April 17, 2006
Arthur C. Danto on the Whitney Biennial
In his review of the Whitney Biennial, published in the May 1 issue of The Nation, Arthur C. Danto draws a connection between "Day For Night" and "Uncertain States of America," a smaller exhibition of American artists. The latter was also organized by European curators, and was recently presented at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo. (It opens at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Museum on June 24.) Unfortunately, Danto uses the connection only as a rhetorical device, opting to describe the pieces in the Biennial by a few artists included in both exhibitions. He then goes on to say:
None of these works support the subtext of the show. What they illustrate, rather, is the extreme pluralism of contemporary art—the sense that one can make art out of anything, looking any way one likes. To the degree that artistic pluralism mirrors the contemporary world, ours is an open world full of aesthetic opportunities, a condition that only an aesthetic monist would deplore. A certain price may be paid for this pluralism, in art as in life. In art the price is that often one does not know what one is looking at, or what a work means, or why it is there. The curators have acknowledged this by providing generous amounts of wall text, helping us understand what we are seeing.
There are many people, I think, who would argue that wall-text supplements cannot do the heavy-lifting these artworks seemingly call for, and that there is something lost in the translation.
Later in the piece, he offers a calmer version of a criticism the exhibition has drawn from many in the peanut gallery:
This is the kind of thing most of the works are said to do. They ask us to reflect, explore, question. The Peace Tower installed in the Whitney's courtyard, for example, "provides an opportunity to step back momentarily from the bustle of the rest of the exhibition and to reflect on the wider social issues presented therein." Surely that is not what di Suvero and Tiravanija intended. When Serra's painting says Stop Bush, its aim is to stop Bush, not reflect on the messages of the other works with which it is exhibited. There is something strangely inert about the language of mirroring and reflecting in which "Day for Night" is framed. Somehow, one feels, the experience of a work of art ought to do something more robust than reflect on good causes. It is too much to ask that we feel the way Rilke did when he stood before an archaic torso of Apollo—that he must change his life. But there seems to be little place for passion, or pleasure, in the intellectually earnest work on display here.
There is now a third exhibition entering this European-curators-looking-at-American-artists field: "USA Today," a collaboration between the Royal Academy of Arts and the Saatchi Gallery opening in six months in London. What I hope is that someone who is able to see all three—or even only two—of these exhibitions will compare them at some length, interrogate the reasons for the recent surge of interest in young, American artists in Europe, and try to ascertain just what picture of America, if any, emerges from them.