works, irrespective of size, allotted each artist four years ago.
Before discussing the actual works in the biennial, I must in all fairness admit my bias. As far as I am concerned, art can and does have broader implications than merely artistic ones: but no art can be sustained or redeemed solely by the force of its message. Propaganda, pornography, and advertising, all of which may use artistic means, do not need to be artistically excellent to be effective as what they are. But the excellence of art must be artistic excellence, or else it means nothing. This
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