We hit up the Whitney Biennial. My general impression was that of disappointment. With 81 artists, the show is meant to be representative of the spirit of art in America these days. My main qualm was with the organization of the show. When I entered the fourth floor, I felt like I was entering a thrift store. I watched an interview with one of the designers of the show, and he claimed that the Biennial is generally a pretty crammed show, but that there were even more artists this year than in years past. I also read in a NYTimes article that, “Rather than organizing the Biennial in a conventional linear path, the curators have organized it so the visitor picks where to begin: any room on any floor in either building. ‘It’s a choose your own adventure,’ said Shamim M. Momin, an associate curator at the Whitney.”
Mm, yea. Choose your own adventure. Or, rather, choose your own nightmare!! Hah. jk. But I really was quite unimpressed. There was a lot of video installations, and just general installation work, which I’m not too keen on. I feel like this type of work is often very conceptual, which I can dig, but not if craftsmanship goes by the wayside, which seems more and more to be the case.
Take the video by Stanya Khan and Harry Dodge, for example. Their film, Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, was done with a shaky handheld camera, and the performance was improvised. Khan herself played the protagonist, who is a woman who walks around Los Angeles, disillusioned, in a Vikings hat, rambling to the cameraman.
Apparently she begins to develop a relationship with the cameraman, and this is where it gets interesting. I didn’t stick around for this. Maybe if I HAD watched the whole film, I would’ve become privy to this relationship, and picked up on the conceptual undertones, but I was just too disappointed with the quality of the film to stomach anymore of it than I already did. It felt like something my friends and I would’ve put together in high school. In fact, I’m pretty certain we’ve had ideas for films which were of equal caliber (although they never came to fruition).
I watched the majority of Olaf Bruening’s video Home 2. It features a tall, lanky redhead who sports white contacts and travels to various countries, completely oblivious to these countries’ native way of life. It takes on the air of a slapstick comedy and could probably be easily confused as an outtake for Jackass. The oblivion of this character is hilarious, yet at the same time profound. It comes as a commentary on the globalism of today, and the inevitability of insurmountable cultural differences and the inevitability of insensitivity to these differences:
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