The Whitney Biennial

It seems that with every Whitney Biennial there is a rush to define the theme of the exhibition and by extension, the current state of contemporary art in America, which is actually the defined purpose of the exhibition according to the museum’s website. This year, the 76^th in a series of Biennials and Annuals that began in 1932, was curated by Elizabeth Sussman, Curator/Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator and writer. With an unprecedented emphasis on time-based art, the same building housing performance, video, music, dance, and a film program co-curated with Thomas Beard and Ed Halter of Light Industry, the exhibition is constantly in flux and populated by artists in the processes of collaboration and making while acting as curators, archivists, activists, architects, and historians.
What I found most striking about this iteration of the Biennial is that the curators, while embracing heavy performance and film programming, have contained the exhibition within the Breuer building and shunned the use of outside venues like the Armory or Central Park which have been used in the past. The artists and their artwork inhabit the same space in ways that allow for them to be understood in context with one another all while the particular needs and ideal viewing conditions of specific mediums are honored by the curators. Given the festival-like style of the exhibition and its revolving artist residencies and time-based media programs, the Biennial requires multiple visits and this review is the result of multiple visits in March and April 2012.

In the first floor gallery, right after the entrance and to the left of the elevator, is an installation by Oscar Tuazon called For Hire (2012). It’s a modular construction of forms inspired by ancillary architectural spaces that include a shower basen, a staircase, a screen, and fluorescent lights. Walking through the structure within the gallery space, one can only imagine that it was constructed from the inside of the gallery out. Tuazon designed the piece in collaboration with another Biennial artist, K8 Hardy, and it will be reconfigured on the fourth floor in May as a runway for her fashion show performance. As the first piece in the exhibition, the works serves as an introduction to both the collaborative environment of the show as well as this idea that the space and use of the artwork shapes the context of the work. On the first floor, For Hire exists as a habitable sculpture, but on the fourth floor, the exhibition’s main space for performance, the work will be activated by performers into something else entirely.

For the first time in Biennial history, nearly an entire floor of the museum (the fourth floor) has been left open as a 6,000 square foot performance space, which through different programs and residencies will play host to dance, theater, music, and video. In a sense, it has become the centerpiece of the exhibition as well as one of the most exhilarating and dynamic spaces I’ve experienced in a museum. In my first visit, I climbed the stairs from the third floor to the sounds of a rock song and someone shouting counts. The Michael Clark Dance Company was in its residency, but instead of seeing the professional dancers of the company, the massive floor space was occupied by around 40 volunteers attentively learning choreography. The performance space takes up the majority of the floor, but there are galleries behind it that hold work by Luther Price, Wu Tsang, and others. Because of this, and no doubt the curators’ desire to exhibit artistic process, the floor is left open for rehearsal and museum-goers are free to watch and walk through. I watched for a little while as they rehearsed a small sequence of choreography- some more comfortable than others. When I made it to the back galleries, a man in front of me pulled on the closed, “Do Not Open” door of the Wu Tsang installation only to hear the shrieks of a few changing dancers.

My next visit was for one of the ticketed Michael Clark Dance Company performances of “Who’s Zoo?” on the fourth floor. We were corralled in the lower level of the building before taking the elevator up twenty at a time. The space was left almost completely blank except for a large matted floor for the performers, white walls, Breuer’s gridded ceiling, and curtains over the windows. With no seats, people sat on the floor near the mat or leaned on the walls behind us. The sculpted dancers of the company in their colorful, skintight leotards performed to the recorded music of Jarvis Cocker in solo or paired formations that shifted from sculptural stillness to bursts of movement and energy. A long-time collaborator of Michael Clark and Merce Cunningham, Charles Atlas created projections for the wall that complimented the performers with stark geometrical light forms without distracting from or overwhelming them. My favorite parts of the performance where the appearances of the non-professional dances that had been in training in the space during my earlier visit. Next to the dancers’ bodies, their “normal” forms and slightly uncomfortable yet determined way in which they held themselves bred instant empathy and affection. I was particularly relieved and excited to see that a woman I saw consistently misstepping and falling behind in rehearsal was right on target in the performance. When the “non-dancers” formed a line that quickly swept through the massive space, entering from a door stage-right and exiting stage-left, it was completely exhilarating and heart-warming in that special way that makes us unconsciously smile in the company of strangers who suddenly feel like comrades.

In my most recent visit, this open performance space was set up as a screening room for a large projection of Charles Atlas’s film Ocean (2011), a filmed documentation of a Merce Cunningham stage production of the same name held at the Rainbow Granite Quarry in Minnesota in 2008. Atlas filmed the three performances with a five-camera crew, collected the footage, and edited it into one feature-length version of the project. The space at the Whitney, which had just been host to a dance company strongly influenced by Cunningham, now became host to dance in another medium. In an incredible turn of fate, there is a common dancer between the performances, Julie Cunningham. Her small stature, pale skin, and shaved head make the connection almost impossible to miss. Seeing both performances is like seeing a live manifestation of artistic influence. For the screening, the back galleries were open, so there was a flow of people headed there that paused at the film before moving on.

It was during this visit that I finally was able to see Wu Tsang’s installation Green Room (2012). Tsang is another example of the Biennial’s embrace of process and cross-media production. The film program will screen his documentary Wildness (2012) in the second floor screening room in early May, but his installation, a recreation of the dressing room of the Silver Platter bar in Los Angeles, is up throughout the exhibition with access depending on programing. The space shifts between being a two-channel video and lounge area where we get a glimpse into the landmark Los Angeles bar that’s been home to Latin/LGBT communities since the sixties and a functioning dressing room for performers in residency. Being in the space and hearing the confessional nature of the person on screen gives us access to a space and an experience far removed from our own. His full-length film, installation, and essay in the catalogue are considered a part of a larger project with each addressing the same subject with different media.
When Wildness (2012) screens, it will be in the film and video screening room on the second floor. The room is set up very traditionally for film viewing with rows of seating and a curtain framing the screen. The curating of this element of the Biennial is very consciously situating film and video work within the context of the exhibition while strictly adhering to things like specific showtimes to avoid the problem of showing non-looping work in black-box galleries for patrons to stumble upon at any time. In an interview with Cynthia Lugo in Joan’s Digest[i], one of the curators of the film program explained:
“How a film is edited and structured in time is obviously one of the crucial decisions that an artist working in that medium makes. It really undercuts the work for someone to see a random fragment of it. One of the jobs of a museum is to provide an ideal context for viewing art, and if a museum abdicates that responsibility, then whose job is it? “
I think the experience of this film program has been refreshing in large part because of this sentiment. The space they’ve created allows the film program to remain in the building, where viewers can walk directly to other pieces and make connections between the worlds of film and contemporary art, while still providing the medium with its essential viewing conditions.
The amount of programming and its rotating nature can be just as daunting as it is exciting. There’s a sense that the space is constantly in flux, an overwhelming schedule for anyone who wants to truly see the entire exhibit, and I imagine this emphasis on artists who “do it all,” could be just as stressful a notion as it is liberating for artists. As what looks to be the second to last Biennial in, or at least mainly in, the Breuer building, it’s nice to see the 1966 building hold up so well to the demands of the wide range of media and art forms displayed here.