My pal D-L is staying with me for a couple of days and yesterday we hied ourselves off to the Whitney Biennial. I’ve said here before that the show is a no-win endeavor, given that it can’t really encompass what is truly interesting. There were people and works that I’ve liked in other contexts, but as a whole the show didn’t do much to restore my faith in the contemporary art scene.
A big problem is the current conventions for showing video. I’m part of the generation that has a very hard time not looking at any glowing screen in the vicinity. Because of this I hate the proliferation of TVs in bars and cafes, and now museums seem to be following the trend of incorporating video in almost every exhibition.
The Whitney does most of this on the third floor, which seemed to me on Sunday to be like one big, very unsexy maze of peep booths. The attempt to include video installation meant that there was a series of cubicles each with some sort of video or film projection in each. In practice it means that people are wandering down hallways peeking into rooms and usually seeing works from some odd point in the middle and then if they are sufficiently intrigued, waiting around to see where the beginning of the thing is and then watching it again. This is channel surfing made physical. Meanwhile, pokey old painting and sculpture just can’t compete. One of my favorite rooms in the show is a painting installation by R M Quaytman that requires time and acute viewing to reveal itself. The rest of the exhibition argues against that type of encounter with art.
The worst moment comes on the second floor where a group of drawings and a series of intimate photographs have to duke it out with a video piece that literally harangues the viewer for ten minutes at a time. If those were drawings I’d be pissed, not because the video piece is so bad (yelling at art patrons is not automatically a bad thing) but because there’s no way that the works can be seen as being on equal footing in terms of experience.
In the Seventies, artists began to critique the “white cube”, a shorthand term for the sterile exhibition spaces that began to crop up as containers for contemporary art. The understanding of the white cube as alienated has become so commonplace that art students now refer to it reflexively. What I saw at the Whitney, and what I’ve been seeing at other places is the rise of the black cube, a new standardized methodology for making and consuming video that seems just as alienating to me.
One good thing about going to show like this is that they provide negative examples. I came out of the show with a few ideas for new work.
Tags: art, daily photo, making art, video, Whitney Biennial