The Seventy-fifth Edition Of the Whitney Museum's Biennial Show Smaller

Written by Basil Katz Thursday, 25 February 2010 20:19

NEW YORK, NY (REUTERS).- New York's Whitney Museum unveiled a smaller, more intimate biennial show on Tuesday partly in response to the impact of the economic downturn in the United States. The museum, which focuses on American art, has helped discover some of the 20th Century's great artists through its shows, which have become one of the art world's gauges for current trends and future stars. Curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari avoided a specific theme and deliberately reduced the number of artists to 55 to allow closer audience interaction with the art. On view 25 Febuary through 30 May, 2010.

This year marks the seventy-fifth edition of the Whitney’s signature exhibition. While Biennials are always affected by the cultural, political, and social moment, this exhibition “simply titled 2010” embodies a cross section of contemporary art production rather than a specific theme. To underscore the idea of time as an element of the Biennial and to demonstrate the influence of the past on 2010, familiar and less well-known artists from previous exhibitions are brought together in Collecting Biennials, an accompanying installation drawn from the Museum’s collection on view on the fifth floor. Balancing different media ranging from painting and sculpture to video, photography, performance, and installation, 2010 also serves as a two-way telescope through which the Whitney’s past and future can be observed.

The last biennial, in 2008, came at the peak of "a very distinct bubble in the art market," said Michael Plummer of Artvest Partners, an art investment advisory firm.

"Now that it has burst, you're looking at a biennial in a much more sober market," Plummer said.

The 2010 biennial can be at turns "creepy" and "optimistic," Bonami said. "Creepy because there is this apparent calm, like the first chapter of a Stephen King novel in which everything looks normal, but you know it's not."

Two photographs entitled "Landscape with Houses" by James Casebere portray a mock-up of a dreamlike suburbia of tract houses -- a world almost too perfect and one typical of those hit hardest by the foreclosure epidemic.

"This is particular to America. Behind closed doors you can do anything you want, and if you trespass you could get shot," Bonami said.

Other artworks were clearly political, and crafted in reaction to "the collective frenzy" around the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president, Bonami said.

The pared-down tone of the show also yielded glimpses of optimism.

One artist will invite musicians and shoe-shiners from Chicago to interact with the audience. Another, through a series of photographs, showed the gradual return of normalcy for disfigured Iraq war veteran Ty Ziegel before his marriage.

"We didn't go in with a theme," said Carrion-Murayari. "We were hoping to be as responsive as possible to what artists were producing over the past two years. There is a more modest approach to materials because of the economic situation. Artists aren't able to act on a spectacular scale."

(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Paul Simao)  Visit The Whitney Museum at : http://www.whitney.org/

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