Whitney Biennial 2012

I liked the 2012 Whitney Biennial. I found it thoughtful. Sure it was mixed – I encountered work I’d not seen before, work I knew I loved and work I’ve never understood and possibly never will. I appreciated its attempts to give a central seat to film, video and performance. While it made me wonder what the purpose of chasing the zeitgeist is when there are opportunities to see work by many artists in the show all year round, I enjoyed the conversations this provoked with friends. And I know that you’re reading this wondering why I’ve over-seasoned with so many ‘me’s and ‘I’s, but that’s because to affect some third-person critical-aloofness would be a misleading way in which to talk about this edition of the biennial. At its best, this was an exhibition of art in the first-person. Taking a cue from Lutz Bacher’s beautiful Celestial Handbook (2011) – pages torn from a mid-century astronomy guide and hung throughout all the public areas of the museum – it could be read as a show of personal cosmologies, some content to roam their own universes, others trying to figure out their place in the bigger galaxy. The 2012 Whitney was also, as the curators were at pains to point out, an exhibition that took shape as Occupy emerged in the US. This complicated conversations about individual and institutional roles in art and its bigger superstructure. But it was not a dumb show of self-flagellating critique or art-saves-the-world posturing. It tried to articulate how the ‘we’ in ‘We are the 99 percent’ is just a bunch of ‘I’s, and that negotiating the gap between a life in art and bigger socio-political problems is infernally complicated, no matter who you are. Occupy retreated, but raised stark questions about art, politics and ethics that nobody, let alone this biennial, has been able to adequately address. (The closest the exhibition came to this was through Andrea Fraser’s contribution, a polemical catalogue essay calling out contradictory and hypocritical ‘legitimizing discourses’ that oil the wheels of the art industry.)

This year’s biennial featured 53 artists, and was curated by Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, with film and video work programmed by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter of Light Industry. With many participating artists represented either in the moving-image section (rather than use black boxes, a screening room was dedicated to the film programme, showcasing one artist per week for the three-month duration of the show) or by performance in the huge fourth-floor gallery, the museum spaces allowed works room to breathe. Modesty and lack of bombast was notable. Even one of the largest works – a hanging tapestry, painting and sculpture combination by Kai Althoff that filled the entrance to one floor (Untitled, 2011–12) – effaced itself by being see-through. Other works in the gallery were visible through gaps in the woven fabric, such as Moyra Davey’s photographic mail art or Richard Hawkins’ erotic collages inspired by butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata. Some artists gave voice to others – for example, in Concern, Crush, Desire (2011) Nick Mauss re-created a room from the spa of French cosmetic company Guerlain, including here works by Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly and Gary Winograd. Robert Gober produced a room dedicated to Forest Bess, a Texan fisherman and painter whose ideas about male and female sexuality led him, during a difficult and sad life, to perform operations on his own genitals in order to become an hermaphrodite.

Five thousand square feet of an entire floor was dedicated to performance. This included work by British choreographers Sarah Michelson – winner of the Whitney’s 2012 Bucksbaum Award – and Michael Clark, each developing a new piece in residency. Michelson worked with fellow biennial participant and theatre director Richard Maxwell to produce Devotion Study #1 (2012), which related the architecture of the Whitney to ideas of American Modernism. Clark produced the exuberant Who’s Zoo? (2012), with music by Jarvis Cocker, visuals by Charles Atlas (also a biennial artist-in-residence on the fourth floor) and a cast of amateur dancers working alongside members of Clark’s company. (For this British writer, both Michelson and Clark were a reminder of how the conversation between UK and American pop and Modernism is old and deep.) Behind the main performance area, a space designed by Wu Tsang based on the nightclub interiors in his 2012 film Wildness (which was also included in the show) was put to use as a dressing room.

Beard and Halter’s serious and considered film programme, featuring 15 artists and filmmakers was where less familiar work could be found alongside names such as Mike Kelley, George Kuchar, Kelly Reichardt and Frederick Wiseman. In works such as My Tears Are Dry (2009) and A Lax Riddle Unit (2011), Laida Lertxundi dramatizes small moments of domestic stillness drenched in golden Los Angeles light and old soul music, her work reminiscent of older Californian filmmakers such as Bruce Baillie. Stitching together appropriated footage, Michael Robinson’s work created what could be described as an oblique form of experimental science fiction: in These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (2010), for example, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra and Michael Jackson are dressed as an ancient Egyptian co-exist on screen to uncanny and amusing effect. Luther Price’s films, made by marking the celluloid, then burying the film in the ground for months to let it rot, nod to an older tradition of American abstract experimental film pushed to an extreme, as the reels perish with each screening.

Documentary was represented by a range of generations, from veteran Wiseman (Boxing Gym, 2010) through Thom Andersen (creator of the extraordinary essay on Hollywood and urban history, Los Angeles Plays Itself, 2003) to Matt Porterfield’s portrait of a working-class Baltimore community (Putty Hill, 2010).

With events spread throughout the duration of the show, to see this year’s biennial in full meant visiting the Whitney every week for three months. What kind of commitment can an exhibition legitimately demand of its visitors? What does it mean for most visitors to have only a partial view of the whole? What does commitment to art and exhibitions even mean when economies and governments are in crisis around us? Is it the commitment of an artist like LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose documentary photographs trace a polemical line between family history and the bleak realities of post-industrial American cities? Is it that of Forest Bess, committed to transforming his body without medical help? Is it The Red Krayola, Mayo Thompson’s band of 46 years, still going strong? Perhaps it’s the dedication to developing a unique voice, such as those of the late Kelley or Kuchar? I don’t know – it’s hard enough trying to figure that out for myself.