Biennale to Biennial: Whitney Guest Curator Bonami Organized Venice Display Critics Loved to Hate

Whitney Wizard: Francesco Bonami

As I gird myself to head out to today's press preview for the Whitney Biennial, I have to wonder at the museum's gutsy choice of Francesco Bonami, former senior curator of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, to curate the show in collaboration with Gary Carrion-Murayari, the Whitney's associate curator.

Bonami received a general drubbing for two recent, high-profile curatorial outings: In his review of the 2003 Venice Biennale, the NY Times' chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman, called that show, "the largest, most sprawling and also by far the sloppiest, most uninspired, enervating and passionless Biennale that I can recall. The curator, Francesco Bonami, has provided the usual nebulous title, pregnant with meaning but signifying nothing. This time it's 'Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer.' It doesn't begin to account for the miasma that Mr. Bonami has allowed to be assembled."

Maybe that's why Bonami is playing it absolutely safe this time, titling the Whitney's show: "2010." And maybe by limiting it to 55 artists, he took to heart Kimmelman's comment at the end of his Biennale review:

I have a utopian idea: a small, tightly argued Biennale by a brave curator who chooses a dozen, or even a few dozen favorite artists, as opposed to several hundred, the works installed coherently.

There were 81 artists, in two venues, in the exhausting but endearing 2008 edition of the Whitney Biennial (which I discussed here, here and here).

Bonami provoked another critical storm with his 2008 show at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice---Italics: Italian art between Tradition and Revolution, 1968-2008 (which also appeared at the Chicago MCA).

Acknowledging the controversy over "Italics," Bonami said this to Georgina Adams of the Art Newspaper:

There has been a big stink over this show....I didn't intend to create a stink. But in Italy, when you step outside the 'family,' when you don't involve established figures, then you are wrong.

By contrast, introducing less established figures is usually what Whitney Biennials are all about. But the press release for this year's edition indicates that many of the chosen are already familiar to Whitney devotees: Eleven of the 55 artists in the show have been in shown in previous Biennials (most recently, in 2006, both Hannah Greely, whom I discussed here, and Josephine Meckseper). Four more 2010 picks have previously exhibited at the Whitney.

Whatever I think of the main event, I'm looking forward to the auxiliary one---a fifth-floor retrospective of artists in the Whitney's collection whose works were shown at Biennials over the last eight decades. This also harkens back to the 2003 Venice Biennale, in which Bonami included a retrospective of paintings that had appeared at the prestigious exhibition since 1964. According to Kimmelman, that show was "a hodgepodge, thrown together, with many holes in it, but it include[d] art that's carefully made and rewards scrutiny."