Feature

The Biennial Question

Two artists in the show have created fictional personae. Several have banded into collectives or groups—one is called Bernadette Corporation—that simultaneously attack the idea of the artist as a romantic solitary and subvert monolithic social identities, such as those associated with brand names or racial stereotypes. “Day for Night” even includes a fictional art-star named Reena Spaulings, who’s been pieced together by a group. Is a famous artist, nowadays, just a windup doll? To be an American artist today is to be intensely conscious of the tricks, stratagems, and showbiz of contemporary art. This hall of cracked mirrors itself reflects a culture that makes a fiction of reality programming.

Not surprisingly, in an era of uncertain identities, the half-seen becomes particularly powerful. Iles and Vergne hope to create a show that, Iles says, is also “preoccupied with the irrational, the religious, the dark, the erotic, and the violent, filtered through a sense of flawed beauty.” Vergne describes a “twilight zone” in which artists work between day and night and “between the history of forms and the forms of history.” Phrases like “lavish abandon” and “shock and awe” are being bandied about. There will be plenty of political art on view, much of it about the war in Iraq. Of course, political art is rarely subtle, confused, or shadowy about issues of identity; artists almost invariably have very clear ideas about identifying good guys and bad guys. But the great smoke clouds of secrecy and the vulgar politicizing of the war do contribute to the sensation that, in America, the truth lies behind a vast scrim.

I like twilight zones, flawed beauty, and the dark side. And meditations upon identity, already popular in ancient Greece, never go out of style. But what’s heartening about this Biennial (whatever its success as an exhibit) is the sight of curators trying to clarify the moment rather than just passively presenting what’s happening. The challenge today is not, as it has been in the past, to get an audience for art. It is not to attack or not to attack. The challenge is to make distinctions of value and extract what matters from the rotten, and growing, clot of art-information—that is, to do exactly what sloppy surveys and art fairs do not. Curators should try to find the important shapes and essential lights in our evolving culture. They should even declare what’s good and bad. It doesn’t matter much, in the end, if they’re right. History comes to its own conclusions. But the effort to make judgments of value is bracing to the present.

To develop a vital new character, the Whitney must give up part of its traditional identity, its narrow focus upon the homegrown. With boundaries in art eroding, the Whitney actually has little choice; it will otherwise subside into a fuddy-duddy museum that isolates what cannot be isolated. It’s lucky that America itself is not a place of fixed identities. It’s a place of immigrants, a mongrel nation; that’s its glory. Perhaps the Whitney can embody the American idea at its most expansive. An anxious institution uncertain of its place may even, paradoxically, be in a good position to hold a mirror to America itself. At a gathering of past and present Biennial curators staged by Artforum, someone suggested a Biennial called “Post-America.” Iles herself thought it was no big deal to have European curators organize an American show, since this country has so many connections to other Western nations. But imagine, she said, if a Chinese curator organized a Biennial! Imagine if an artist did one! Klaus Kertess, who organize the 1995 Biennial, observed, “The beauty of the show is its impossibility.” He was striking an old existentialist chord about the human condition. And invoking a traditional American idea: Chase that whale.