Take this installation, for example. A homoerotic work by Marsden Hartley greets you on the 3rd floor. So far so good.
Then you're likely to walk through a door where Nick Mauss has recreated what I think is supposed to be a turn-of-the-century powder room. Here's the ceiling:
The walls are hung with works in the Whitney's permanent collection, including an Andy Warhol photo of a male basket in bicycle shorts. Old/new, masculine/feminine, color/black & white, in/out, yeah, OK, I think I'm gettin' it: a comment on duality.
Some of stranger works encourage me to steal pieces with my digital camera, pieces that I like looking at more than the originals because of their color, texture and reflectiveness. Kate Levant here:
And Sam Lewitt, who's chosen medium is ferrofluid which practically burbles on the floor of the Whitney. I'll bet this is what the soil looks like at a nuclear waste dumping ground.
Some of the work I liked best employed digital technology. Elaine Reichek transferred this Old Masters painting by Titian to a tapestry using a digital loom.
Her technique works for embroidery, too:
It's so much more appealing (and innovative) than drawings like these by Nicole Eisenman, which cover an entire wall and most of another. According to the curators, her themes are "human interaction and detachment." Whatever. As a child of the sixties, I'm partial to the peace sign, not the artistic vision.
This series of non-objective paintings by Andrew Masullo seem pretty weak, too, although I do prefer them in close-up.
Close-ups do improve a lot of the work. Like this queer work by Richard Hawkins which does a good job of capturing the boredom and sexual tension in a gay bathhouse:
Here's a closeup of an inexplicable wood and canvas sculpture by Cameron Crawford:
And an overhead shot of more colorful, curvaceous inexplicability by Vincent Fecteau:
Matt Hoyt's objects, so small you're tempted to put them in your pocket and re-gift them, might disappear without a close-up:
Blurring improves some work, no question. I won't say whose.
This sculpture by Lutz Bacher includes a pipe organ. I'll bet the guard has been hanging out with Dawn Kasper, whose room is just around the corner (imagine dorm life and you'll get the idea).
I hate to admit it, but what really drew me to the Whitney this evening was an article in the Home & Garden section of the Times about Dawn Kasper the day before. She "lives" in the museum for the duration of the Biennial, though she pees in the basement and sleeps elsewhere, and interacts with museum visitors as if she were a work in progress. She must be a dyke with a very clever publicist. As part of her work, she plays vinyl recordings on a cheesy record player. When she heard David Bowie was in the house, she rushed back to her "room" to put on "Space Oddity." Then she overheard him say "I don't want to go in there." Can you hear the sound of a backfire popping through the thin gallery walls?!
Her installation did have the air of a "happening." The guy at the microphone was just about to begin a poetry reading.
I found the hipster footwear more compelling . . .
. . . though not as compelling the very high heels hanging on the walls, which seemed to be making a political statement about perils some metatarsal bones face at Mardi Gras. Or maybe not.
I don't expect to cry in museums but Werner Herzog's "Hearsay of the Soul" made me do just that. I sat in the darkened room, watching projections of images by Hercules Seghers, a completely unfamiliar 17th-century Dutch artist. They float across a series of screens which are then intercut with Ernst Reijseger, a contemporary Dutch musician playing his own work on the cello, accompanied by a synthesizer. His ecstatic demeanor, the glorious sound produced by his simple fingerings and strange density of the monochromatic etchings on the huge screens add up to an immersive surge of joy.
I had quite the opposite reaction to the politically correct work of Joanna Malinowska who smuggled in this work by imprisoned activist (or murderer, depending on your view) Leonard Peltier to question why it took a Polack to recognize the artistic merits of native American artists. In the context of this painting, this almost sounds like ethnic joke, and I don't mean one about redskins. Who's conning whom here?
The work of Forrest Bess set off another bullshit detector, albeit one that resonates more with me personally. Not that I have any interest in getting plastered and trying to carve a vagina just below my scrotum so that I can experience the pleasure of being penetrated by a penis but still, you have to give props to a guy who had enough savvy to correspond with Carl Jung and the leading sexologist of his time (John Money at Johns Hopkins) and get himself a New York City art dealer just before Hurricane Carla obliterated most of his work in 1961. Because if it weren't for his extreme bio, would anybody really care about these very minor, if pretty works, which, along with some frightening self-portrait/mutilations, merit their own room? By the way, the label text did teach me that WB Yeats had an operation that prevented him from ejaculating. He believed that building up a reservoir of semen helped relieve his writer's block. Jeez, the things people will do for their art!
