Among the 2004 Whitney Biennial’s least successful entries was a room-cum-scrapbook by Raymond Pettibon. Photographs and drawings were pin-tacked to the wall, and intentionally faux-deep statements (“here is another system of philosophy”) were drawn across the walls in a sloppy but self-conscious diary-style cursive.
Much of the Biennial, my first, felt to me like a scrapbook that had replaced pages for walls. I mean this as a compliment, despite my dislike for Pettibon’s work. There was an appealing casualness to the Biennial’s presentation, 108 artists parsed into small white rooms; the exhibit felt intimate, surprising given its scope. And I strolled through the rooms, prompted by the metaphor of a scrapbook, looking for my own memories— uncanny recognitions and unapologetic hits of nostalgia.
The best work felt dreamy, familiar but strange. Eve Sussman’s film, 89 Seconds at Alcazar, unfreezes Velázquez’s Las Meninas. We watch as its characters, the queen, the dwarf, the Infanta Dona Margarita, assemble, and the camera floats lazily between them and then to Velázquez. “Sometimes, they are talking, but what we hear is like the murmur of voices from another room,” Mark Stevens writes for New York Magazine. “The work is uncanny. The characters have stepped out of art into art, our art.”
What follows is a shortlist of “my” art, the Biennial entries that exist in a scrapbook I compose in my dreams and lose upon waking.
Click on images for close-ups.
1. Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water
In the NY Times, Michael Kimmelman writes, "Beauty is the biennial's ultimate defense against naysayers, notwithstanding that it is in the eye of the beholder. My vote for show-stopper is Yayoi Kusama's mirrored room of colored lights and water, which should cause people to line up for a peek."
Mia Fineman writes for Slate, "[Kusama's] room-sized work, Fireflies on the Water, accommodates only one viewer at a time, but this hallucinatory installation of mirrors and sparkly lights reflected to infinity is worth the wait."
The work conflates vanity and beauty; yes, it's beautiful, but you're embedded in its center, as its audience and subject. And then, the vanity it prompts surpasses a simple consideration of yourself, rendered beautiful -- your lone figure stranded on a filmic dock, surrounded by colored lights and their reflections -- and becomes the vanity implicit to any appreciation of art. Beauty exists for us, relies on us for its transcendence from the physical to immaterial. In acknowledging the magical beauty of Fireflies on the Water, we're also, very simply, asked to acknowledge the deeper magic of subjectivity.
2. Cecily Brown, Black Painting 4
In The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl writes, "I can’t decide if established, estimable painters and drafters like Brown, Sillman, Siena, and Pettibon have abruptly improved or if the new authority of their work mirrors the Zeitgeist. In the case of Brown’s sexy Expressionism—nudes in bed, oppressed by darkling atmospheres that are pregnant with demonic intimations—both possibilities seem likely."
Black Painting 4, oil on linen, displays a nude on sheets, above whom blackness -- thick, messy and chaotic -- begins to explode into something else, something darker than blackness. Oscillating between abstraction and a more figurative style, the painting implies both the flesh and grace of the woman's body and the frightening, unfocused quality of dreaming.
3. Amy Cutler, gauches on paper
Fineman writes, "Amy Cutler, whose early work often seemed dry and didactic, is represented here by weird, charming drawings of a fairy-tale world populated by women who turn their dresses into pup tents and carry horses strapped into harnesses on their backs."
Cutler's drawings display an idiomatic intelligence that, when paired with a feminist sense of humor, results in dark, quirky fairy-tales. In one drawing, the phrase "horseback" is parsed into women carrying horses like backpacks. Another drawing, Rations is, according to the Whitney website, a play on the saying "to cut off one's nose to spite one's face." For me, Cutler's work summarized the quirky and unpretentious aspects of the Biennial.
4. Ernesto Caivano, series of ink drawings
From The Globe and Mail's Whitney review: "Fantasy sparkles… in Ernesto Caivano's fanatically detailed drawings of imaginary Philapone birds."
Similarly, Fineman writes, "Ernesto Caivano … renders imaginary creatures called Philapores—flightless birds with elaborate plumage—with a fluid, meticulous line and extraordinary technical finesse."
There's not much more to say about Caivano. His images are beatiful in the way a mathematical equation might be: as coherent as it is intricate, as simple as it is precise.
5. Elzabeth Peyton, Nick (La Luncheonette, December 2002) and Live to Ride (E.P.)
Schjeldahl says, "As for Peyton, the distilled allure of her little pictures makes them, for me, the moral center of the Biennial. Her romantic aestheticism charges her swift line and intense color with a sense of the sacred."
Nick (La Luncheonette, December 2002), awash in a night club blue, is better seen in person. It feels like a still frame from a film: a moment that implies a full night's activity. The paint strokes are long, wispy at their edges, suggesting a moment's transcience. But the colors, primary blues, reds, and yellows, anchor the moment and give it a convincing physicality.
6. Terence Koh, The Whole Family (Bigger)
The catalog notes call The Whole Family "contemporary memento mori," "a blizzard of white, a color signifying death in non-Western cultures." White faux fur pelts, hiding random objects, cover the cubicle-sized installation. Pulling back a pelt, you look into a room coated in "powdery white cornstarch" (catalog notes). White objects are scattered throughout: dangling from the top, a miniature ladder; farther back, an upside-down owl with oversized diamond eyes. The Whole Family feels a little slight, but its blankness was convincingly chilly -- a calm that registers as threatening.
Other highlights:
-Catherine Opie, Untitled (Surfers)
-Sue de Beer, Hans und Grete
-Marina Abramovic, Count On Us
-Mark Handforth, Western Sun and Diamond Brite
-Jim Hodges, Untitled (it's already happened)
-Craigie Horsefield, El Hierro
dwarf and midget links
