ART AGAIN… THIS TIME AT THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL

This afternoon, as I allow the stress of waiting to hear from School #1 following the campus visit of late March – they said I should be hearing on the 7th or 8th – and try to avoid chewing through my own inner lip, I have been perusing the online offerings of this year’s Whitney Biennial. I do not want to follow, here, in the footsteps of nearly every fashionable critic and waste your and my valuable time calling yet another Whitney Biennial dull and uninspiring – that seems a given for the biennial, but is neither interesting nor productive. And today – especially today – I want to be those things. I want to feel interesting and productive – even as I eyeball my fingernails with a crushing desire to bite at them, and even as I avert those same eyeballs from the conference paper that I seem profoundly unable to engage in anything resembling a productive way.

Thus, I shall try to find something interesting and productive to say about this year’s biennial – that bastion of conservative avant-gardism [yeah, you tell me how to spell that one if you think you know better].

And it actually isn’t that hard. Pretty early on in my meandering through the show I came across a piece I found myself actually liking – a rarity for me I must admit: Frederick Douglass Self-Defense Manual Series, Infinite Step Escape Technique #1: Hand Seeks Cotton by Dawolu Jabari Anderson [see above]. This artist is new to me, and I must say a good find on the part of the Whitney. I find the few drawings I can find of him out there in web-land to be absolutely charming, which is exactly what makes them so powerful. Their self-reflexive processes speak with great subtlety of the ways in which race – and the mainstream celebration thereof – is so often packaged as and reduced to those assumptions the celebration is meant to dispel.

Beyond the critique these drawings assert, I am absolutely struck by their handling: the awkwardly assertive renderings in Black History Month -- Feel What the Excitement Is All About [see left, click the image to see larger view], the wrinkling, folding and forced aging of the paper, the beatific expressions of the three girls as they witness the miracle of the slam dunk.

For all they ways these pieces attempt to dismiss themselves, to render themselves mundane – especially in the presence of the self-important projections of art that fill the galleries of the biennial – they only assert themselves all the more. They present that rare and astute wedding of materiality and message, speak in those subtle tones that resonate as though custom-made for the acoustics of whatever room you are in.

So, the rest of the art world can have the grandiose installations, the self-important video works, the derelict and dilapidated sculptures and the rest of the hauntingly abstract and/or figurative. Just leave me these pieces. Offer me a small side gallery, a few of these, and a little extra time to stick around and I will be happy – or at least something that resembles that as I resist the urge to crack my knuckles again.

And to all of you out there in the area of NYC, I suggest you swing by the Whitney and check this guy out. In my book he’ll be worth the general bother of shouldering through yet another biennial. I may even have to pack up the wife and make the little road-trip down to the city to take my own advice. Perhaps if I ever get this call – hint, hint, to School #1 – I will have reason for a celebratory adventure – a word that the wife tells me comes from the Old French aventurer meaning to happen, which makes sense of a lot about a lot of medieval adventures. But for more on that you shall have to implore the wife to start her own blog.