There have been a few things I have noticed, from going to the show, reading and figuring out the catalogue and looking at various reviews and interviews with the curators before and after the exhibition.
Over all the hanging height is relatively low. Making you have to actually stoop to view some of the works. I know that this is not standard for the Whitney as there is an exhibition in another part of the building not linked to the biennial, which is hung higher. Maybe contemporary work needs to be hung lower A. because we are shrinking as a race, or B. because, its just so low!
In looking at the video and technology based installations, most of them have their guts showing- no effort to conceal/ hide the working of the now little seen 16 or 32 mm projection set ups. Previously there would have been a fear of people tampering with this stuff, or getting their little fingers stuck in the spinning wheels. Strangely this seems to be no longer the case. Its all hanging out, but not consistently enough for it to be an over all curatorial decision. In some cases, the looped 16mm set-ups are more enthralling than the artwork itself. This decision for the machinery to be made visible is only conceptually relevant in one case- that of the Torqued Chandelier Release by Rodney Graham, where the use of the projector, its speed and the film reference one another. A few of the other projections were very well concealed- so much so that when you walk into the room you actually cannot see a thing and walk into the person in front of you.
My hunch is this – they ran out of either time or money in installing and concealing the projections, resulting in some of them not being concealed.
The museum labels for almost every single work on show are well written and succinct. They carefully explain either a bit about the artists, or the work. The show has been made accessible to all by this action. In most shows in New York, your lucky if you get a label at all, and now they are everywhere, plastered like pages of a small book, next to each work. Don’t get me wrong- I appreciated them and the information they provided. But this indicates a few things- the curators felt the need to justify some of their choices by providing explanations. They feel that the show required an additional explanation, and thirdly the artworks required more than just themselves in order to function. Context was required. In some cases, the label was the artwork, with Jordan Wolfson’s painting and scraping of the gallery walls. A well justified conceptual solution- though I do doubt that many people even saw or read that particular label.
The catalogue is another thing in and of itself. It took me a while to navigate it, and I am not that stupid. I think. I bought it because I felt it was actually more interesting than the show itself. It’s designed to be pulled apart and is an artwork itself. Each page has is leaf that folds out into and 11/17 inch page- one image from each artist on the show, a work called Draw me a sheep, somehow apparently inspired by the story of the little prince. But I Have to say the images are not that compelling.
I find it ironic that the show has produced a catalogue that is designed to be pulled apart and dispersed. It shows to me that they don’t want it sticking around too long, maybe to make way for the next big thing. Another interesting point is that the information available on the labels, is not repeated within the catalogue. So if your looking for some of what you saw in the show, you wont find much of it. The catalogue is not so much of the show, but more of the artists of the show and maybe it was too obvious to put the works on show in the catalogue, or else the work was just not yet made, or once again they ran out of time- Speculation on my part, but highly possible given the way these exhibitions go, with such short time lines for the project.
An interview I read had Philippe Vergne stating that this was not meant to be a representation of the “best” work in either America, or the world. It was more intended to simply be a taste of what is happening now. This of course is the assumption that most viewers have- you see something terrible and you say- “they think this is good art-these curators? “ Which is not the case. It’s an aspect of what is going on. It seems that the curators have not attempted to show good or bad art, but just art that is happening now. They stated that, Yes, there are many good artists not included in this biennial. Of course the Whitney does not want to be seen saying such a blatant statement as they are meant to be showing what the public consider to be good art.
What I am getting at here is that the information related to the biennial has been distributed in contrasting modes of high and low accessibility- freely available and some hard to get at. Some things are obviously pointed out and others not and I am fascinated by the ambiguity within a single show of this nature. There seems to be a certain lack of cohesion between the various modes of information
Information is spread around for you to find, piecing together the parts can make up the whole, I have found, but this does not happen completely.
The curators also stated that they made up a fictitious third curator named Toni Burlap, (who wrote the catalogue essay). This came out of an initial insider joke between the curators, who stated that the show was not about making lists of artists, but about having fun, and play, and energizing the space through this. They seem to have somewhat separated them selves form the show by making use of this third person –a curator who also writes. So is the motivation of this third person- an imaginary curator supposed to allow freedom, dissociation? Or lack of responsibility.
We shall see. Artists can only rework so many ideas, until they need to have some of their own. And soon I hope that they will.
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