WHITNEY'S TEPID BIENNIAL

Sleet spattered over VIPs queuing outside for the opening of the Whitney Biennial on February 23rd. We suffered in silence, in darkness, our conversations drowned by the monastic groaning of an outdoor installation that cast an eerie blue hue. Dumpling trucks prowled and rogue cameramen interviewed some on a scrap of red carpet. We inched along as the storm intensified, sentries sifting us into various purgatories.

Once inside, past menacing squads of security officers and Blackberry-wielding event planners, we were rewarded with heat, light, DJed electronica, crowds, food, wine and, eventually, art. We began our tallying for our respective cost-benefit analyses: was it worth the wait?

The Biennial spans three floors—more when counting "Collecting Biennials", a nearly year-long show of permanent-collection works by artists featured in Biennials past, in celebration of the show’s 75th year. Francesco Bonami, this year’s co-curator, broke it down for us: floor four is “spectacle”, three is “video” (the first Biennial to devote an entire floor to the medium) and two is “creepy”. We are meant to choose our own path, but the most convenient approach is to take the elevator to the fourth floor and walk down.

In this survey of American contemporary art, a journey from razzle-dazzle to weirdly sad could be seen as an oblique nod to the decay of American culture. This view seemed reinforced by a life-sized replica of the “Ghostbusters” vehicle installed by the Bruce High Quality Foundation ("We Like America, and America Likes Us, 2010"). Painted primer white and dotted with cracks and bullet-holes, it includes a loop of clips on its windshield and an earnest voice-over describing America as if it were an estranged spouse. But really, this work could mean anything.

The catalogue’s cover features an image of Barack Obama as a cowboy, and overtly political art appears throughout the show. While many of these pieces lack the punch of work made during George W. Bush’s presidency, they are also mercifully free of the shrill tone and shallow message associated with such art. One piece that has invited special attention from critics is Jennifer Jackson Hutchins's "Couch for a Long Time" (pictured below). This big but subtle work, in a room full of Nina Berman’s photographs of a severely disfigured Iraq war veteran, sees a few squashed ceramic pots sitting on a couch covered in newspaper clippings about Obama. Jerry Saltz of New York magazine, who has praised this Biennial as “anti-blockbuster” and “blessedly low on hype”, sees this work as evoking “intense pressure—the pressure that we, [Obama], Art and America are all under.” But to Sebastian Smee, a far less impressed critic at the Boston Globe ("Whitney show is an anthem to the awful"), this same work is “arbitrary,” “ugly” and “pointless”. How nice for a Biennial to be getting under people’s skin again.

Still, much of the art here is small and tepid. Rothko’s gloomy “Four Darks in Red” (1958 in the “Collecting Biennials” annex could easily swallow up most of what’s here. Even Robert Williams, a self-proclaimed “low-brow” artist, is represented by some puny watercolours, not one of his high-octane oil paintings.

Perhaps the most successful piece in the show is Alex Hubbard’s "Annotated Plans for an Evacuation". This video sees the artist slowly spackling the wheels of a dumpy Ford Tempo, attaching the car to a slab of drywall and then driving it. The result is a strange manipulation of our perception of two- and three-dimensions, which feels appropriate in a year when American video is being placed on a high-art pedestal.

Taken as a survey of contemporary video, the third floor has gaping holes: there are very few animated or internet-related works on display (where were the Cory Arcangels and Ryan Trecartins?). But Bonami and Carrion-Murayari are making a statement: American artistic ingenuity has wriggled its way into celluloid and pixels. Assessing these works is almost worth the $18 price of admission, even if the rest of the show feels like a smaller, muted version of the ghosts of Biennials past.

The Whitney Biennial: 2010 is on view through May 30th in New York

~ JAMES MCGIRK

Picture credit: "Battle Cry" (2008) by Tam Tran; collection of the artist. "Couch For a Long Time" (2009) by Jessica Jackson Hutchins; courtesy Small A Projects, New York, and Derek Eller Gallery, New York. Photograph by Dan Kvitka