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Many happy returns
ArtForum, May, 2004 by Jack Bankowsky, David Joselit, Pamela M. Lee, Scott Rothkopf
When the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2004 Biennial, organized by Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, opened in mid-March, Artforum asked four of its regular contributors--JACK BANKOWSKY, DAVID JOSELIT, PAMELA M. LEE, SCOTT ROTHKOPF--to take stock of American art's best-known survey, which remains on view through the end of the month.
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Writing on the heels of the show's opening, New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl proclaimed Elizabeth Peyton, court painter to the postgrunge imperium, the "moral center" of the current installment of the Whitney Biennial. At first I thought my favorite art-critical stylist daft: One had better be possessed of like gifts, I mulled, even to contemplate a counterintuitive flourish of such breathtaking magnitude. What could possibly land this celebrity-doting miniaturist at the center of anything, let alone a "moral" center? Then it hit me: The answer is everything!
I will confess up front that I heartily disagree with Schjeldahl's celebration both of Peyton's work and of painting in this Biennial more generally, which to me feels tepid across the board. (I'm excepting Richard Prince--I don't count him a painter here, though one just as easily might; and I reserve a word of praise for James Siena, whose manic inventiveness coupled with the modesty of his art makes him easy to love.) But back to Peyton and to my point: Like them or not, her pretty portraits can be seen to register a number of pressures central not only to the current moment in art but to painting's status in this show.
In her catalogue essay, cocurator Chrissie Iles (she is joined in the exhibition's organization by Debra Singer and Shamim M. Momin) means to place painting at the thick of things: Pointedly separating the painterly plenty she sees out there in the galleries and studios from, say, that earlier '80s return (a "reactionary assertion of bombastic image-making over conceptual/perceptual practices"), Iles wants us to consider painting--and its "center stage" status today--as a "rejoinder to the photographic homogeneity of mass media surface and image, and its impact on individual and collective identity."
I'm with her on fundamentals: Each efflorescence of painting needn't signal a reactionary rappel a l'ordre; if painting is to speak to us today, it will speak (if not always in immediately discernible ways) out of or against our condition under mass media; and (this last point is implicit) a part of telling the present to ourselves necessarily entails a retelling of the past. That said, I yearn to know two things: How does it all boil down to Robert Mangold and Alex Hay (on one end of the seniority spectrum), and how (on the other end)--you'll think me obsessed--does Elizabeth Peyton get to be more than a footnote to Karen Kilimnik (who is not included in this show)?
Iles makes a good case for Peyton, if a case is to be made: Exhibited in a gallery presided over by David Hockney (more on the senior moments in this show later), Peyton's au courant idols (including herself) take their place at the center of a "cross-generational dialogue," one of a handful meant to animate the exhibition. The torch is passed thus: "That Hockney is both the subject of fame and a participant in its subversion, and that he is one of Peyton's adored subjects, demonstrates another way in which ... the publicity machinery of mass culture has been internalized in painting." To cut to the chase, I go along with the "internalized" but not the "subversion." When it comes to our celebrity culture and its discontents, both painters remain gentle salonists. Kilimnik's savagely obsessive exhumations of bedroom-bunker fandom and its eventual transmutation in her loving but tellingly stunted painterly idylls may draw from the same mass-cultural substrate as Peyton's romantic makeovers, but Kilimnik turns the allure of the glossies inside out, whereas Peyton ties it up with a Kate Spade bow.
I guess it's clear that I'm unimpressed with the painting in this show. I am similarly disappointed, even exasperated, by the selection of late-career artists. It's not that I don't think there's a place for the old steadies in the do-everything Biennial ideal, but in this installment the curators seem to have made a decision: When it comes to all but the most recent art, they have opted to beg off attempting anything like a general survey of the best and most vital work done in the last two years. Rather, as with Hockney, they have cast a line back from the thematics governing their notion of what is afoot today and thus guided their senior selections. Fine in principle, but at least where the painting is concerned the backward nods seem, more often than not, either perplexing (Mangold), a little gratuitous (Hay), or willful (Mel Bochner). I get the feeling some of the choices here are driven by a determined set of expectations as to what art "should" be (studious, conceptual--academic) instead of simply made on the merits of work that by guts or will or happenstance some-how gets underneath our condition and delivers up its contingencies. In Bochner's case, young artists and scholars may have lately revisited the artist's photographic experiments of the '60s, but to single out his current work for this reason comes with an ahistorical undertow. Let's face it, Bochner is a critic's artist and as such a valuable minder of a certain learned flame within the art world, but the man is deep into a three-decade slow patch, and the paintings on offer here would not seem to point the way out.
