The Biennial was lambasted in 1993 for being politically correct-one artist made admission buttons announcing that he was glad he wasn’t white-and it was yawned at in 1995 for taking refuge in a lot of mediocre painting. Now the Biennial heads back to the middle-guessing what’s going to be hot. The show’s cocurators, Whitney staffer Lisa Philips and Australian consultant Louise Neff, told an art magazine, “We didn’t want to do a sampler of every tendency in American art.” Instead, they looked at artists’ “private worlds” for “some of the most significant American art created during the past two years.” But a sampler is what they’ve got. If there’s a cutting edge out there, it must be sharper than this.
Downsized to about 200 works by 70-odd artists, the 1997 Biennial is slickly professional. There’s very little angry amateurism, and there are genuinely arresting works from David Hammons, Bryan Crockett and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Hammons, 54, is an African-American artist who’s always been sardonic about the black experience-he once sold snowballs on the street as a performance piece. Here he’s represented by a seven-minute video, “Phat Free.” The video finds Hammons himself, in funky baseball cap and overcoat, meandering through Manhattan, kicking an empty pail. The kicking-the-bucket metaphor may be obvious–African-American males are an endangered species-but the gorgeously overexposed, lo-fi video blends beautifully with the meaty sound. DiCorcia’s street-scene photograph “Los Angeles” shows a preoccupied man shambling alongside a construction site, a shaft of light hitting his skull as if he were Saul on the road to Damascus.
Much of the rest of the Biennial, however, looks like a premillennial yard sale, with artists frantically reducing inventory before they lose their leases on the avant-garde in 2000. Former bad boy Chris Burden hauls out toys and models he’s been hoarding for years to construct a spacey tabletop called “Pizza City.” Fellow Los Angeleno Jason Rhoades does more or less the same thing-bigger and less coherently-with what looks like a hardware store after a 4.5 on the Richter. He calls the work “Uno Momento/theatre in my d–k/a look to the physical/ephemeral.” If he finds sex in junk, who are we to argue?
The Biennial’s usual nod to a hiply realist painter favors a young Texan, Richard Phillips. Save for size, Phillips’s 10 percent surreal faces are as deep as a full-page ad in Elle. The high-concept slot goes to Annette Lawrence’s “obsessive drawings in her own blood, based on the Mayan calendar.” They’re small, brown and have lots of numbers. Whatever.
In the absence of any major new movements in the art world, this Biennial opts for a synopsis of what commercial galleries are showing. But without a point of view, the show becomes pointless. The Whitney is going to wait three years for the next Biennial, so it can occur in 2000. The museum and its critics might use the extra time to think up a better dance.
