The Whitney Biennial 2010

One theme of the Biennial is couches, or sofas.  One is covered with a collage of newspaper articles, including a picture of Obama -- from the New York Times.  (That is called "Couch for a Long Time" by Jessica Jackson Hutchins.) Another is more properly a "booth" as in a diner.  My favorite was by Robert Grosvenor -- a long regal red couch ("Untitled") behind a metal fence.  (Looking at it now, on the Internet, I see it resembles the top of a tunnel, but while walking through the Biennial, with my hurting feet, "Untitled" became a couch, for me.)

Michael Jackson is a theme, including a small sculpture on the first floor -- the first piece you see when you walk in: "The Crossing: Passengers Must Pay Toll in Order to Disembark (Michael Jackson, Charon & Uncle Sam)" by Daniel McDonald.  In this diorama, Michael Jackson is being ferried across the River Styx by Charon, the mythical Greek ferryman.  Michael proffers a giant penny to Charon.  Uncle Sam is also in the boat -- as if our nation itself has died!  On an upper floor, a series of photographs compare Baudelaire and Michael Jackson ("The First and Last of the Modernists" by Lorraine O'Grady).

Beauty is cautiously making a return, in contemporary art.  Maureen Gallace's diffident but transcendent landscapes of New England are the best example.  And I will include my aging hero of underground comics, Robert Williams, who supplies five kindly, subversive watercolors.

In a quiet way, this biennial has politics, most noticeably in Josephine Meckseper's video "Mall of America," where video game-style American warfare is intercut with scenes from the famous Mall of America in Minnesota, shot through a blue lens (in homage to Godard).  Nina Berman's photos of an American serviceman disfigured by a suicide bomber also remind us that we are at war.  And Stephanie Sinclair photographs of Afghani women who self-immolated, out of desperation.  (I could barely look.)

Several videos are about Training the Body -- dancing, martial arts.  One installation and one video celebrate rock music.  The biennial is saying: "We play rock music to train our bodies, and prepare us for war."

This show is less multicultural than usual, but has the most women of any biennial ever, I suspect.

The star of the show?  Kate Gilmore, whose video "Standing Here" shows her kicking her way out of a drywall enclosure, with high heels.  (The broken enclosure stands in the room with the video.)  The camera looks down from above, and Kate's determined but frenzied efforts to escape captivate anyone who looks.  May we all escape from our flimsy boxes!

Postscript

Actually, three weeks after seeing the show, I find myself obsessing on David Adamo's installation of walking canes that he's whittled down, until they are almost as thin as stalks of wheat.  "Yes, this is the world of 2010," I thought, gazing at these fragile, emaciated canes.