WHITNEY BIENNIAL: THE LIST

The Whitney Biennial is something of a coming-out party for mostly young and mostly unknown contemporary artists working in America. To announce the much-anticipated list of artists selected for this year's show, which opens in New York on February 25th, the two curators, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, have supplemented the traditional press release with a short, weird film. Art wags are now scratching their heads, wondering what this could possibly mean.

“Whitney Biennial: The List” features a cherubic Carrion-Murayari and bewhiskered Bonami bellowing their 44 picks while being shot at extreme angles in odd locations around an unusually monochromatic Whitney Museum of American Art. Meanwhile, the artists’ names scroll by below, replete with exclamation marks! Is this a call to arms? An attempt to infect the tweet-set on the cheap? Puerile inside baseball on par with the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s rickroll?

Quite like Pelosi’s congressional cat cam, "The List" has its moments. The staccato scene-cuts to uncannily familiar places within the museum echo the strange oration, and hearing Bonami carefully pronounce the name “Kelly Nipper” may provoke a giggle or two. It feels a little like watching a mad yet mild-mannered professor tramping through a deserted fairytale lair, along with his sweet-tempered assistant.

Paddy Johnson, a local arts blogger, suggests the clip heralds a new “age of viral PR performance art!” But "The List" lacks the slick sheen and exaggerated irony of most viral flackery. It all feels just a little too sincere.

But we are so hungry for meaning, and they offer so little to satisfy. The show is titled “2010” and comes without a theme. In an interview with the New York Times, the curators nebulously refer to “drastic changes” and “taking historical precedents and trying to make them new and fresh”. Their list runs the gamut of known-knowns (the sculptor Charles Ray), unknown-knowns (the hot-rod and Juxtapoz magazine favourite Robert Williams) and known-unknowns (the video artist Jesse Aron Green).

Whatever it is they are up to, the first curatorial salvo for 2010 has been fired.

~ JAMES MCGIRK