Can we call it the Tired Biennial? I mean that in a good way. It was a great show, and I say that even though I gritted my teeth through the whole thing, even though I saw lots of art I didn't like. Even though I went twice, and took notes and was very careful and attentive and still I am sure I did not see everything or get every inside joke. This biennial is not about good or bad, and that is what makes it smart. There are disturbing trends on view, and this makes sense because we live in a disturbing world. And thankfully there are little pockets of redemption scattered amid the piles of rubbish and extra heaping quantities of nostalgia and the word shit everywhere.

I like to start at the top and work my way down. So yes, it does disturb me that the Wrong Gallery has curated an installation on the Mezzanine floor, but not for the reasons you'd think. I am not pissed because curators have been made into artists. I am pissed that artists have become curators. I am pissed because the Wrong Gallery installation makes too much sense, and too-perfectly sets the tone for a biennial that has little invention and imagination to offer. Almost every single thing Subotnik, et. al curated into Down By Law was an artifact or artifact-like: pictures of prison farm inmates with real fingerprints. Real serial killers. Real pictures of poor people. Flat illustration re-enactments of real assasinations and the current president's head. Video verite of a woman who has really waited on GW Bush. And of course Chris Burden's shooting of a Boeing 737 photograph reigns over the whole affair, the granddaddy of artifact and reality art...

...Wait a minute! Chris Burden is one poetic motherfucker! And he used the sheer ballsy beauty and the impossibility of his actions to transform reality. His photograph is spooky and nostalgia-inducing in this post- 9/11 world. Who would consider restaging that one? But more importantly, it stands out in the Wrong Gallery effort as an actual artistic transformation, a poetic gesture captured so that what it evokes becomes more than what it actually is. The rest is strictly Wunderkammer--look at this freaky stuff I've found--whether an artist made it or not. The same sentiment abounds downstairs. Snapshot-look photography, collections of stuff and research-based art are everywhere. I am reminded of that childish Microsoft impulse to call everything "My:" My Documents, My Computer. My Katrina. My Parrot Joke. My Charlie Chaplin Monologue.

The only other generalization I can make is that it all felt so nostalgic. There were a number of heavy-hitters included. Much of the visual language was quite abject. When all this spraypainted shit-rock and sheetrock sits next to older (often more interesting) work, and there's this pervasive drive not to invent or imagine, the result is just deafeningly sorrowful and backward-looking.

I can handle wistfulness and sorrow, so I trudged on. Each floor begins with some pre-nostalgia to get you in the mood, and I love that it comes in the form of obituaries for the living by Adam McEwen (which, incidentally, are funny if you have the patience to read so much text in an already tedious environment). I love Rudolph Stingel's big unhappy and tired self-portrait--the Biennial mascot. I love the way he contemplates the Urs Fischer's swinging silver sticks as if to say "this, too, shall pass," and I love that the silver sticks are the hourglass of this biennial and will (hopefully) stop swinging soon because they will be frozen in hardened stalagtites of waxy buildup.

Adding to the nostalgia--speaking of Urs Fischer, I love Gordon Matta Clark! This is starting to feel like a greatest hits album. Are Robert Gober and Steven Parrino here to do anything other than make the younguns look like they need to get out and live more? Play with materials? Maybe do some funky experiments with their cameras? Pairing Parrino and Koether was a no-brainer, but she suffered for it here. Another slightly cruel, but more curatorially clever pairing was Monica Majoli's watercolors of extreme S&M scenarios next to Serra's Abu Ghraib redux. Opening night I was convinced that Majoli looked lightweight next to the more strident and defiant Serra. On second viewing, it was obvious that I was wrong. Stop Bush, indeed. Majoli's watercolors are tender and ambiguous and tend to transcend their research material. Serra managed to turn someone else's torture into a t-shirt design. This show skewered more than one blue-chip modernist who sincerely engaged the protest rhetoric of yesteryear to bad effect. Consistently clever on the part of Iles and Vergne, but I am not sure why they chose to beat this horse so thoroughly. We all know modernism won't save us. What do we learn by watching it fail on such a grand scale? It broke my heart to see the Whitney literally swallowing up the Peace Tower.

My Icons by Kenneth Anger... and suddenly I am really starting to see all the ways that this show is a big fat reality sandwich. It isn't just that drive to present My Things. More subtle, but equally flat insistence on reality is everywhere. It's in Gedi Sibony's janky low-pile formalism, which recalls, of all things, a past show at the Whitney. This manages to create instant insider nostalgia using the least generous tools at hand. The echo chamber at its finest! In Dan Colen's ridiculously easy fake rocks. The material reality of these rocks is just like the art world. They come with their own commentary, are extremely lightweight but attempt to masquerade both as cultural foundations and as bad-boy nihilism. They can also fit neatly into the bed of a small pickup truck, no need to bother anyone, really. Eat shit and die, please!

Reality, inside and outside the Whitney, is overwhelmingly bleak. Pawing through all this detritus and rearranging it again and again just to showcase one artist's individuality at a time only highlights that bleakness, and adds loneliness. And looking into the past, whether it's the Smithson exhibit or the (now commodified) rhetoric of protest, just magnifies all that bleak loneliness.

But I am an optimist. In fact, every single time I thought about canning it because this show was giving me more wistfulness and sorrow than I could swallow, some brilliant sweetheart of an artist actually delivered what I need to keep living in this truly fucked up time. Paul Chan's 1st Light seduced me and allowed me to laugh at myself. Yes, I do feel like everything's drifting away! Thank you, you generous creature! Francesco Vezzoli's Caligula trailer was hysterical and appropriate. Cameron Jamie's Kranky Klaus worked some serious magic, especially before I did my Krampus research. The action consists mainly of masked jingle-butted monsters in fur seriously messing up well-meaning folks who are just out having a drink or going to the pharmacy. And the funny part is that these people, who are getting their faces rubbed in snow and their shirts pulled off by really loud scary beasts, seem slightly amused, slightly worried, and very patient. Sure, every now and again a little girl cries or a little boy gives a true WTF? look. These little glimpses of what I would do in a similar situation only make everybody else's playing along more surreal. In America, Kranky Klaus reads as an institution out of control, a freaky meditation on complacency that carries real political weight. It is a deft sidestep that avoids the Serra/diSuvero pitfall because it isn't a slogan or a manifesto, and as such doesn't depend on the artist's power to back up its message.

Here's the takeaway: There is healing, generous work tucked into the 2006 Biennial. And all of it breaks away from the larger slavish attention to reality, makes no use of the artist-as-curator/researcher impulse, and denies nostalgia. The future is in dreaming and twisting, and in admitting how powerless we actually are. And that seems right, doesn't it? After all, we have to imagine our way out of the current mess.

Props to Friend of Greenpoint Sculpture

Alex Villar refuses to mind the gap at Smack Mellon. Worth a look!

Rough Draft:

Can we call it the Tired biennial? And I mean that in a good way, in a "Yes I do feel deeply tired as an American in this American night?" It was a great show, and I say that even though I gritted my teeth through the whole thing. Even though I want to kick Dan Colen into Dash Snow and watch them tumble down a flight of stairs like the hipster Terrence and Philip they are. It is fitting that they were a part of this biennial, which is not about good or bad, and that is what makes it smart. There are disturbing trends in this biennial, which makes sense because we live in a disturbing world. And thankfully there are little pockets of redemption scattered amid the piles of rubbish and extra heaping quantities of nostalgia and the word shit everywhere.

I like to start at the top and work my way down. So yes, it does disturb me that the Wrong Gallery has curated an installation on the Mezzanine floor. But not for the reasons you'd think. Yes, yes, I will eventually make my case that art should be more than arranging a bunch of stuff (apologies to Haim Steinbach). But I am not pissed because curators have been made into artists. I am pissed that artists have become curators. I am pissed because the Wrong Gallery installation makes perfect visual sense, and sets the tone for a truly bleak show. Almost every single thing they curated into their outlaw show was an artifact or artifact-like: pictures of prison farm inmates with real fingerprints. Real serial killers. Real pictures of poor people. Flat illustration re-enactments of real assasinations. Really visually boring video of a woman who has really waited on GW Bush. And of course Chris Burden's shooting of a Boeing 737 photograph reigns over the whole affair, the granddaddy of artifact and reality art.

Wait a minute. Chris Burden is one poetic motherfucker! And he used the sheer ballsy beauty and impossibility of what he was doing to transform reality. His photograph is spooky and nostalgia-inducing in this post- 9/11 world... who would consider restaging that one? But more important, it stands out in this curated affair as an actual artistic transformation, a poetic gesture captured so that what it evokes stands on its own two feet, becomes more than what it actually is. The rest is strictly Wunderkammer--look at this freaky stuff I've found. The same sentiment abounds in artists who are addicted to arcane research and using specific cool things as material, and it's no different from that childish Microsoft impulse to call everything "My:" My Documents, My Computer, My Favorite Network Places. My Buttplug. My Interest in Something Obscure.

This slavish attachment to reality and indulgence in nostalgia pervades the rest of the show downstairs. I've got to hand it to the Wrong Gallery folks. They definitely have their fingers on the pulse. I felt completely prepared for what lay ahead. I love that each floor begins with some pre-nostalgia to get you in the mood, and I love that it comes in the form of obituaries (which, incidentally are not unfunny if you have the patience to read so much text in a very reading-glasses show). I love Rudolph Stengler's big unhappy and tired man, who is really the mascot for this show. I love the way he contemplates the swinging silver sticks as if to say "this too shall pass," and I love that the silver sticks are the hourglass of this biennial and will hopefully stop swinging soon because they will be caught in hardened stalagtites of wax. There is a finite space between the candle and the floor, and they put new candles in three or four times a day. Waxy buildup.

And more nostalgia--speaking of Urs Fischer, I love Gordon Matta Clark! This is starting to feel like a greatest hits album. Are Gober and Steven Parrino here to do anything other than make the younguns look like they need to get out and live more? Maybe do some funky experiments with their cameras? Pairing Parrino and Koether was cruel, but not half as cruel (or clever)as Majoli and Serra. The night of the opening I was convinced that Majoli looked lightweight next to the more strident and defiant Serra. But on second viewing, it was obvious that I was wrong. Stop Bush, indeed. Majoli's watercolors are tender and ambiguous and tend to transcend their research material. Serra managed to turn someone else's torture into a t-shirt design. It was a statement of powerlessness in this context. This show skewered a few blue-chip modernists who felt compelled (were enticed?) to sincerely engage the protest rhetoric of yesteryear to bad effect. I am not sure that this was an effective curatorial strategy. It felt more snarky than illuminating.

My Icons full in effect by Kenneth Anger... and suddenly I am really starting to see all the ways that this show is a big fat reality sandwich. It isn't just that curatorial drive to present My Cool Things. More subtle, but equally flat insistence on reality is everywhere. It's in Gedi Sibony's janky low-pile formalism, which evokes, of all things, a past show at the Whitney. This manages to create instant insider nostalgia using the least generous tools at hand. The echo chamber at its finest! In Dan Colen's ridiculously easy fake rocks. The material reality of these rocks is just like the art world. They come with their own commentary, are extremely lightweight but attempt to masquerade both as cultural foundations and as bad-boy nihilism. They can also fit neatly into the bed of a small pickup truck. No muss, no fuss. Eat shit and die, please!

We all seem to agree that things are looking pretty bleak. Pawing through our detritus and rearranging it to highlight our individuality only highlights that bleakness, and adds lonliness. And looking into the past, whether it's the Smithson exhibit or the (now commodified) rhetoric of protest, just magnifies all that bleak lonliness. Maybe this should be the Head In The Oven biennial...

... but I am an optimist. In fact, every single time I thought about canning it because this show was giving life to some deeply negative thoughts, some brilliant sweetheart of an artist actually delivered what I need to keep living in this truly fucked up time. Paul Chan's 1st Light seduced me and actually made all my fears come true for a minute and allowed me to laugh at myself. Yes, I do feel like everything's drifting apart! Thank you, you generous creature! The Caligula trailer was hysterical and appropriate. Cameron Jamie's Kranky Klaus worked some serious magic, especially before I did my Krampus research. As I was watching, all I could think was "This institution is a menace! Why are people okay with this?" Mean-maskfaced jingle-butted monsters in fur seriously messing up well-meaning folks who are just out having a drink or going to the pharmacy. And the funny part is that these people, who are getting their faces rubbed in snow and their shirts pulled off by really loud scary beasts, seem slightly amused, slightly worried, and very patient. Sure, every now and again a little girl cries or a little boy gives a true What Is This? look. These little glimpses of what I would do in such a situation only make everybody else's playing along more surreal. I left Kranky Klaus with a better understanding of what I find so eerie about much of life in America today. It's the complacency. And I think that Jamie is one smart cookie for manipulating a particularly freakish Austrian tradition (apparently these people deal with jingle-butted monsters every year) in such a deft way.

Takeaway:

Everything that was healing and generous broke away from the larger slavish attention to reality, the curatorial/research impulse, and nostalgia. The future is in dreaming and twisting. And that seems right, doesn't it? After all, we have to imagine our way out of the current mess.

I'm off to revisit the Biennial tomorrow afternoon. I actually managed to get paid to review it! Work in progress will be viewable over the weekend and I would really appreciate comments.

http://fromthefloor.blogspot.com/2006/02/news-flash-curators-are-not-artists.html

...in case anyone wants to read *more* about The Problematic Biennial.

Biennial Biennial Biennial!

How can I hate a Biennial I can't stop thinking about? I am looking forward to seeing the Biennial again today and watching the diSuvero/Rikrit talk and seeing what kind of sense can be made of this Gawky Adolescent But Maybe A Harbinger of Growth and Change biennial.

Something had to happen--the 2004 WB was an Oscar Wilde Ugly Gilded Dismissal of the Real World. But here is the problem. What kind of Response Art do we have to organize a Response Show? What can artists do? Iles gave us what is out there:

1. Old School Manifestoism, exemplified by the Peace Tower, represented by a handful of blue-chippy heavy hitters like Serra, Larner, Gober, etc.
2. A generation of younger artists raised on reletavism and postmodern theory, who know manifestoism is a dead end and are kinda flopping around trying for something else. Small, ironic and maddeningly self-aware and hermetic gestures predominate. Integrity comes from without. Artists rely heavily on Research and Art History for support. Janky low-pile carpet formalism, spearing Brancusi, Eat Shit and Die rocks. Inexplicable twig art. Rehashing Gordon Matta Clark. Pretty conte drawings of things. But they are dark, see. Dark drawings.

The result in the immediate moment is painful display of how utterly fucked we are. Is my generation really this feeble? Is art really this powerless?

Yes.

I can't speak for artists everywhere, but my education was a mobius strip, not a foundation that grounded me in any fundamental sense. I have been trained as a college graduate to see and seek absences of integrity.

(This is as it should be. I am not wishing to go backward and live when Peace Towers made sense.)

But what is this generation left with when everything is relative? Where does one find integrity? Now that something really bad is happening, where is my voice? What can I do, knowing that a peace tower coming out of my generation is hollow and silly and ineffective?

When Mark protests the war, he has this sense that he can represent other people and The Truth. Younger artists know better. We know that the whole world is subjective and that point of view shifts, and so what we think matters very little, and that what Cheney thinks matters a lot. Postmodern theory was supposed to destabilize the Establishment, but all it wound up doing was affirming how powerless most of us are.

The War Does Not Make Us Happy. (But it makes W happy, and we can't do anything about that, so we are going to pack up our spraypaint and go watch a movie and make some art that is all about ourselves and how powerless we are.)

Ugh! How to get beyond these tiny ironic gestures that are so full of self-awareness that they can't be about anything else? I am ready to go into any art context and see some kind of common truth, even if I am not prepared to believe Mark's Big Truth.

Kimmelman dismissed the manifesto-driven Peace Tower and he is right to do so. It is satisfying on a very basic level, but it just misses the point. A manifesto is a statement that objectifies your world view and represents your beliefs in the round. It is your truth becoming The Truth. And that concept is sweet but ineffective. Big Truth is someone else's Big Lie--the whole enterprise smacks either of naivete or wanting to put something over on someone.

But Iles *must* have been thinking something when she put the floppy, flaccid thirty- and twenty-somethings next to the Peace Tower, Serra, Hammons, Larner (to some degree) and Gober. I am an optimist. I want to see this "Well, We Are Powerless And So Is Our Nostalgia" curatorial statement as a demand to cowboy up. Artists can't have Mark's sense of objective truth, but that doesn't mean that art has to lack integrity and subsist merely as a "barnacle on the bottom of the cruise ship of popular culture."

Maybe it's the particle smashing biennial. If you smash heavy steel particles like Serra and diSuvero with paper mache particles like Dan Colen's, then perhaps that conflict creates new particles that understand that little-t truths are okay, and that knowing how much you don't know creates a very different (and much more powerful) integrity than being aligned with some collective myth of objective truth.

More thoughts on the biennial, comparing it to last year's biennial:

The 2004 biennial was really pretty and stupid and vapid and consensus-building and left me feeling really cold because the world was too fucked up for art this beautiful.

Okay, so this year the biennial is ugly and the splash screen for the biennial's web page says that the whitney believes that together we can defeat bush. A direct response, and Iles was part of the team curating last year. Step in the right direction? And what on earth do spraypainted silver sticks swinging wax have to do with defeating Bush? Why did Iles set it up so that resistance is the theme, really (day into night my left eye), and in so doing set younger artists up to fail and look stupid?

Does she really do this, or were the galleries too full for me to really see what was going on? Disclaimer: the place was mobbed, and I do intend to see the show again when it's not a madhouse.

And what about beauty? Is the world too fucked up for art to be beautiful at all? Is the only response to an ugly time ugly art?

Because I think that times are so terrible that the only helpful response is extremely beautiful art that confronts what is actually happening. I see a massive turning away, and why not? If any artist can make the world something to look at again, isn't that useful? Isn't that the first step to actually helping?

Or is it ridiculous dreaming to assume that art means anything to the larger culture anymore? Kimmelman in today's paper talked about the biennial in terms of art's neutered status. He called art a barnacle clinging to the ship of popular culture. He's right.

First Impressions of That Heinous Whitney Biennial:

Fallon and Rossof are digging this angry show, the anger makes sense to them. Okay. These are angry times. It makes sense to be angry.

http://www.fallonandrosof.com/artblog.html

But what does one DO with anger? And is this a decent response to anger? I am reminded of a graduate school moment: some knucklehead art history grad student's anti war sign: War Will Not Make Us Happy. A cutting, ironic commentary on consumerist culture? Or is it ever... inappropriate to be so self-aware?

My problem with this show is that it pits young against old in a grand display of Everything Can Be Co-Opted. Why is it that Mark diSuvero, Serra and Liz Larner are submitting actual angry thoughts, while the young 'uns are content with holes in fake walls (puh-leeze!) and fake rocks on top of cutouts of the words Eat Shit And Die?

Mark can make a Peace Tower that at *least* proclaims: I am bigger than my physical body, and I can say something very large because THIS is a large problem. And what I say can be a positive and affirming statement of what I want and how powerful I am in this equation. It is an indignant shout at the very least, and it embodies a certain kind of optimism.

Matthew Day Jackson is busy spearing Brancusi and hatin' on Dan Flavin. Again, anger...but at what? Righteous, indignant anger about something that actually impacts the real world and people? Or abject anger that has no point except to do this avant-garde thing correctly?

Again, I am reminded of graduate school. JP Gorin invites us to his studio because he wants us to "fuck it up--destroy the building, I want the wall between my studio and Louis Hock's studio gone!"

So we did. We all took him very literally and took the drywall off one wall and spraypainted another and rummaged through his things. And although JP's gigantic ego guarantees that he will bring these kinds of misinterpretations on himself all the time and I certainly don't *blame* us for attacking his ego, I have never been sorrier about that night than I am right now, thinking about the Whitney.

He was asking us to show him what we've got. He was asking to get really fucked, in an alive way, with lots of kisses and sucking, slurping sounds and maybe his head and shoulder pushed up against a wall in an uncomfortable position. He wanted a positive statement about what we could do, and he was willing to put that on himself--he was willing to let it be done to him.

Instead of fucking him, even fucking him in an ugly hateful way, we took his clothes in an ironic commentary about how ridiculous *his* behavior was and left him having to explain why his studio needs to be repainted and plastered.

We cut off our own noses to spite JP's face. We did nothing. I am sorry because the gesture was so essentially negative. It was nothing more than a negation of JP's desire.

Back at the Whitney, it looks like this Tyrrany of Negation is not some local San Diego problem. I am depressed. There has to be a better way.