I took the Amtrak up to New York on Thursday morning to spend a couple days with some friends (Guts and Alyssa!!) I hadn’t seen in way too long. I got into Manhattan in the morning with a whole day to wander around before meeting up with Alyssa. I got into Penn Station and started walking North in the general direction of the Whitney. Before I made it to the museum though, I was waylaid by a thrift sale in a church basement in an absurdly rich-looking neighborhood off Madison Avenue. Figuring that the clothes absurdly rich people donate to thrift sales are probably still pretty nice clothes, I paid five bucks to get in and managed to make off with two cute BCBG skirts, an classy gray wool Armani skirt I can wear to work, and a white DKNY trench-style raincoat. All for the price of their Target-sales-rack equivalents! Ha! I had to fend off flying elbows and plastic laundry baskets overflowing with people’s purchases, but I made it out alive and feeling quite successful. Plus it was for some good cause or other, so I can feel doubly good about myself.
Then I went to the Whitney Biennial exhibit. Contemporary art is often very cool. It is often very prone to bullshit. Studying art as a major helped me get to know the work of some very cool contemporary artists that I might otherwise have put in the bullshit category. Wolfgang Laib, for instance, who makes art out of pollen he collects by hand in the meadows around his house in Germany.
Or Andy Goldsworthy, who makes art out of materials he finds in nature, like colored leaves, with no glue, no paper, no paint. He arranges them, and then photographs them, and then nature does its thing and the art disappears.
I saw a lot of art at the Whitney that I really liked. There were some poignant series of photographs of people. And some imaginative semi-figurative sculptures, and really beautiful abstract paintings. And a very cool tapestry by some Norwegian or Danish guy, all woven out of sisal and jute and things with fun textures and layers and a big hole meant to look like a sun. There were even one or two video installations I kind of liked.
However. There was also a healthy dose of art that makes you go “Seriously?”, which was made even more fun by the fact that I took one of those audio tour things with the head phones, so I got to hear the artists themselves explain their work, which made it all the more wonderfully silly.
My two finalists in the “Seriously?” category are…
A couch that the artist had covered with newspaper clippings about Barack Obama. Sitting on the couch were a couple big lumpy ceramic pieces, vaguely shaped like vases, but really awkward and non-functional. The artist’s audio tour explanation talked about how the couch was from her childhood home, and represented comfort, or security, or something. And how the meaning of the piece had maybe changed over the last year from a “couch of hope and promise” or something, to what might be seen as a couch of disappointment and broken expectations. I forget what the ceramics had to do with anything. Something about domesticity maybe? My verdict: kind of dumb and very boring.
My second favorite in the silly-bullshit category was an installation for which the artist had built a small room out of plywood in the middle of the gallery space. You go inside the dark room, and there is a pane of glass suspended from the ceiling, on which is projected a pale-green image of JFK’s head, floating disembodiedly. Under Kennedy’s head was an LP spinning around and around. There was another, larger projection making its way around the walls of the room that, as its own piece of abstract art, might have actually been pretty neat – it was some smeary, swirly paint or liquid photographed on a pane of glass. There might have been low music playing too. And that was it. JFK’s head floating above a vinyl record, looking like the big wizard head in the Wizard of Oz before Toto pulls back the curtain. Apparently the piece had something to do with the 1960s and the race to the moon. And jazz. There were some words and scientific-looking diagrams on the outside walls of the room too, that I’m sure tied into something, but that I could make neither heads nor tails of.
Sadly, no cameras were allowed in the exhibit (stole the couch photo from their website), so you all will have to go and pay your $12. You can actually scroll through a number of the pieces here: http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial
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