Whit-Split: Biennial Less Than the Sum of Its Parts

Solemn Duo: Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, co-organizers of this year's Whitney Biennial

During the remarks at yesterday's press preview for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, the 75th edition of what the museum describes as its "signature exhibition," there seemed to be a lack of chemistry between the two organizers of the show---guest curator Francesco Bonami, the middle-aged former senior curator of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, the young associate curator of the Whitney.

In an Interview interview (and fashion spread!) conducted by former Whitney curator Lisa Phillips (now director of the New Museum), Bonami suggested there was more bonhomie than was apparent at the rostrum. He described their interaction this way to Lisa (an old Biennial wrangler herself):

We just looked at artists together and decided. The process was very fun....It worked very well.

Whatever their working relationship, the resulting agglomeration, which the curators concede has no overriding concept or theme, does not coalesce. Unlike previous Biennials, which often reflected some unifying (if, at times, off-putting) sensibility, each floor in the latest version is its own realm, with seemingly little connection to the rest of the show. And in many cases, the text on the labels seemed a lot more weighty than the works themselves.

My favorite was the fourth floor---more "museum-like," as critic Eleanor Heartney termed it when I encountered her before I myself had gotten there. It had a higher concentration of works that, to me, had more substance and appeal. As distinguished from the scattershot second floor and the video-intensive third floor, a number of artists were represented in more depth on the fourth floor, including a large room of unexpectedly decorative Charles Ray florals, of all things:



The work that will stick with me the most probably wasn't even conceived as an artwork: It is photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair's horrific and haunting series of nine digital prints---"Self-Immolation in Afghanistan: A Cry for Help," 2005. This was the only portion of the show that, as far as I saw, bore a "parental discretion" label.

At first, I thought the subject was war victims. Then I read the title and the description:

These women, who were being cared for in a rudimentary public hospital in the town of Herat, ...set themselves on fire in acts of utter desperation. Some of the women shared their personal histories of prolonged abuse at the hands of their husbands or families with Sinclair....Partially in response to the widespread attention these images received from media outlets around the world, a new burn unit was created in Herat.

Here's a partial installation shot of Sinclair's photos:



And here's one of the nine images:



On a completely different note (also on the fourth floor), I also admired the jewel-like beauty of Lesley Vance's series of abstract paintings based on photographs of carefully arranged still lifes. Here's one:



If there's any thread that runs through this show, I think it could be expressed as: "Things are not what they seem." There's a certain malleability or unreliability of images---both literally, as in Tauba Auerbach's trompe l'oeil paintings...



...or through a masking process, as in Curtis Mann's bleached and manipulated photographs documenting the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, which are transformed into an abstract, Jennifer Bartlett-like patchwork...



...or through a reimagining and morphing of concrete reality, as in Vance's abstraction.

You will soon have your pick of reviews that will probably find more of value in this show than I did. For now, I'll leave you with a CultureGrrl Video, below, of Francesco introducing "2010" to the press, with the stony-faced Gary standing stiffly at his side. The young curator does smile and nod in agreement, though, when Bonami remarks on how the young Whitney-ites did not seem to desire his company after hours.

Bonami considered it a good sign that none of the artists in the show had complained about it. He also provided us with a possible adjective for our own appraisals, in his surprising description of the atmosphere that he believes pervades the works on the second floor. Let's see how many reviewers describes those works as "creepy"---something that you will not find in the official online description, which refers, instead, to "diverse responses to the anxiety and optimism characteristic of this moment."