Art and Language, Incident in a Museum ,1986
The most effective installation of work at the 2012 Biennial occurs in the “Untitled” Café in the basement of the museum. Directly above the dining area hangs a painting of a vacant floor in the Whitney by the British conceptual art group Art and Language. While not listed in the Biennial’s roster of primary participants, Art and Language have been invited to present an opera co-written by Red Crayola, the experimental art/ rock band, who are. The painting, a flat re-presentation of the institution’s somewhat dreary, emptied, halls, and in figurative contrast to the literal cultural recreation beneath it, is the clearest representation of this institutionally vacuous show. A similarly empty museum is reproduced on the Biennial’s event guide.
In her essay contribution to the exhibit, There’s No Place Like Home, Andrea Fraser does a good job at delineating how art institutions (and artists, viewers) can internalize and therefore extend the symbolic representation of art’s agency in a symmetrical loop of uninspired critiques.
“ It may well be the critical agency within our selves that plays the greatest role in maintaining this internal conflict and, thus, in reducing cultural critique to a defensive and reproductive function. By interpreting negations as critique, by responding to judgments of attribution with judgments of attribution, by aggressively attempting to expose conflicts and to strip away defenses in critiques of critiques and negations of negations, critical practices and discourses may often collude in the distancing of affect and the dissimulation of our immediate and active investments in our field.”
The curators, Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, state in the press release their conviction that the artists in the 2012 Biennial are “trying to cull into existence something real and true, pushing it up and out of layers of synthetic nothingness, idealism, cynicism” and that “such restless energy can be ecstatic, poetic, and tragic all at once in the tangled web of twenty-first-century American culture” This highly florid language, which should embarrass any sophisticated critique of contemporary art , is itself representational of the unbelievably lightweight interrogation of “the real” that pervades the show. By wading in the shallows of sociological and aesthetic theory to fish for its activated presence, the curators are left with a tale of the one that got away. The show presents like a thesis of a theory of embodied practice. The 2012 Biennial aggregates its form similar to a series of representational snap shots taken by a gifted tourist who projects how neat the slideshow will turn out, thereby impoverishing his/her actual experience of the there and was. Perhaps in anticipation of the possibility of the audience finding that staged re-presentation a bore, the curators have scheduled all manner of time- based and performative modes which might serve to leaven the pedantic nature of the scope and arrangement of physical works. It’s a smart move to “build in” real time when trying to “cull into existence something real and true”. I can’t faithfully include this dimension here since at this writing I have only seen a few screenings and a dance rehearsal, but I’ll hazard to guess that, if the choices of performances reflect anything like the guiding principles of the overall work on display, the tendency toward the theoretical real will play through. In a book I (literally) picked up on sidewalk as I left the museum, a 1953 edition of Feeling and Form, by Susanne K. Langer, I found this passage: “ But it is not the intervention of symbolism as such that balks our understanding of “lived” time; it is the unsuitable and consequently barren structure of the literal symbol”. A statement in a similar vein, included in the show from the idiosyncratic painter Forrest Bess, might be uncannily predictive of the representational malaise I sense enfeebling the exhibition, “Am I suffering from a disease of symbolism?”
Painting, 1949, Forrest Bess
In answer to this question we have a resounding affirmative from none other that that most hyperbolically mystifying filmmaker, Werner Herzog. He’s made a long career of heavy- handed symbolism, and puffed -up running commentary, verging on self- parody, in his film projects. Hercules Seghers is an interesting choice for Hertzog’s slide show tribute here since his work is the most symbolically folded and stylistically convoluted of the 16th century Dutch landscape tradition. It is landscape as symbolic memory. Herzog typically finds extraordinarily resistant subjects to support his ridiculously ethereal reveries. Vincent Gallo is similarly a romantically self- absorbed auteur whose main claim to fame is in having directed the starlet Chloë Sevigny to give him a “real” blowjob in his barely plotted and insipidly unreal psycho- narrative film Brown Bunny. Including Hertzog and Gallo in the same show could be some kind of in-joke here, but more likely it’s the pathetic transference of a symbolic disease.
Why is this representational aspect of the Biennial so troubling? It is because the curators consistently telegraph their moves to invest symbolic meaning into the realm of “the real” without real effect. The obvious attention paid to the tokens of the real such as the strategic spatialization of many of the artist’s installations, the use of sound, the inclusion of time-based media and performance, don’t add up to a sum of embodied inspiration. Instead the ensemble feels like a feeble regression into some of the worst art clichés imaginable. Besides, any attempt to re-sublimate art with cogent meaning is doomed in this context. Herbert Marcuse, in his essay, The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive De-Sublimation, points to the overriding cultural reality that tends to defeat such institutional gestures.
“Institutionalized de-sublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the “conquest of transcendence” achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality; the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail. It reflects the belief that the real is rational, and that the established system, in spite of everything. delivers the goods. The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent. Conscience is absolved by reification, by the general necessity of things.”
What Sussman and Sanders have achieved in the 2012 Biennial is pretzel logic of sublimating “the real”, into the real, while de-sublimating the instinctual present. Without that instinctual dimension art no longer has any impact or import. By exteriorizing art’s “materiality” and rehearsing its “contingent practice” in a theoretical exegesis, the curators paradoxically deny the potential reality of art’s inherent becoming. Art’s immanence can be hotly (and is often shallowly) contested in the circular argument of the formal versus the social. In the 1993 Biennial, also curated by Sussman, the issue of the social interrogating the formal came to the fore. In that show however there were enough resistant characters among the artists to deny the limitations of the polemic. This is not the case with the present show. One of its few delegates for painting, Jutta Koether, is not only one of the most vapid painters in New York, but her installation of paintings, on sheets of glass, near a window, looks like a graduate student’s idea of the situational aesthetics of a classroom critique. Another painter, Andrew Masullo, represents as a practitioner of a sub-genre of art I’d call friendly formalism. His wall label states,
“ Masullo is known as a painter’s painter in part because, despite their ostensible simplicity and modest scale, his works deftly resist being confined by content or artistic movement”.
I’d differ with the fact that he is not part of a constituent movement. I can think of at least 20 painters off the top of my head, in New York alone, who are more or less friendly formalists. What’s interesting about this trend in painting is that it tends toward the de-sublimation of the traditional aura of abstraction while claiming its heritage as material grist for the mill. I found it curious also that Masullo is represented elsewhere in the exhibit in a few of the Forest Bess paintings that he owns. Perhaps possessing the aura of the eccentrically “real” symbolist lends Masullo an instinctual, atavistic charge that he nevertheless feels the need to neutralize in his own work.
Maybe this is also the meta-function of the Forrest Bess show- within- a- show in the Biennial. This tragically real sufferer from a symbolic disease (he was diagnosed schizophrenic) who mutilated himself in order to literally embody his theories of uniting the male and female spirit, seemed to misread creative sublimation as an obstacle rather than a natural defense to enable him to productively interrogate his reality. His desperate, symbolic struggle with his incapacity to reconcile his unresolved sexuality is poignantly documented in the show in statements such as: “If you remove the regeneration theory from my paper-there is nothing left but sexual perversion and that I couldn’t stomach” In Bess’s case he had the practice of abstract painting to act as a prosthetic sublimating device which probably lends his work it’s anxious power. But one might also consider how his attempts to achieve a physically regenerated self were handicapped by his unrealizable ideal of also attaining a visionary transparency. This literalized exteriorization of being seems symptomatic of the Biennial as well. You can’t stomach anything real if your guts are inside out.
Representing the anti-formal, or what the French writer and sub- cultural theorist Georges Bataille refers to as the transgressively uncategorizable “informe”, is Lutz Bacher. Her work has a pervasive presence in the show. A series of small, white -framed prints of celestial phenomena, apparently appropriated by Bacher from a scientific paperback, seem to be installed on almost every floor. Is this dispersal meant to be analogous to a poor reproduction of real universality in the Biennial proper, or is it elegiac of the scientific positivism of the past? The conceptual projection of these works is strained because their weakly disassociated logic reads too easily as artily obtuse. Her modified pipe organ has this same arch quality of offering just enough transgressive signification toward inappropriate usage of the traditional while failing to achieve a true negation of aesthetic pretense. If Bacher has no point to make, than she sure makes it unclearly.
Lutz Bacher, Pipe Organ (2010-11)
In fairness to many of the individual artists chosen to participate I should point out that the weakness of the overall curatorial vision does not always preclude individual poetic moments. Luther Price’s scarified and manipulated film scraps, often scored with the reductively harsh, yet hypnotic, soundtracks of sprocket holes running through the projector’s amplified audio, have an animated presence. His concept is not a new one, a trail blazed most famously by Stan Brackage and other visionary filmmakers, but his work provided much needed relief from the airless concept of the overall exhibition. The diminutive sculptures of Matt Hoyt offered a similarly refreshing pause. His work, often resembling drops of resin or gum wads, as well as more suggestive organic forms like branching coral or the inorganic remains of antique electronic components, claimed a smaller space of existence than much of the larger scale works in the show yet a larger share of embodied aura. Mike Kelley, who died last month, is represented in the show by a documentary film of his Mobile Homestead project, which took his unique ontological exploration of his cultural roots in Detroit on the road to various cities, situations and locales. It’s a shame that none of his actual sculptures are present in the show, since they may have offered an antic parody of the plodding pedantry prevalent in the physical show. He was a master at holding regressive sublimation in supreme tension with institutional desublimation.
The independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, who can honestly own a credible track record of stalking the imaginative possibilities of quotidian time and space in her films like Old Joy, and Wendy and Lucy, is an interesting addition to the roster of filmmakers included. George Kuchar is another filmmaker whose idiosyncratic body of work offers a lo- tech foil to the enervating academicism of this Biennial.
Dawn Kasper (detail from installation at 2012 Biennial)
In the end it is simply not possible to import the real into the context of the museum and have it read as undifferentiated naturalism. A young artist currently working in Detroit, Kate Levant, simply re-presents barely manipulated abject materials scavenged from derelict buildings. Hung in another installation that is reminiscent of a graduate critique, the residue of the real looks absurdly aestheticized here. A similar gesture by Dawn Kasper brings the entire contents of her transient studio existence into the museum, staging contingent reality as a performance piece. There is something profoundly insincere and socially irresponsible in isolating these gestures. The curators of the 2012 Biennial should have known better that simply representing the tokens of the real doesn’t recreate vision, and that vision is exactly what is needed to recreate the real.
