The Whitney Biennial pushes the envelope of what we think of as art. My sister Margaret heard it was controversial and wanted to find out why. Ryley and I went along. An installation on the first floor titled something like, “Thoreola,” set the tone. An abandoned office space, filled with upended glue jars, glued Styrofoam pebbles, oversized notes with numbered instructions, we tried to understand its meaning. I took a photo of this and one other before a guard told me photography was prohibited. (Why? I have no idea.)
James Welling took blue mesh and somehow crimped and shaped it to create highlights and shadows. By mounting the mesh against a black backdrop, the mesh took on very senusal shapes that looked like beautiful body portraits. A small room housed dripping white (concrete?) sculptures pocked with broken bottles, screws and other debris. One looked like the head of Davey Jones from The Pirates of the Caribbean. Reading the card, we learned that artist Charles Long was inspired by the droppings of great blue herons along the Los Angeles River! Ryley who is 10, decided we should vote on which floor had the craziest art.
Unfortunately, there was no guide to the art/artists in the show and I can’t find all of them on the Whitney’s site, so I can’t include all artist names and titles. One installation was an enormous, two-story laboratory sort of construction. Fish tanks full of yellow Gatorade pumped and bubbled, seemingly food for the paper white flowers grown from bulbs. Instead of dirt, the bulbs sat on yellow golf balls. One woman asked Ryley if he could make sense of it for her.
A good many of the entries were video or film. A documentary by Spike Lee addressed the hurricane/levy management policies in New Orleans. Close-up interviews of people, some officials, some residents, were interspersed with footage of hurricane Katrina, Betsy and others walloping the city. A truck sat in the middle of a raging, out-of-control street river, its windshield wipers still beating. After five minutes or so Ryley motioned me down to ask, “Mom, why is this art?”
We thoroughly enjoyed Olaf Breuning’s film of himself, his love of orange and other thoughts; his orange hair, orange shirt melting into the orange earth with his orange dog alongside. His sense of humor was infectious.
Another film we liked began with a closeup shot of a man talking to a woman whom you never see. She describes a dream she had that she’d like to make into a film. After she verbally explains it, we go from the stark room of their talk to a more produced (albeit simply) scene. She’s an empress/filmmaker with thick black-rimmed glasses who makes her subjects watch her films. Midway through a flick, the movie stops and when she goes behind the scenes to investigate she sees that the movie camera is actually made of plates and other kitchenware. Film covers the floor and the hamster running the machine has quit work. A Russian woman in a lab coat also wearing heavy black-rimmed glasses and long red-lacquered nails enters to reloop the film and replace the hamster. The hamster won’t stay in the cup and she has to keep popping him back in.
A video installation we liked was a room with six or seven screens of different sizes showing clips of comedian David Alan Grier talking. The focus of your attention changes as the audio levels modulate. …women don’t have orgasms because they’re afraid of farting…
Perhaps my favorite piece in the exhibit, Cheese, is an installation created to house a film. You enter a wooden structure that resembles a rambling ramshackle barn. Inside there are six or seven screens hidden in different corners and tunnels playing parts of the same movie. The story features several women with very long hair—like six feet long. The women dressed in 18th century dresses milk their hair by running water over it and into a funnel and then mix it with goat’s milk to make blocks of cheese. (This may or may not be the plot, but it’s what I thought to be the plot.) Barnyard animals also run loose quacking and neighing. Entering the structure gives you the sense of being in a theater.
The show really got my energy flowing. If you’re in need of a boost, I highly recommend a visit. I marvel at what goes through an artist’s mind. Inspiration can come from anything, anywhere, any time. We decided the fourth floor had the wildest art.
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