It Happens Every Two Years

Everybody loves to hate the Whitney Biennial. Why? That depends on whom and when you ask. Established in 1932 by the Whitney Museum of American Art’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, as an annual survey of new work by living American artists, and changed to a biannual in 1973, this exhibition is invariably trounced by critics regardless of who curates it, how they do it or who’s in it. Nonetheless, it remains one of the most talked-about shows on the art circuit.

The last one was faulted for being a timid show that was the subject of so much advance publicity everyone had lost interest by the time it opened; the 1993 version was deemed didactic and overly concerned with being politically correct; the 1985 show had too much art from Manhattan’s then-burgeoning East Village scene--and so on. It’s always something when it comes to the Whitney.

It remains to be seen who’ll take the bullets in 1997, but the one thing everyone’s talking about as the March 20 opening approaches is the unprecedented and significant presence California has in the show. The Biennial of 10 years ago included just two West Coast artists--Edward Ruscha and Lari Pittman; this year’s has 16 (11 of them from Los Angeles), plus three more who lived in L.A. at crucial points in their development--Bruce Nauman, Vija Celmins and Kerry James Marshall.

Including 70 artists ranging in age from 22 to 85, the show was overseen by Louise Neri, U.S. editor of Parkett, the international art journal, and Whitney curator Lisa Phillips, who’s lived in Los Angeles part time for the past two years.

“The work by the seven L.A. artists in the last Biennial was maybe the strongest in the show, and we wanted to recognize the fact that California is as important an art center as New York,” Phillips says. “We saw so much good work by West Coast artists, it could’ve been all California people, and we ended up allocating 50% of the floor space to artists from California. That, I think, is reflective of the way L.A. artists can work--the scale of the work there mirrors the horizontal sprawl of the city, and the availability of space.”

Continues Neri: “Among the recurring themes in this Biennial are storytelling, information overload, cultural alchemy and obsession, and many of these artists--particularly those from California--set themselves enormous tasks in their work. Jason Rhoades spent a year building an environment, Chris Burden spent eight years developing a model city, Charles Ray did four years of preparatory research for a four-minute film, and Diana Thater’s ‘The Electric Mind’ is a huge, Brechtian, wraparound video environment about behavior and animal training. Most of these are big pieces, and we’ve given them the space they need.”

So, is everybody--at least everybody in California--happy? A random sampling of art world insiders suggests the answer is: “No, of course not!”

“Institutions now run the art world, and the Biennial is the institutions’ way of telling us what this year’s important themes are,” observes Las Vegas-based critic Dave Hickey. “In my opinion the Whitney no longer has a raison d’e^tre because it’s nothing more than a theme show.

“From what I know of who’s in this one, it looks as if they’ve just rounded up the usual suspects, too,” he adds. “I have no idea why West Coast art is so prominently featured in this Biennial, although it seems obvious to me that with Bruce Nauman living in Galisteo, New Mexico, and Mike Kelley in L.A., the power has shifted to the West.”

Painter Ruscha concurs with Hickey as far as having “no idea why this one’s so heavily weighted toward California.” But, he suggests, “the show may get slammed for that very reason. New York is a provincial town--I’ve always thought of it as the Hollywood of the art world--and they still like to go gunning for California.”

Needless to say, the younger California artists on the guest list approach the Biennial with their own set of concerns and reservations. L.A. artist Doug Aitken, whose contribution to the show is “Diamond Sea,” a 20-minute film shot last fall in the diamond mines of Namibia, says: “People interpret the Biennial as the art world’s State of the Union address, which is too bad--it would be better if it were treated as just a group show.”

A group show in a difficult venue is how installation artist Rhoades would describe it. “When I was in the last Biennial, I discovered it’s not a very interesting place to build a piece, and if they’d asked me to do something new for the show I probably would’ve declined; major American museums are made for dead things and are just too dysfunctional to handle strong work.

“The piece I’m showing is about the physicality of the ephemeral, and was originally made to be shown in Basel, Switzerland,” Rhoades says, referring to “Uno Momento.” “I wanted the piece to be seen in the U.S. too, though, and the Whitney is one of the few places big enough to accommodate it--it’s 80 feet long, 35 feet wide, and it takes about a week to see the entire piece because it constantly changes. It has fire and water in it, among other things, and there’s a section where butter is flung onto the ceiling. About 10% of the piece, beginning with the fire, had to be eliminated for the Whitney,” says Rhoades about the piece, which travels to Lyon, France, for the biennial there at the conclusion of the Whitney.

Neri says she is thrilled to include “Uno Momento,” which she describes as “an amiable creature loosely based on the movie ‘Car Wash’ that represents a gigantic leap for Jason. It’s a kind of ejaculating environment that involves an enormous choreography of objects. It has countless moving parts that are synchronized on an elaborate computer program keyed to the business hours of wherever it’s shown.” (In other words, the piece sleeps when the museum is closed.)

Whereas Rhoades has reservations about the Biennial, Charles Ray--who was included in the Biennials of ‘89, ’93 and ‘95--says, “I like being in it, and one way or another it generally does reflect, not American art per se, but American art from the point of view of a specific curator.”

Of his piece in the show, a short film titled “Self-Portrait With All My Clothes,” Ray explains, “I spent the past year and a half teaching myself to sew and made a complete set of clothes that includes a jacket, underwear, pants, shoes, glasses--everything.

“The clothes won’t be exhibited; rather, I’ve made a film of myself wearing them,” adds the artist, who’ll be the subject of a retrospective curated by Paul Schimmel that opens in 1998 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, then travels to the Whitney. “The film will be screened at the Whitney, but I’m also hoping to show it in a commercial context--I’d like to screen it in that time slot where those L.A. Times ads run in theaters.”

Like Ray, Burden will be appearing in his fourth Biennial and has no quarrel with it. “It’s an impossible show because you can’t please everybody, and people who aren’t included naturally have a gripe,” says the artist, who participated in the Biennials of ‘77, ’89 and ’93. “People also tend to read it as a bellwether--you know, this is what’s happening and you’re on board or you’re not--and even though that idea is a crock, it generates a lot of anxiety.

“I’m not in tune with the politics of New York enough to know whether this Biennial is indicative of a shift in the way California artists are perceived, but I do know that the piece of mine they’re showing has a lot to do with L.A. It’s a miniature city I think of as a spiritual model of L.A. It’s not a literal model of this city, but in the way it’s organized, the way it keeps going and is so huge, the residential zones at the edge of the airport--all that is very much about L.A. I worked on it here for eight years, then it was shipped off to Europe, and I wasn’t pleased with the way it was configured there,” adds Burden of the piece, which comprises 25 tables covered with miniatures. “So when I heard the Whitney wanted to show ‘Pizza City,’ that was all I needed to know about this Biennial.”

By contrast, Bay Area artist Bruce Conner was startled by the invitation from the Whitney. “New York is a great playground of art, but plenty of things don’t show up there, because it’s a provincial town, and they can’t imagine anything important existing that hasn’t come through their neighborhood. So, yes, I was surprised they thought of me,” says Conner, who’s been included in the film section of several Biennials, and is represented this year by a re-edited version of a film he began shooting in 1959, “Looking for Mushrooms,” as well as a series of inkblot drawings. (Unlike past years, film, video and all other art forms will be integrated in this year’s installation.)

“It’s unfortunate people approach the show expecting an objective cross-section of current work--the Biennial has never made that claim for itself yet people are consistently annoyed when it’s not that,” says Conner, who’ll have a solo show at L.A.’s Kohn Turner Gallery in April and a survey exhibition next year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Conner was prominently represented in the Whitney’s “The Beat Show,” a 1996 exhibition on the ‘50s beat generation that was curated by Lisa Phillips; as a result of working on that show, Phillips got to know Conner’s work.

“Having spent a lot of time with Bruce, I knew he was on a hot streak, and Louise and I were quite moved by the direction his work has taken,” Phillips says. “And it fits the parameters we’d established for the show; we were interested in artists who are iconoclasts and Bruce has always gone his own way.”

Adds Neri: “Lisa and I talked a lot about what motivates artists to make work, and one conclusion we came to was that artists are preoccupied with the surreal of the everyday. This is where someone like Ed Ruscha really spoke to us, because his work is so much about the gap between things. These strange collisions of unrelated things that somehow make crazy sense, words echoing across landscapes, phrases drawn from private sources and put into the public realm--Ed’s work is so semiotic and cool.

“Bruce Conner’s work is more phantasmagorical and psychedelic and is grounded in classic Surrealism in the tradition of Max Ernst--Bruce is a bit of a mystic,” Neri adds. “His inkblot drawings are incredibly intricate and are involved with eroticism, as is work by Lari Pittman, but in a completely different way. There’s nothing mystical about Lari’s eroticism, which is strident, glossy, and has a bright, impenetrable surface--there’s nothing behind the surface either, which is an interesting idea.”

Included in the Whitney for the fourth time, Pittman says he believes “L.A. is featured prominently in this Biennial because to turn their back on the art presently coming out of this city would reveal a serious provincialism on the part of New York.”

“Ultimately, however, the L.A.-versus-N.Y. argument is obsolete because at this point each city has a highly particularized function,” adds Pittman, who was in the Biennials of ‘87, ’93 and ’95. “New York has a long history of supporting art, and has a highly developed system of museums, galleries, critics and collectors. L.A.’s strength is its production--and one could make a case for the idea that the production here has become so strong precisely because the surrounding structure is underdeveloped. There’s something to be said for blooming under sweet neglect.”

According to Neri, there’s also something to be said for the crash of the art market in 1990. “With the collapse of the economic euphoria of the ‘80s, many artists who’d tooled up had to tool right back down,” she observes. “Everyone loves to talk about this new era of sobriety and truth, and perhaps it has something to do with the approaching millennium--whatever the reason, I’ve noticed a strong element of humanism in the art currently being produced.

“Charles Ray’s work, for instance, has a deep moral integrity. If it takes him two years to learn to make clothes for a four-minute film, then that’s how long he’s gonna spend on it. That kind of integrity is common to most of the California artists we looked at, and I find it quite reaffirming because it’s a quality that’s leeching out of other parts of our culture.

“People say the art world’s in trouble, but what about the fashion world or America’s film industry? People always say the Biennial’s in trouble too,” she adds, “but that’s because it’s the only show of its kind in America and it reflects a highly diverse culture. The controversy, by the way, is indicative of its importance.”

“Bashing the Whitney has become something of a spectator sport and is part of the pleasure this show provides,” Phillips says in conclusion. “Because it’s a show about breaking developments and always includes untested material, people can test their own opinions out against the Whitney--and they always do.”

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The California-based artists in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, which runs from March 20 to June 1, are Doug Aitken, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Chris Burden, Charles Burnett, Bruce Conner, Martin Kersels, Sharon Lockhart, Paul McCarthy, Jennifer Pastor, Raymond Pettibon, Lari Pittman, Charles Ray, Jason Rhoades, Ed Ruscha, Diana Thater and Kara Walker.