A: Is for Art that has us Confused!

The 2008 Whitney Biennial tells us “where American art stands today”. "Cheese" (2008), is a multichannel video piece by Mika Rottenberg, shows a iffy economy and lowered expectations. With 80 artists, this is the smallest show yet it takes up three floors and continues at the Park Avenue Armory, at 67th Street. This Biennial is unglamorous, installation are plain and forced. There are certainly elements to hold ones attention such as Spike Lee’s HBO film about Katrina-wrecked New Orleans but does this really belong in an art museum show meant for emerging artists? I did find Phoebe Washburn’s floral ecosystem refreshing and a light in this dim experience. A lot of the work seemed to be in a transitional, questioning mode, art as conversation rather than as statement. In a sense this show went "Green" and all kinds of found and recycled ingredients, otherwise known as trash became art. Examples are wood scraps, disposable coffee cups, old socks in blocks of resin for display. Spidery, shapes based on traces of bird droppings from plaster covered in debris. If painting is what you came here to see you will be deprived as there is little that follows that format. The Biennials use to be the best of the best of the art galleries so for better or worse, the art in this show is genuinely new. From the old we have Frances Stark’s free-associative collages. The 2008 Biennial is a political show, at least if you define politics, in terms of indirection, ambiguity; questions asked, not answered; truth that is and is not true. The best pieces though film are Omer Fast sex, lies, and a civilian shooting in Iraq a film-within-a-film. William E. Jones takes a very personal tack on the subject of civilian surveillance by recycling an old police video of illicit homosexual activity shot in an Ohio men’s room. The video dates from 1962, the year the artist, who is gay, was born, and the police sting triggered a wave of antigay sentiment in the town where he grew up. Though there is some interesting pieces one comes out of this show confused to what is art and what is film and what is to be thrown out with the trash. They say art is in the eye of the beholder but this is a disturbing F.A.C.T.

“Whitney Biennial 2008” runs through June 1 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, and through March 23 at the Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street.