Art review: Whitney Biennial is a wasteland

One of the works included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Newsday / Alejandra Villa / March 4, 2008)

As I slogged through the Whitney's amorphous, random and mostly incomprehensible Biennial, a line from T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" echoed in my brain: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." The heaps and scraps scattered around the museum felt like a flimsy levee, hastily piled against apocalypse. Eliot paints a coherent panorama of dissolution, but these artworks just dissolve in desperation.

The impending recession haunts us; the gradual warming of the earth terrifies us; the never-ending war in Iraq drains our strength and our emotional resources. And yet the art market soars blithely upward, impervious to crises at home and abroad. The Whitney is not in the business of selling art, but this Biennial shows that it's nevertheless caught up in the market's bizarre hysteria, swooning over mediocrity and prodigally handing out prestige.

The sliver of "now" on view at the Whitney seems to me a symptom of decadence, a wasteland of its own, made up of dissociated trends and indecipherable shards. Biennial curators Henriette Huldisch and Shamim Momin have mimicked the organization of global art fairs, where each gallery is assigned a little booth. Here, artists have designated areas in which to make their case, but they fill the space haphazardly, with agglomerations that may in fact be meticulously crafted environments but often resemble the piles left out on the sidewalk on recycling day.

Amanda Ross-Ho's installation consists of what could almost be a wall lifted from her studio, complete with pushpins, stray news clippings and other homeless or ratty-looking images. Nearby are some large blurry photographs possibly shot with a cell-phone camera, a rolled-up dirty dishtowel and a tissue box sitting on a paper doily. Dominating the space is a black cut felt wall hanging. Ross-Ho takes detritus as her inspiration, but such alchemies as she performs on it seem hollow and mystifying at the same time.

Then there is Mika Rottenberg's space-consuming "Cheese," a half-ripened meditation on agriculture and feminism. We enter a huge, barnlike maze cobbled together from recycled wood. Inside hangs a series of video screens showing women in white nightgowns with long, silky hair chasing goats around a pen. They do this fetchingly, waving their locks like toreadors trying to excite a bull. Why devote so much square footage to such an undercooked concept, especially one with no redeeming aesthetic value?

William Cordova, Matt Mullican, Frances Stark, Rita Ackermann, Leslie Hewitt, Charles Long, Jedediah Ceasar and Ry Rocklen all create assemblages out of bits and pieces. Their work has in common a sense of decline, decomposition, and chaos - an all-consuming anxiety that the center cannot hold.

T.S. Eliot appended explanatory notes to "The Wasteland," guiding the reader through his recondite references, and in past years, Biennial curators did something similar, explaining the artist's intentions in elaborate wall texts. But critics gave curators grief for these labels; they lambasted the jargon and insisted that art, as a visual medium, should broadcast its meaning without the crutch of language. Accordingly, this time around, the curators have kept words to a minimum.

Some need words

The trouble is that innumerable installations simply don't speak for themselves. Nor do they resonate in that semi-poetic way that art can, washing over you in evocative waves of beauty, nostalgia or sentiment. No, most everything here is like a joke with a punch line in Yiddish or Catalan or some other language I don't understand. At least one or two of the artists apparently intuit that their work can be puzzling; during the installation some objects - one, a giant cat box full of litter and another, bits of plaster scattered on a windowsill - were helpfully labeled "Art," lest workers haul them away.

Perhaps we should nevertheless be grateful for the absence of words, since in the one place they do appear - the introductory summing-up of the show's tenets - they read more obscurely than ever. The works before us, we are told, "explore fluid communication structures and systems of exchange that index larger social, political, and economic contexts, often aiming to invert the more object-oriented operations of the art market." In other words: 1) much art deals with the world beyond the studio, and 2) artists are purposely making things nobody would want to buy.

A few pieces - very few - have enough humor and visual appeal to excuse their obscurity. They may have little to say but at least they do so with a certain flair. Eduardo Sarabia's "The Gift," for instance, consists of a storeroom neatly packed with mermaid tails, horse heads, banana boxes and Chinese vases decorated with azure assault weapons. Maybe this is a sly comment on the absurdity of consumerism - I've been in real stores with similarly eclectic inventories - or maybe Sarabia is just another surrealist-come-lately.

Elephants, as a theme

Among the oddments he's displayed is a row of plastic elephant feet, which turns out to be part of a stream of pachyderm references running through the show. Long black vinyl tubes, like laminated elephant trunks, jut from an enormous wall piece by Rodney McMillian. In a photograph, Louise Lawler cloaks most of an elephant in a vast white sheet, exposing only its extremities.

And then there's my favorite piece: the Javier Téllez film, "Blind, for the Use of Those Who See," in which an elephant is led into the empty and crumbling swimming pool in Brooklyn's McCarren Park. Six sightless subjects then take turns approaching the giant leathery creature and experience it by running their hands over its hide. The setting strikes a note of desolation, but, amid this urban decay, people and beast meet in sensual and joyful communion.

The real elephant in the room is the impotence of art. This Biennial is filled with wan political statements, reluctant commodities, unpersuasively subversive gestures and acts of broken narcissism. There are not one but two pieces involving bits of mirror fastened to plywood frames - both of them incomplete reflections, hovering in midair. The entire exhibit seems gripped by awkwardness and a lack of conviction in art's ability to change lives, refract the world or even just make money.

Eliot might have been wandering through the Whitney when he asked: "Where are the roots that clutch? What branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish? ... You cannot say or guess, because you know only/A heap of broken images."

ARTifacts

So expansive is the vision of this

Biennial's curators that the Whitney's four floors can't contain it and the show spills over into the Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street. There, artists have taken over the weather-beaten wood-paneled rooms, the enormous Drill Hall and even a decommissioned washroom. The Veteran's Room now houses Mario Ybarra Jr.'s "Scarface Museum," which is indistinguishable from a hobbyist's trove of knickknacks. This is an interactive work: If you're not sure what to do with that pair of "Scarface" boxer shorts emblazoned with the line "Say hello to my little friend," Ybarra will take them as a donation - and then you, too, can have a work in the Whitney.

-Ariella Budick

WHEN&WHERE

"Whitney Biennial 2008" through June 1 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, Manhattan. Installations and performances organized by the Whitney and the Art Production Fund will also be presented at the Park Avenue Armory (Park and 67th Street) through March 23. For exhibition hours and admission prices, call 800-WHITNEY or visit whitney.org.

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