An Opinionated Guide To The 2014 Whitney
by Marc Yearsley, Gothamist, March 7, 2014

Didn't Gothamist already post about this?
Yes, we did, in fact! The excellent preview by Ben Miller would be a strong introduction if you stopped reading now. But you already clicked and the money is in the bank, so read on for a fuller picture of the show.

Fine. What is the Whitney Biennial?
The Whitney Biennial is a once-every-two-years ("biennial") exhibition presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art ("Whitney") of mostly new and emerging contemporary American artists. The Whitney has been putting on large group exhibitions for nearly 100 years, but the biennial format only began in 1973. It is first and foremost an exercise in curation, and this year the Whitney invited outside curators to put together the show, culminating in its distinct format and (sometimes) unique results.

Is it fascist?
Well, that depends on how you feel about museums. (At the Frick they force you to WEAR your overcoat if you decide not to check it!) But seriously, though the Biennial is mostly uncontroversial in a larger, more general sense, it is routinely the target of familiar and valid criticisms from within and without the art world. As recently as 2012 a parody Biennial website mocked the exhibition's corporate ties.

The most notable (and sustained) criticisms were made by the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous feminist art collective formed in 1985 in New York City, active through the late 1990s, and still working today, who in 1987 protested the Biennial to draw attention to the dearth of female and minority artists in the showcase. “The Guerrilla Girls Review The Whitney” was held at the non-profit Clocktower gallery, where the group denounced the systemic disenfranchisement of women in the history of the Biennial up until that point (for the seven exhibitions from 1973-1987, the number of women of color in the Biennial was a “statistically insignificant 0.3%"). In 1987, women were a mere 27% of artists in the Biennial.

2014’s Biennial is still not immune to these criticisms: by one early estimate, roughly 30% are women and 7% are black. Is it a coincidence that this year's only female curator assembled the most diverse collection? Should I disclose that I am a white male now or later?

So? What's the big deal?
However you slice it, it’s just one of the biggest art-world events in one of the biggest centers of the art-world in one of the most famous museums in one of the biggest cities in the United States. The Whitney Biennial exists, and you most certainly will be hearing about it.

This year’s Biennial is taking on a slightly different format: three curators from outside the Whitney were invited to organize their own show on one of the museum's three main floors. Anthony Elms, Stuart Comer, and Michelle Grabner took over the second, third, and fourth floors respectively. Elms is an associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (read a nice Q&A with him here), Comer is the Media and Performance Art Curator at the MoMa, and Grabner is an artist and professor at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Let's get to it, then!
There is a lot to get through: 103 artists and groups make up the 3.5-ish floor exhibition, so this will mostly highlight the pieces I liked the most and try to provide a sense of the three distinct floors. Am I qualified to do so? No, but neither are art historians, because art history is saturated with hired bullshit.

The Second Floor
Each level opens with a curator's statement summarizing their approach to their exhibition floor. Elm's guiding question for the second floor was the same one Marcel Breuer posed to himself when designing the Whitney—"What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan?"

Walking out of the elevators your are confronted with your first piece, Jimmy Durham's Choose Any Three, a wooden totem with names of famous persons in groups of three, made during his time in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He has been living and working all over Europe since the mid-90s, and his presence foreshadows one of the floors more interesting themes: Patriotism. What is an ex-pat American artist's relationship to American contemporary art? Is he even American? Does it matter? (Yes.)

High points elsewhere on the second floor: intermittent screenings of last year's stellar film Computer Chess by Andrew Bujalski, shot entirely on some ancient Sony AVC 3260 VHS cameras... ...and Gary Indiana's LED curtain installation, looping footage shot inside the now-closed Presido Modelo prison in Cuba modeled after Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon design. Next to the curtain is an artist's statement set on top of still photographs of mostly naked young men.

The second floor is rounded out with two curated personal collections, one of art critic Gregory Battock, who was stabbed to death in Puerto Rico in a still unsolved murder, and the other of Malachi Ritscher, an underground music scholar who set himself on fire during rush hour on the Chicago expressway in protest of the Iraq War.

There are three video installations centered around looking and being watched, often without consent—feeding into an implicit dialogue on post-PRISM America—completing a second floor that, as I said above, is a question of patriotism.

The Third Floor
Stuart Comer wrote that the artists he brought to the Whitney had work that's "as hybrid as the significant global, environmental, and technological shifts reshaping the United States." The third floor has an apocalyptic 22nd century feel to it, with invited artists extrapolating reflections on contemporary problems with a futuristic pessimism. That's right, it's got it all: Place, Movement, Violence, Philosophy, Technology, Capitalism, Nature, Industry, Globalization.

But the third floor is the standout, for me at least. Channa Horwitz's formalized graph paper illustrations that are like complex, colorful, and highly regulated DNA read-outs (my favorite of the more traditional artwork); the trippy experimental documentary Leviathan on the fishing industry in New Bedford, Massachusetts, produced by a group from the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab; a really cool photo series from Zachary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, Relationships, of a transgender couple undergoing a gender transition in opposite directions; and a mixed media installation of feminist video and photo prints from A.L. Steiner.

There's also a whole room for Semiotext(e), including an entire new series of texts commissioned for the Biennial, an excerpt of an interview with Gilles Deleuze, and some artifacts from the influential publishing house's 40 year history.

Finally, let's not forget the Bjarne Melgaard's *NSFW*Real Doll room. The creepy dolls are propped up on ugly, handmade, yet equally as artificial couches. The photo is a little blurry, but it's a keeper, accounting for the disorienting video screens looping footage of animals, humans, fighting, and fucking in a truly distopic future pleasure house. Melgaard's room is definitely a make-or-break moment; you're gonna love it or hate it, most likely, though there is plenty to be ambivalent about.

The Fourth Floor
Grabner's aim for the fourth and final floor was to assemble a collection that was not framed to be a "purely subjective take on contemporary American art" but rather a "curriculum that presents identifiable themes, generalities even, that are currently established in the textures of contemporary aesthetic, political, and economic realities." The result is the Big-A Art floor, packed with massive sculptures and installations, that Grabner identifies with "three overlapping priorities: contemporary abstract painting by women; materiality and affect theory; and art as strategy."

A very classic spread results in what is arguably the least subject-diverse floor, but the most formally and technically interesting, in a strictly artistic sense. It is also home to a small display of David Foster Wallace's notebooks on The Pale King, including a list of 52 "Good Names" scrawled on the back of a Rugrats notebook (the best of the names, #2 on that list, is "Nugent Brian Nugent") and some notes from his interview with Roger Federer. Even though DFW is a household name, it is a curious, but welcome, inclusion nevertheless,

Towards the back is a short, shifty stop-motion animation video of some clay figures playing an early version of tennis called jeu de paume by Joshua Mosley. Sports culture is gargantuan and interesting, so probing an original artifact of play is an interesting and fruitful area.

Out of the big pieces, Gretchen Bender's People in Pain, repaired by Philip Vanderhyden, is most impressive, filling out a large wall with distressed black vinyl, lit by neon blue LED lights illuminating various movie titles. Not getting into specifics about the rest of the pieces is not a knock; I was simply less drawn to, but no less impressed by, the large abstract canvas paintings and a rainbow-colored bunch of hundreds of thick streams of yarn pouring down from the ceiling (very cool).

TL;DR Version
The third floor is the most interesting, the fourth floor has the best Art, and the second floor definitely exists. It's hard to not feel underwhelmed, always conscious that this is simply another museum, despite the prestige and buzz that surrounds the Biennial, but that may be just a common feeling with art in general. There is a lot of talk about the Whitney's "signature windows," and the commissioned pieces that dialogue with them, which is mildly annoying.

Wow, modern art is the worst! I could do that shit.
Nope, that attitude is the worst. That generally blasé dismissal of art is a toxic and lazy defense mechanism. Furthermore, it's one of those dangerous statements that nearly means nothing at all; a void collapsing in on itself as it barely escapes your face.

Even being extremely conservative with the estimate, humans have been artists since, well, we started being human, so a lot has been done before—it should be no surprise that the conceptual underpinnings of a piece of art (and the non-vacuum art resides in—namely, our increasingly mediated visual culture) take on a more privileged position as time goes on. Also, people don't have to spend 35 years learning to paint anymore, so go make some art or something.

Fair enough, but did anything suck?
Definitely! For what it's worth, every museum has its duds and the Biennial is no exception. I offer one in particular—Morgan Fisher's Ro(Ro(Room)om)om, a Russian egg type installation modeled after three rooms in the Whitney's new and under construction home in the Meatpacking District. Fisher sets each one inside of the other at different scales, finishing the largest (and most useless, Museum-wise) room, a closet, at full scale.

It's just drywall and nails adorned with the unavoidable (read: not intentional) scrapes and scratches that arise during assembly and movement. It is basic, uninspired, lazy, and offensive; unimaginative, no matter how verbose you get about it. There are other misfires, of course, but I'd offer the unfortunately titled Ro(Ro(Room)om)om as the poster child of What Sucks About Art Sometimes. Other flops include oil paint on LED video screens and the stairwell installation of speakers decked with stuffed animals emitting an ambient droning sound. For the most part, though, it is usually advisable to not focus on the shitty stuff.

Well, should I go?
I don't know. A benefit analysis is never useful for these types of things. Either someone is going to go to this thing or they are not, arguing its worth is completely subjective. How much do you need that $20? But if you like art, are interested in something that comes around once every two years, and have some disposable income set aside for recreation and edification, an afternoon at the Whitney barely costs more than a ticket to a movie, and you won't ever be able to Netflix it. Honestly, I'd recommend it on the strength of the third floor alone. This year's Biennial has highs and lows, everyone is going to have different tastes, you like what you like, and, as always, time is a flat circle.