What a Difference Two Years Make

Three things never change at the Whitney Biennial: Critics hate it, artists lust after it and everyone who keeps up with contemporary art has to see it. Staged every two years at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the perpetually controversial, 68-year-old mega-survey of American contemporary art is the museum’s signature exhibition.

Even so, the 2000 Biennial Exhibition, which runs through June 4, is a special case. Born amid an administrative upheaval, it’s the first Biennial under director Maxwell L. Anderson. What’s more, all the artworks were selected by outside curators--in the wake of staff defections.

Anderson, who came from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, took over at the Whitney in 1998. He brought a new style of management, breaking a tradition by assigning curators specific areas of responsibility. When he passed over Thelma Golden and Elisabeth Sussman, they promptly resigned. Golden, now head of exhibitions at the Studio Museum of Harlem, was slated to organize the 2000 Biennial Exhibition, but she declined to do so under the new regime.

“I asked her to stay on and curate the Biennial, but she decided that reporting to [contemporary art curator] Lisa Phillips, a former peer, just wasn’t going to be possible,” Anderson said. A couple of months later, Phillips left, as did other curators. Very quickly, no one was in charge of contemporary art at the Whitney.

“The reality that hit was that we had a finite number of curators at the Whitney and all of them were working full tilt on ‘The American Century’ exhibition,” Anderson said, referring to the survey that opened in the spring of 1999. “It was the largest exhibition arguably in American history--a 60,000-square-foot, $10-million-budget show with hundreds of loans from all over the world--so we didn’t really have the mechanism to take on the Biennial.”

In need of a quick fix, Anderson decided to expand the role previously played by outside consultants. “There had been a committee of advisors in previous Biennials,” he said. “What was new was to have me direct a project with curators from outside the institution. I asked all the Whitney curators how they felt about it. They said as long as I was directing the process, it felt to them entirely institutionally rooted, and an interesting and exciting way of proceeding.”

Anderson said he “cast a net around the nation” to assemble “a spectrum of opinion and expertise.” Believing that “better decisions are often made by reasoned debate,” he aimed to set up a situation in which “clashes could occur before the show opened as well as afterward.”

He chose six committee members: Michael Auping, chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Valerie Cassel, director of the Visiting Artists Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Hugh M. Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Jane Farver, director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center; Andrea Miller-Keller, an independent curator from Hartford, Conn.; and Lawrence R. Rinder, director of the CCAC Institute, a forum for exhibitions and other programs at the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco and Oakland, who has since been appointed curator of contemporary art at the Whitney.

At their first meeting, last spring in Chicago, each participant supplied 50 artists’ names. The idea was to narrow the group to those artists who had been chosen by more than one curator. “There wasn’t a single overlap. It was unbelievable,” Auping said.

In subsequent meetings and computer communications, the curators winnowed their individual lists, presented favorite candidates and voted. They were not expected to represent specific regions, so they also traveled extensively to see the work of nominees all across the country. They ended up with 97 artists, most chosen for specific works, some asked to create works just for the show.

The process was both “enormously rewarding” and frustrating, Davies said. “It’s just infuriating when your passionate point of view falls on deaf ears. I think this is a very good show, but there are limits to what a team of six can do. It’s a little bit of too many cooks.”

Auping also expressed mixed emotions. “I don’t know who the Whitney Biennial is harder on: the artists, the audience or the curators,” he said. “For me it’s like jury duty. You have to participate in it and do what you can to make it better.”

Anderson, who attended all the meetings but didn’t vote, recalled “a lot of healthy argumentation about the intention of the exhibition, to whom it was directed but how it would be read.” It was important to achieve “a gender balance and a geographical balance, to be sensitive to people’s places of origin and ethnicity, and to focus on a vision of American artists as much as a vision of American art,” he said.

Even those who made the choices aren’t entirely satisfied with the balance. Auping said he was surprised that such a large number of artists selected--42--are from New York, because none of the curators lives there. Davies is pleased with the young Los Angeles artists chosen, but he believes the city got short shrift this time around with only eight representatives--probably because the committee didn’t include a Los Angeles-based curator.

Well before the exhibition opened, the curators knew they had carried on the Biennial’s tradition of controversy. On commission, Hans Haacke created “Sanitation 2000,” an installation that caused a stir a couple of weeks ago, when news of it was leaked to the press. Reacting to the brouhaha over the “Sensation” exhibition of British contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the German-born artist combined a copy of the 1st Amendment and three American flags with quotations on free speech and cultural issues from evangelist Pat Robertson, Sen. Jesse Helms, conservative politician Patrick J. Buchanan and New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani. Their words are printed in Fraktur, the German typeface used by the Nazis. The sound of jackboots marching is broadcast from a group of garbage cans.

Haacke received his commission in April 1999, five months before the opening of “Sensation,” Anderson said. “I was under the impression that we would be looking at a salvo at the Whitney as a place beholden to corporate interests.” But by October, Haacke had a new subject.

Anderson said he doesn’t agree with Haacke’s association of American public figures with Nazis, but he supports the artist’s right to create the work, the museum’s right to present it and the public’s right to express their views of it. “If you have invited [the artist] to be part of a process, you say, ‘Go ahead and we’ll take our lumps.’ If I had said, ‘Maybe you could change to Roman type,’ which occurred to me, it would have been censorship.”

Anderson hasn’t decided how the 2002 Biennial will be organized, but the show will go on. “The Whitney, since its founding, has encouraged artists and this is a primary avenue for us to do that,” he said. “People may like to gripe about individual works in the show; what they can’t deny is that, over time, many of those artists become the influential figures of their generation.”

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“I don’t know who the Whitney Biennial is harder on: the artists, the audience or the curators. For me it’s like jury duty. You have to participate in it and do what you can to make it better.”

MICHAEL AUPING

Chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth