So you are “against the war.” Do you:
a) articulate a coherent foreign policy and support politicians who advocate it?
Or do you:
b) create a film trailer for a non-existent remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, about that “decadent government of Roman Emperor Gaius Germanicus Caligula, who gave his horse political office and hosted scandalous orgies in the Imperial palace,” and feature cameos by Helen Mirren, Courtney Love, Karen Black, Benicio Del Toro, Michelle Phillips, the “incomparable” Milla Jovovich, Gore Vidal himself, and a chorus of strap-on dildos—but, you know, more than being just about the dildos, really this is about critiquing Hollywood and that corrupt regime in Washington?
If you said “b,” you might have the makings of a “queer”-thinking artist. By “queer,” I don’t mean in the sexual sense, although a critical appreciation of prostitution and BDSM pornography might help. Rather, this has to do with the way you view the permanence of one’s place. For the queer-eyed straight guy, to quote that bisexual transman Pat Califia, “If you don’t like being a top or bottom, you switch your keys.”
Congratulations. But I wouldn’t break out the champagne just yet. Because if the past two years have proven anything, it is that normative power delights in pounding queer-thinking types like yourself into the ground. Just look back to the politics of 2004. That summer, tens of thousands of protestors alighted on the streets of New York to subvert the Republican National Convention through acts of civil disobedience, unsanctioned bicycle rides, profanity, “anarchy at the RNC,” and spontaneous displays of puppetry. What resulted is a matter for the historians. But just to summarize: The protests were officiously contained. The Republicans put on a squeaky-clean show. The Democrats became further associated with a rabble of freaks in the mind of the American voter. Bush thwarted the hopes of a quick policy change by defeating John Kerry in November. And our President has been using the political capital of his re-election landslide to push the war in Iraq and the rest of his Republican agenda ever since. Victory, the normative.
So history has shown that queer thinking does not carry the day in the American political system. Not that those protestors were the main reason for the Bush win. But by supporting spectacle over argument, the opposition ensures that policy decisions remain uncontested by all but a minority within the President’s own party.
Okay, but let’s say you really do have a porno-non-film on your hands. Sure, you’re not about to change the outcome of the war with Caligula and the dildos. But what about art? Suddenly the 2005 Venice Biennale champions your work. Next thing you know, the Whitney Museum of American Art wants you too. Does your video stand a chance of subverting the dominant paradigm and “the endgame of the tired models of modernism?” Does it really matter? And, hey, where’s the dotted line?
Plenty of artists must think similar thoughts, or we wouldn’t have a packed new Whitney Biennial every two years. Like clockwork, for a few months every other spring, Marcel Breuer’s upside-down ziggurat on Madison Avenue gets turned right side up, and an institution sponsored by a cosmetics heir, Deutsche Bank, and the tobacco conglomerate Altria (né Philip Morris) gets its freak on.
In the “Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night,” the latest iteration to trumpet the righteousness of queer-headed wrongness as its salient feature, the upending of traditional expectations is written right into the title.[1]
The term “Day for Night,” the first time a name has been associated with a Biennial, comes by way of “François Truffaut’s classic 1973 film,” as we are reminded by the curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne. The film takes its theme from the American cinematic practice of using filters to shoot nighttime scenes in daylight. Similarly the curators have sought to create a show where things are not as they seem, and artists, one might suppose, can therefore express themselves in unseemly ways, so long as they are selected by the curators in the first place and continue along in their seeming unseemliness. The special tablet-sized exhibition catalogue comes with its own subversive properties. Fold-out sheets called “Draw Me a Sheep,” designed by each Biennial artist, are “embedded within the format of the book.” According to the curators, this “defies the logic of knowledge structure—a succession of snapshots that informs us, or de-informs us, about our present time.” And just what happens if a Biennial artist doesn’t want to defy the “logic of knowledge structure”? Well, that wouldn’t be very queer, now would it?
Consider this master conclusion from Toni Burlap’s catalogue essay (Burlap is the collaborate pen name of the curators, f.y.i.):
According to the curators of this Biennial, “The Opposite of ‘right’ is not ‘left,’ but ‘wrong.’ Since the world seems to be moving inextricably towards the right—an impulse repressed since the ground zero of the end of World War II—to be wrong is to be the opposition. An institution should, however, by its nature be wrong, in the sense that it should be writing the future rather than echoing its own time. In this case, to be successful, an exhibition of the zeitgeist should be wrong.” Wrong is, therefore, ultimately right, completing a loop of communicative thinking that unfolds across history and time like an endless Möbius strip.
Got it? Gone is the infantilized escapism of Biennial 2004, which too many museum-goers found, if not exactly “right,” at least better than usual. Back are the political jeremiads that marked the Biennials of the early 1990s—although, if it were possible to evaluate such things, with even less intelligence than the first time around. Duchamp is here, of course, most notably as a much quoted influence in the catalogue and in a “Do the Du” homage by the appropriation artist Sturtevant. Kenneth Anger, that old California video artist from way back when, is here too with a film “that confirms that the Mickey Mouse cartoons’ “sadism [and] violence, their very two-dimensionality, served as a diagram for the mechanisms of social oppression.” Then there’s straight-up anti-war stuff: a reconstruction of the 1966 Artists’ Tower for Peace, by Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija, sprouting up from the basement patio; Richard Serra’s Stop Bush (2004) agitprop poster-art based on an image from Abu Ghraib. As for the collective media artists of Deep Dish TV, they even wrote me a nice personal note the day before the press preview and dropped it at the office with their DVD called Shocking & Awful: a grassroots response to war & occupation.
There are over 250 such works in the ziggurat this year, including a tanning bed made out of oil drums and a work of candles, chain, and tree branches by Urs Fischer that requires sections of the gallery wall to be sliced apart, transgressive-like. There are darkened rooms filled with makeshift huts and chicken wire. There are fake rocks, fake obituaries, fake vomit, and a collective show called Down by Law organized by a fake gallery featuring “a family of bad men and women, a parade of wrong behaviors, illegal practices, suspicious faces, and corrupted minded,” plus what I hope is a fake pipe bomb.
Alone in the lobby gallery, thanks to Deutsche Bank, the French embassy, and the Public Art Fund, Pierre Huyghe presents what is certainly the most lavishly underwritten part of the show—no surprise here, given Iles’s affinity for video art and, judging by the grubby scraps otherwise assembled, contempt for any other art form.
Anyway, Huyghe’s lush video, called A Journey That Wasn’t, documents, in part, a sailing adventure by artist and crew to the Antarctic ice shelf, “receding due to the effects of global warming” (of course), in order to search through “mutations in the indigenous fauna” for an albino penguin (they find it!) by means of a “temporary sound and light station that was specially designed to translate the physical shape of the island into sound.” Just in case you were wondering about that last bit of hardware, “The Morse code-like stream of sound that it produced was not unlike the unique vocal displays that animals use to communicate with one another, and it was the artist’s hope that it would be a call for the elusive creature.” Right. The second part of the film records a reenactment of the first, this time filmed in Central Park’s Wollman Rink. The soundtrack here features the “performance of composer Joshua Cody’s instrumental score based on the sound data derived from the island’s topography.” Queer adventure, writ large. Take that, Ang Lee.
And you can see it all, the whole Biennial, in less time that it takes to read this review. There’s plenty here that’s shocking and awful. But save for Huyghe’s big budget, Matthew-Barney-without-the-Vaseline film, there’s very little in the way of plain old shock and awe. The sublime authority of art, the only real power afforded the artist, is suspiciously absent here. One wonders why.
I visited this Biennial twice during the opening day: The first was over a dreary noontime press preview that had critics scratching their heads. Some tried to make light of the spectacle (“Do I dare go in here?”). Others attempted to dilate on the inconsequential work on display, as if the Biennial was really a showcase of artistic talent rather than a demonstration of curatorial power.
In the evening I returned for the opening-night party. There was the real Jeff Koons, the Cheshire Cat of the 1980s art scene, smiling beside his own fake obituary by Adam McEwen. There was the actress Chloë Sevigny. Downstairs, with the deejay and the booze, were the artists of the hour, all young, many with strange facial hair, celebrating their temporary takeover of the asylum and smoking butts out on the patio beside the Peace Tower. In this topsy-turvy world underwritten by Philip Morris, one supposes, the heavy armaments are designed to fire only in reverse.
The artists here are killing themselves. Yes, and they don’t mind it one bit. In the solstice ritual of Saturnalia, that Mardi Gras of the ancient world, the roles of master and slave are temporarily reversed. The tradition continued well into the Christian era. Asterius, Bishop of Amasea in Pontus, noted in 400 A.D., “This festival teaches even the little children, artless and simple, to be greedy, and accustoms them to go from house to house and to offer novel gifts, fruits covered with silver tinsel. For these they receive in return gifts double their value.” These Biennial artists, plucked from obscurity by the almighty Whitney curator only to be shoved back in their place when through, are the willing Saturnalicius princeps. Like the “lords of misrule,” variously known as the Abbots of Unreason, the Princes des Sots, and the Bishops of Fools, these artists get tapped to lead the revelry—only to be sacrificed at the end in order to cement the status quo. The more queer the festivities are allowed to become, the more sclerotic the culture shows itself to be, because the less it fears a genuine overturning of the norm. And for those who refuse to go along? James George Frazer in The Golden Bough reminds us of the Martyrdom of St. Dasius: “the lot fell upon the Christian soldier Dasius, but he refused to play the part of the heathen god and soil his last days by debauchery. The threats and arguments of his commanding officer Bassus failed to shake his constancy, and accordingly he was beheaded.”
“Toni Burlap” writes how “the artist, the ultimate Homo ludens, is reconfiguring, through play, a metaphorical representation of the world.” But in accepting this form of play, the Biennial artists enter into a Saturnalian bargain. They become playful masters for a time, but in another switch, cede artistic control over to the institution. Selection rather than creation takes on primary significance. Siva Vaidhyanathan, in a catalogue essay called “The Technocultural Imagination: Life, Art, and Politics in the Age of Total Connectivity,” concludes “We can do what was unimaginable just two decades ago. And we must harness this radical democratic power for the best, before the powerful and anxious capture and kill it.” But when it comes to contemporary art, the Whitney remains one step ahead of the democratic imperative by sweating out the subversive in these biannual reaffirmations of the status quo. The Biennial is all about the Whitney. The museum director Adam D. Weinberg reasons: “While there are certain scholarly exhibitions that require distance from the makers, others such as the Biennial not only benefit from this involvement [of the curators] but necessitate (especially given the considerably condensed time period to produce the exhibition and catalogue) a direct and dialectical relationship with artists.”
Will you ever see a great painter here? A pro-American political artist? Something that may just be overwhelming and, indeed, actually unexpected? Maybe. But it won’t be this year, when all you get is bad Duchamp. In other years it has been bad Mondrian. The derivations change, but what remains consistent is the badness the curators are always able to pull together. For this dialectical role-play to work, the Whitney museum carefully avoids any of the numerous talents who might have a chance of breaking out of the prescribed parameters. By banking on the bad, the Whitney hopes to demonstrate its goodness. Weinberg says it best in this self-congratulatory sentiment: “Such risk taking and honest examination are what distinguish the Whitney Biennial and the artists the curators have courageously selected.”
There is one thing, however, that this Biennial notably lacks over others, and that is its Dasius, a martyr to frown over the fun. For decades the museum and its supporters have dismissed the judgments of Hilton Kramer while eagerly awaiting the affirmation of his next negative review. Here is what Calvin Tompkins recently wrote in a New Yorker profile of Weinberg:
The one unchanging aspect of a Whitney Biennial—the one thing everyone can count on—is that Hilton Kramer, the most easily outraged of American art critics, will hate it. His Times review of the 1977 Biennial called it “a disaster, a libel and a misrepresentation of the art they are responsible for showing us” … . In 2000, after reminding us that there had never been a really good Biennial, he pronounced that year’s version “the first in which there is not to be found a single object, installation or home video worth seeing.” Such constancy is reassuring, and Iles and Vergne look forward to this year’s fatwa.
Sorry to break it to you guys. But, well, you know, with Hilton retiring from his Observer column and all, I think you’re going to need a new reason to put on a show.
Until that time, for screwing over countless artists with queer fantasies, Gore Vidal’s Caligula sums up the Whitney Biennial in a nutshell.
Notes
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- “The Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on March 2 and remains on view through May 28, 2006. Go back to the text.
