Spring in dystopia: lean on visual pleasure but limned with thoughtful commentary on the state of the world, the current Whitney Biennial gives a quieter than usual voice to a general malaise

Art in America, May, 2008 by Gregory Volk

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This latest Whitney Biennial almost perfectly fits with our prevailing national mood, which is basically anxious, uncertain, filled with questions about what is happening now and what is to come, and still stubbornly if waveringly hopeful. The war in Iraq keeps grinding on. Economic news isn't good; we're very likely headed toward a recession or perhaps in one now. Global warming seems an increasingly dire threat and political gridlock isn't helping things much. We're for Hillary, Barack or McCain, but we're also suspicious of leaders, since we've been betrayed time and again. Overwhelmed by macro troubles, we focus on things close to home, but that proves just as disconcerting and baffling. We'd like to be original, but everything seems borrowed or used. We'd like to make a difference and have an effect, but that seems unlikely, if not impossible. These are the days when optimistic visions seem to be slamming into limits, when a gigantic country that prizes its can-do aplomb seems to be waist deep in confusion, corruption and failure. In the midst of it all, the ever-expanding art world with its superheated market has giddily paraded on, seemingly oblivious to the host of troubles that beset us. Nationally, and also art-worldishly, one wonders when the other shoe is going to drop.

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With that background in mind, consider Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn's video Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out (2006), which is surely one of the strangest and also one of the best works in the exhibition. A valkyrie (played by Kahn), wearing a plastic Viking helmet and carrying a big chunk of foam-rubber cheese, has a constant nosebleed as she wends her way through seamy Los Angeles looking for some dire action, for something important (and probably awful) to happen. She's shadowed by an unseen and unheard cameraman (Dodge) whom she addresses, making this mock epic seem like a ludicrous do-it-yourself version of a television reality show. As she points out different things--a pile of charred clothes from a person who may have been immolated, a nearby shoe, perhaps left by someone who has fled, and police cars and ambulances with wailing sirens and flashing lights--and mentions a knifing she witnessed as a kid, the entire scene seems suffused with palpable malevolence. Much in the video is goofy, but this goofiness has a darkly serious side. When, out of the blue, the woman talks about a time when she was in hell and saw a withered miniature man clamber from a wretched pond, she could be referring to a feverish, drug-addled hallucination. But the story also seems completely believable, as if she frequently commutes between this world and the underworld. Suddenly, the video has apt and urgent implications. These are the days when terrorist bombings are commonplace, when torture is policy and we serve, via the media, as constant recipients of accounts of unspeakable horror. Dodge and Kahn's antic, lowbrow video functions as a brooding meditation on an era marked and marred by crisis and violence.

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Two young curators from the Whitney, Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin, with input from several older luminaries, have crafted an exhibition in which artists are taking stock of this conflicted era--personally, politically, esthetically and socially--although most aren't attempting to offer wild new breakthroughs. A manageable 81 artists participate, with their work arrayed on three floors of the Whitney and, for three weeks in March, in various spaces and rooms of the cavernous Park Avenue Armory a few blocks away, making for an exhibition that's relatively easy to move through and absorb. Many of the works were specifically made for the Biennial, not culled from recent gallery shows, which is welcome. Big works, bright colors and audacious statements are generally shunned, like the garish decorations from a party that has ended badly. Instead, modestly scaled works in somber colors predominate: there is a great deal of gray, black, brown and beige in this exhibition. Paintings and painting-scaled photography are scarce, at a time when both have been flying off the shelves of commercial galleries and art fairs. In part because paintings are so rare in the show, it is excellent to encounter three colorful, quietly spectacular abstract canvases by Mary Heilmann, in which free-form, oozing blobs advance over chessboard patterns that also hint at kitchen linoleum or tile floors.

Otherwise, this exhibition seems skeptical of visual pleasure and frankly suspicious of a product-oriented art world churning out flashy merchandise. Ruling the day are sculptures, installations, videos and performances: precisely the mediums that are a tougher sell in the art market. As always with the Whitney Biennial, there are legitimate questions about who is included and who isn't, and for what reasons. With 25 or so artists from Los Angeles, a couple from San Francisco and one from Portland, the West Coast is well represented, and that's a good thing. On the other hand, five of those Los Angeles artists are from the same gallery; I guess this is one heck of a time for Susanne Vielmetter Projects. Most of the remaining artists are from New York, which means that these two usual poles--East Coast and West Coast, New York and L.A.--have got a secure grip on the show, yet again, at a time when several regional scenes are flourishing and producing some very interesting art. Recent trips that I've taken to Kansas City and Cleveland introduced me to quite a number of intriguing artists who could easily be included here, and I'm sure this is also the case elsewhere. As publicized in a subway advertisement, this exhibition purports to be about where American art is now, but it appears that artists who have set up shop in the heartland need not apply.