ARTS
Whitney's art-free zone
Roger Kimball believes that the museum's 1997 Biennial show has sunk to an all-time low Some exhibitions are born bad, some achieve badness, and some have badness thrust upon them. For as long as anyone can remember, the biennial exhibitions of recent American art at the Whitney Muse- um in New York have somehow managed to be bad in every way possible: festering biopsies of American cultural pathology.
It was not always this way. When Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the muse- um's founder, began an annual series of such exhibitions in 1932, soon after the museum opened, the result was often merely mediocre. (Well, sometimes. The critic Clement Greenberg found the 1944 Annual 'more disheartening than ever', the 1945 instalment a 'new low'. In 1947 he dis- cerned 'enormous improvement', but then things sunk back to their 'old mediocrity' the next year.) It was not until the mid-1960s that the Whitney's signature survey exhibitions — by this time they were biennials — had become something of a joke. By the mid-Seventies the joke had soured. And for the last 20 years or so, the Whitney's biennial exhibi- tions have traced that accelerating down- ward spiral we associate with the action of certain large, porcelain plumbing fixtures.
Anyone familiar with desperate postur- ings of the art world will not find this sur- prising. For the Whitney Museum, like most institutions devoted to contemporary art — the Tate Gallery is a good example — long ago abandoned any pretence to collecting and exhibiting works whose pri- mary distinction was aesthetic merit. Sur- rendering instead to the sordid imperatives of the 'cutting edge', the Whitney now trades almost exclusively in the politicised, sexually perverse rubbish that substitutes for art wherever the words 'deconstruction' or 'transgressive' are used as terms of endearment. Every now and then, it is true, an exhibition of what used to be called art — 'art' in the old sense: you know, pictures you enjoyed looking at, that sort of thing — still finds it way into the exhibition gal- leries of the Whitney. Several years ago, I remember, the Whitney sponsored a fine exhibition of watercolours and paintings by Charles Demuth. Similar things continue to happen even at the Tate. But such events are posthumous afterthoughts, like the twitchings of a frog's leg during dissection. The patient is dead even though some familiar motions can still be observed.
There is nothing like that in the 1997 Biennial (until 1 June). The Whitney's PR department says that 'some of the most sig- nificant American art created during the past two years is on view in this historic exhibition'. But trust me: while things are bad in the American art world, they are not Bryan Crockett's 'Fools Fire (Study for "Hard Up") Expire', 1996 that bad. Indeed, if this year's Biennial has any claim to distinction, it is the negative achievement of being an art exhibition completely, 100 per cent devoid of aesthet- ic interest. I know, I know; that seems excessively generous. I readily admit that many recent Biennials have offered stiff competition. To be sure, some were more rebarbative, featuring instances of sexual perversion or hectoring left-wing political animus even more lurid or repulsive than what is on view this year. And some man- aged to combine the visually repellent with the aesthetically soporific in ways that pre- scription drug companies can only marvel at. It is also true that many recent Biennials have required the critical equivalent of the electron microscope to discover anything certifiable as art. But there was always something — a stray photograph, perhaps, or a sculpture or a collage — that revealed some trace of aesthetic interest. Maybe it was — as we are told life is on Mars — exceedingly rudimentary: pre-protoplasmic virus-like slime. But it was something. In this Biennial — the fifth she has helped to organise — the Whitney curator, Lisa Phillips, has finally done it. Perhaps it was the help she received from her co-cura- tor, Louise Neri, the United States editor of an art journal called Parkett. Perhaps it was merely Phillips's own perseverance. What- ever the explanation, the 1997 Whitney Biennial must be recognised as a cultural — or perhaps I should say 'anti-cultural' — landmark of sorts: the first totally art-free Biennial exhibition on record.
It's a remarkable achievement. According to a press release, Phillips and Neri have spent two years working on this exhibition. They looked at thousands of slides. They visited nearly 500 studios, criss-crossing the United States. They travelled to Europe. They travelled to Brazil. They deliberated and sifted and culled. They settled finally on some 200 items — 'selections' the press release rightly calls them, not 'art' — by 70 artists. How did they do it? Two hundred 'selections' — drawings, paintings, sculp- tures, film and video works, photography, installations, printed media, dance, perfor- mance and sound' — by 'artists' ranging in age from 22 to 85 and hailing from all over the United States as well as Chile, Mexico, India, Italy, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Russia and the United Kingdom (these curators interpret the term 'American art' very broadly). Two hundred 'selections' and not a jot, not a scintilla, not an iota of aesthetic interest. It really is an astounding feat.
Astounding — and, if by some chance you happen to be interested in art, pro- foundly depressing. There is no point in attempting to 'review' such an event. It is unreviewable. It would be like trying to review a heap of old clothes — no, more than that: it would, in fact, be reviewing a heap of old clothes: Louise Bourgeois's old clothes, as it happens, which have a room to themselves at the Biennial, clothes that this seasoned artistic huckster 'collected over a lifetime and arranged provocatively'.
What else? There are Annette Lawrence's 'obsessive drawings in her own blood, based on the Mayan calendar', Shashwati Talukdar's 'mock-umentary, which uses images of popular film stars to critique issues of cultural representation', Kristin Lucas's 'personal adventures in technological pathology', Abigail Child's 'haunting double narrative addressing the alienated self in the environment of a homeless encampment', Tony Oursler's talking heads 'combining ceramics, glass and a filmed performance of perversely dis- torted children's rhymes'. Lisa Phillips summed it up well: 'It's the idea of some- thing really strange becoming normalised.' True enough: and when the really strange becomes 'normalised' the inevitable result is intractable boredom. We are told that most of the pathetic cultural detritus on view at the Whitney is being seen for the first time in the United States. Can we hope, too, that it will be the last?
The exhibition catalogue and all the press material accompanying the Whitney Bienni- al gratefully acknowledge the support of Beck's Beer. Beck's, it transpires, has been supporting this sort of thing at least since 1985, when they sponsored an exhibition of Gilbert and George, England's most promi- nent artistic charlatans, at the Hayward Gallery. As a rule, I am against getting the government involved in such matters: I detest, for example, the burgeoning practice of festooning cigarette packages and alco- holic beverages with warning labels. But exhibitions like the Biennial are another matter. There is something cynical, not to say manipulative, about a brewery sponsor- ing such events. At the very least there ought to be some sort of warning that upon leaving the exhibition the first thing most people will need is a drink. Those with weaker stomachs will need the plumbing fixture I referred to earlier.
Roger Kimball is managing editor of the New Criterion.
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