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.