On Art
BLOCH, BRADLEY W.
On Art MIXED MOVEMENT AT THE WHITNEY BY BRADLEY W BLOCH Mass-produced objects are the common coin of contemporary society. That this isso has changed the way we consume everything from...
...The canonization of the psychedelic fun house of Kenny Scharf and the rubber curtains of Izhar Patkin were embarrassing moments in the annals of contemporary art...
...One of Madison Avenue's most effective strategies has been to make the consumer's self-identity a function of the products he uses: You drink Perrier because you are the sort of person who drinks Perrier...
...These are usually the sort of forgettable creations whose forced complexity gives museum tour guides a sense of purpose...
...Less obviously, it has also altered our relationship to numbers...
...Dark on That Whiteness consists of 172 jars of paint whose colors match those of different buildings around the Washington Mall...
...Innerst's end result is a memorable presentation of the urban environment's often overlooked beauty...
...Typical of the genre were two offerings by the team of Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler...
...In marked contrast to such aggressively contemporary pieces, a number of artists in the show took their techniques from earlier times, producing art that is emotional, mysterious and evocative...
...Because McCollum's objects are all of an identical turquoise hue and of similar size, it is hard to differentiate between them and the table seems to go on forever...
...one expects a museum to retain a more conservative position, presenting creations that at least have a clear chance of surviving the test of time...
...Just when the whole composition is about to fade into a meaningless blur, though, the realization hits that these are in fact discrete elements, conscientiously placed...
...The artist Ashley Bickerton, on the other hand, is concerned not with quantity but with the social cues objects carry...
...Thepurity of geometric shape harkens back to a time when the industrialization of America was seen as a gift of Progress and a harbinger of a wondrous future...
...Perhaps the title is intended to mock Van Gogh, but that barb seems an afterthought compared with his attack on the contemporary sense of self: We live in a time when the most appropriate portrait is antiseptic and utterly impersonal...
...Take, for instance, the playpen...
...Other artists in the Biennial were concerned with the deconstruction of the object as code...
...Does he work within it, creating art tied to the world of the consumer, or does he walk away, seeking inspiration from nature, memory and imagination...
...Gornik draws from the familiar repertoire of mountains, ponds and clouds, yet her landscapes end up looking like something we could never expect to see on a trip through the countryside...
...With so much art being produced in studios throughout the nation, the impulse to collect the best and put it on display is natural...
...A showcase for painterly skill, demanding the viewer's prolonged attention, landscapes aren't about "getting it," they are about seeing and feeling...
...it is a chaotic attack on the senses...
...Simultaneously protection, stage and jail, the playpen safeguards a child even as it comically dehumanizes him...
...they only rearrange what already exists without giving the viewer much to hang on to...
...A web of galleries has emerged to provide needed exposure for the newest art...
...Still, it would do more harm than good if our advertising culture were exempt from this kind of scrutiny...
...The Whitney's own director, Tom Armstrong, observed before the previous biennial, "It may not be within the context of what we think is simply good, but what may be fresh, something new.' The '89 Whitney Biennial, however, suggested that the go-go days are drawing to a close...
...On the other hand, there is an obvious danger in a museum passing judgment on barely finished works...
...Museumgoers expecting the adrenaline rush of earlier shows were in for a disappointment...
...Certainly it is worthy of commentary that little in daily life comes without an attached sales pitch, and Bickerton's art speaks to the issue powerfully...
...The Introduction to the '89 catalogue says defensively, "the notion that this exhibition is perilously obsessed with novelty is as inaccurate as it is parochial...
...Its face is covered with the product logos that define Bickerton's life, from Fruit of the Loom to TV Guide...
...Mark Innerst, who looks not to nature but to the heart of the city, infuses buildings and bridges with an emotion that suggests both the idealism of Charles Demuth and the reverence of Byzantine iconography...
...The piece is an imposing black metal and plastic box, equipped with the straps, handles, and warning stickers of post-Armageddon industrial design...
...The mission of the Whitney Biennial—to select the most notable art of the past two years—is not an easy one to carry out...
...Thus the viewer is faced with the fuzzy exactitude of 10,000 nearly identical—yet unique—things...
...We are both overwhelmed and anesthetized by unrelenting muchness...
...Highly calibrated demographics have taken the ploy one step further, enabling market researchers to stitch together personality models based on detailed purchasing patterns...
...The landscapes of April Gornik, for example, clearly have as their antecedents the dramatic 19th-century seascapes of Martin Johnson Heade...
...Indeed, the 1985 Biennial, and to a lesser extent the one in '87, are remembered mostly for their cheap novelty and low standards...
...It may be true, as the exhibition catalogue notes, that the installations represented a "methodological approach to the visualization of nonvisual information and the interweaving and overlaying of previously unrelated, pre-existing systems of information, " but so what...
...The space is contorted yet utterly recognizable, a playpen that is all pen and no play...
...Susie," it reads, "The best in sensory and intellectual experiences...
...Her sense of light evokes the clashing forces of the primordial void...
...The jars are mounted on a wall according to the location of the building they represent...
...In truth, the museum brought the charge on itself...
...There is already enough in the world to deconstruct without hiding simple ideas under layers of translation...
...Ten thousand oddly-shaped plastic objects, whose forms were molded from conglomerations of household items like cat toys and drawer knobs, fill a table 14 feet wide and 33 feet long...
...The Whitney has not al ways been successful in walking the tightrope between innovation and connoisseurship...
...The variety of the works presented, ranging from abstract painting to earth sculpture, gave hope that artists are trying to create something meaningful, with all the uncertainty that process entails, rather than merely something different...
...Allan McCollum unleashes such an assault in his Individual Works, one of the exhibition's most visually captivating compositions...
...The 1989 Whitney Biennial (April 27-July 9) was in significant measure divided between these two camps...
...While subjects like the Williamsburg Bridge and the Pan Am Building are rendered in faithful detail, the surrounding structures are painted as rectangles of various sizes andhues...
...Each pane has been engraved with either a tracing of a fissure from a government building, or a diagram of a notable highway or road...
...Quantities that were once reserved for astronomers arenowpartof theeveryday: billionsof hamburgers, millionsof compact discs...
...For as much as Heade's sea paintings focused upon the unharnessed power of nature, they nevertheless presented nature as we know it...
...Two sides of the life-size piece are parallel and the other two run diagonally to opposite corners, intersecting in the middle...
...Bickerton looks at himself through the eyes of such analysis in Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Aries) #2...
...Innerst's paintings are small, have a heavily varnished look, and are set in thick wooden frames...
...Muchness is more than abundance in the extreme...
...Memories of childhood are another traditional source of artistic inspiration...
...A civilization resembling an overstuffed attic poses a special dilemma for the artist...
...Sculptor Robert Gober integrates the contradictory qualities with chilling simplicity in X Playpen...
...There was a thoughtful, introspective feel to the exhibition as a whole that points to an art world entering a period of reassessment after rampant expansion in the public consciousness...
...That this isso has changed the way we consume everything from music to food...
...To these he has added a logo created to symbolize his own product, giving it a rightful place alongside Extra-Strength Tylenol...
...America Starts Here is similar, taking the cracked windowpanes of an abandoned factory and placing them on a wall according to their original configuration...
...Art that embraces consumerism is stuck with the limitations of its subject...
...Even a ray of sunlight falling on a grassy field is ominous...
...Childhood is a time of ambiguity, when one is acutely aware of the mixed messages of adult lif e but unschooled in the social conventions that make these messages tolerable, let alone comprehensible...
...It seems the waters of High Culture and High Fashion may finally be parting...
...His compositions are somehow limited as esthetic experiences...
...In Heade's eye, the sea was a dangerous place, full of sinking ships, empty rowboats and impending meteorological catastrophes...
...Although Gornik's canvases share that sense of foreboding, she has added her own brand of tension...
...Bickerton's work highlights the problems that occur when artists undertake bald consumer critique...
Vol. 72 • July 1989 • No. 11
