Since he took over as director of the Whitney Museum of American Art two years ago, David Ross has retooled the curatorial staff to make it more compatible with his own ideas about what the museum should be doing. With the opening of the 1993 Biennial exhibition, Ross’ priorities and his method of implementing them have become more evident.
The Biennial purports to be a survey of the most important American art produced during the preceding two years. In the past, it has drawn heavy fire for being too trendy, too cozy with influential dealers and too parochial-that is, too obsessed with the New York art scene.
This year’s edition, which involves 82 artists, can certainly be considered “au courant” for the way it engages socio-political issues that have emerged at the forefront of current art-making. But the Ross regime’s first Biennial also is fundamentally different from its immediate prececessors, and it’s also better.
Its premise-that the politics of individual and group identity define the current zeitgeist and thus should be a primary concern of art-might be challenged. But at least this year’s show, in moving beyond a bazaar aesthetic dominated by style, is intellectually more stimulating. Consequently, the picture it creates of current art is less fragmented than it has been.
Perhaps the most significant change in format involves the way this Biennial was selected. The collegial approach, in which the Whitney’s curators picked the artists by consensus, has been scrapped in favor of a more personal viewpoint.
In this case, the viewpoint belongs mainly to Elisabeth Sussman, Ross’ principal curatorial addition, who worked for him at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston when he was director there. Sussman supervised an exhibition team made up of associate curator Thelma Golden, curator Lisa Phillips and John G. Hanhardt, curator of film and video.
Centralization of authority has produced a Biennial that’s considerably more focused and integrated in terms of its installation than the last one. The show, which occupies the entire museum, doesn’t have a formal theme, but regardless of the point at which you enter you grasp its political orientation almost immediately.
This year the video works have been given more visibility, and thus more stature, by being inserted into the show’s general flow. The special video galleries on the third and fourth floors present video as integral to the Biennial, not an adjunct to it.
The film segment remains somewhat off to one side, in a separate film gallery on the second floor. Yet the number of film and video artists participating-30-affirms the prominent role they have come to play in the Whitney’s view of current art.
The ’93 Biennial also includes a seven-part performing arts series that will begin Wednesday at the Whitney’s Philip Morris branch, Park Avenue and 42nd Street. Free performances are scheduled for Wednesday evenings at 7:30 through June 2.
Aside from the strong video-film presence, special installations, some of which use electronic media, also figure prominently. Together, these two aspects tend to make parts of the exhibition feel like a video arcade. Even the “reading room,” a new feature where you can educate yourself about the participating artists, is next to a video gallery.
Although the ’93 Biennial displays a few genitalia, I didn’t encounter any sexual material that I considered to be blatantly outrageous or deliberately provocative. The Whitney has posted a “sexually explicit material” warning in the lobby, but contemporary mores being what they are, it seems not only unnecessary but also a bit silly. On the other hand, it could be a marketing ploy.
I confess that early reports on the exhibition’s general character failed to create a sense of anticipation, but the reality proved more uplifting. Multiculturalism in particular has been ill-served by so much hysterical and superficial art that one cringes at the thought of having to endure a whole museum full of propagandizing and sloganeering.
In fact, the Biennial advances multicultural themes under the rubric of personal and group identity, which involves gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and race. In a broader sense, identity also involves the concept of boundaries-where one group ends and another begins, or whether the idea of group boundaries is even valid.
Much of the current social and political turmoil in this country and elsewhere has to do with defining boundaries of various kinds; we see that all too vividly in the barbaric warfare being waged in Bosnia and in the controversy over homosexuals in the military. Disputes over boundaries involve power relationships, religious and class distinctions and cultural patrimony.
Questions of identity also generate questions about imperatives and propriety: Why is it perceived as important, sometimes to the point of life or death, to be regarded as one thing and not something else?
These issues have come to dominate the evening news and public discourse. So it’s proper and inevitable that artists, whose function it is to expand consciousness in all directions, should find them worth considering.
Although many of the artists in the Biennial represent cultural minorities or other “marginal” constituencies such as homosexuals, it would be simplistic to characterize the exhibition as the “politically correct” Biennial.
For the most part, the work isn’t strident or egregiously combative. It uses minority positions as levers to challenge traditional power relationships, gender roles and notions of cultural superiority. As someone who approaches political art skeptically, I found myself sympathetic to this concerted focus on issues that really involve everyone, not just minorities.
Take as a typical example Fred Wilson’s installation “Re: Claiming Egypt.” Wilson’s subject is the “blackness” of ancient Egyptian culture, the historical truth of which has become an article of faith among some African-Americans.
Wilson has created a simulated museum display in which reproductions of Egyptian sculptures are combined with objects that promote pride in African culture. While his position seems apparent, he doesn’t beat you over the head with it, which is prudent.
The evidence for ancient Egypt as a “black” culture is inconclusive at best, and probably insufficient. Any effort to settle the issue runs into a host of ambiguities and imponderables, such as the difficulty in defining what “black” or “African” should encompass.
Wilson doesn’t suggest as much, but his installation raises the question of whether such a determination needs to be made at all. If we are being encouraged to challenge arbitrary boundaries, why attempt to establish one that may be illusory?
Renee Green’s three-part installation “Import/Export Funk Office” examines another kind of boundary, that of language. The idea here is to show how subculture slang not only defines but sets apart the group that uses it, and defies translation into common language.
In Green’s installation, a kind of audiovisual library, hip-hop culture is examined through the writings of, and interviews conducted by, a German music critic. Because the audio and video tapes all play at once, “Funk Office” is frequently incoherent, but it makes its point, and with a touch of humor as well.
The ’93 Biennial’s other major theme is the human body, a frontier territory for artists interested in debunking taboos associated with it and exploring how the body defines personal identity.
Some body imagery is subliminally erotic, some more darkly sexual. For example, Glenn Ligon took 91 photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe of nude black men and added a range of commentaries that express differing opinions as to the essential nature of these images.
Charles Ray’s “Family Romance” is a bit closer to the edge. Four anatomically correct mannequins-a nude father, mother, prepubescent son and younger daughter-stand in the center of the gallery. All are the same height, which creates a startling and unexpected sexual tension.
Cindy Sherman’s sexual images are even more bizarre and disturbing. Using artificial body parts, she constructed disjointed mannequins with exaggerated sexual features, then photographed them in murky, “film-noir” color. Looking at them, one begins to understand why many people find bodies-their own and other people’s-threatening.
It’s hardly a coincidence that the most inflammatory political issues of the moment, abortion and homosexuality, involve basic bodily functions. The body art in the Biennial doesn’t proselytize for either, it tries to make us acknowledge irrationality and ignorance related to our most basic selves.
You don’t have to like everything in the show, or even most of it, to recognize the value in this. This Biennial addresses the kinds of societal attitudes and problems that artists are well-equipped by experience and temperament to illuminate. If they don’t, who else will?
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Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. (at 75th Street), New York. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesdays, 1-8 p.m. Thursdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Fridays through Sundays. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission $6, senior citizens and students with ID, $4. Free 6-8 p.m. Thursdays.
The Biennial will close in two stages-the lobby gallery and the second floor, including the film gallery, on June 13 and the third and fourth floors on June 20. Telephone: 212-570-3600 or 212-570-3676.A still from “Massillon” by William Jones, a look at repressed sexuality in the filmmaker’s hometown of Massillon, Ohio.
