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.