Memo from the World
The Movers and the Shakers:
The Whitney Biennial in 2000, Part Two

by Therese Schwartz

In this installment of the 2000 Biennial story, I look at the moving pieces housed in the same open-floor locations as the painting, sculpture, and mixed-media described in last month's Newsletter. Each of these are given separate, generous spaces in which their offerings run continuously and include short videos, three-dimensional props, music, erratic sounds, and human voiceovers. The themes range from the intensely personal to mini-documentary, and you can walk into a space as often as you wish. Installed in corners and recesses specially built for these works, most take place in pitch darkness, which adds to the drama by providing the viewer with a small element of risk.

Shirin Neshat's video in sharp black and white uses a huge ceiling-to-floor screen divided down the middle. It is about Islamic culture and its mandated separation of the sexes. On one side is a crowd of men in white shirts, on the other a sea of women in black, covered up to the eyes. They are assembled in a kind of courtyard of old buildings. On each side of the screen, the doubled image of a man stands on a raised platform, haranguing the crowd in Persian.

No translation is furnished and none is needed; the Hitlerian nature of the discourse is easily understood. To suggest that the rules are sometimes thwarted, at the forefront of each screen, one young man and one woman turn to take a long look at each other.

The video of Carl and Karen Pope belongs among the intensely personal. It is by a sister and brother who are African-American and is articulate about the injustice caused by racist myths.

Carl uses his own body in simulated acts of repellant surgery, branding, and tattooing. Karen recites her own poetry, the words spoken in long, slow intervals. The cadence blots out the connections and meaning, but the picture of pain, sorrow, and anger is visible enough.

I saw the moving exhibits at the same time as the rest of the show; no one resembled another, and none seemed designed to entertain. The reason could be the sparse market for them, but clearly they were not expected to make money. The desired prizes here are acceptance into national Video festivals, big museum shows, and such.

Could it be that personal video, which is young compared to traditional art objects, is still at a stage resembling the early days of the new abstract art? At that time, the only possible rewards were being seen in a museum or in a big prestigious group and arousing the admiration (and perhaps envy) of peers, or catching the friendly eye of a critic and garnering a good review in an art magazine. Of course, almost everyone had to find another way to survive.

Doug Aitken: still from Electric Earth, 1999.  
Eight-laserdisc installation and architectural environment,
dimensions variable.
Image courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Now, back to the Biennial in 2000. Leandro Erlich's installation is cool and impersonal - the way in is through a narrow, dark corridor with lit windows on one side. The variation here is that the windows are reversed so that the outsides are inside. Against the outside wall, heavy steady rain falls, illuminated by lightning at regular intervals. That is all.

A variety of unrelated objects arrange themselves in the corner occupied by the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko. A tall figure with a Medusa head wears the cloak of Athena and, in contrast to the classic, three laptop computers are strapped to the figure's back.

From somewhere in all this, voices are heard asking questions and getting evasive answers. A point is being made that when people are asked about anything they think inappropriate, they will answer politely and still reveal nothing - considered a more civilized response than "not your business" or something even shorter and rather rude.

Doug Aitken, a professional director of commercial music videos, was given twice as much space as all others. In his video, which spanned two dark, dark rooms, there was music with an insistent beat, wild changes in light, and a voiceover somewhat difficult to understand.

The written note for this, which I hope was composed with the artist's input, describes this as a record of his nocturnal wanderings and the electric energy that propelled them. And, according to the text, it is also about a man moving to the beat of his own music. Without this, I would have been clueless about the artist's intention, and even then, when I emerged into light, only the music stayed with me.

Dara Friedman's very short film is no crowd-pleaser. It shows two women slamming doors, and the images are manipulated so they are seen at peculiar angles: that is the story line. The artist, whose work suggests a European influence, studied with Peter Kubelka, an Austrian filmmaker and a leading figure in the Structuralist movement of the 1960's. Accompanying the simple theme is a punishing sound track, loud and relentless, of heavy metal crashing down on resistant surfaces. In its own way, this video aggresses the audience, a kind of poke in the eye and bang on the head. Since it can be taken in very quickly, it doesn't ask for prolonged endurance.

Dara Friedman: still from Bim Bam, 1999.
Two 16mm slot loading projectors,
metal armature, CD player and speakers.
Image courtesy the artist
and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

M.W. Burns installed twelve wall-mounted speakers in different spots, and his piece is a "sounder" - not a "mover." It combines bits of stories, which have been pre-recorded, with the actual noises made by what is going on in the gallery - talking, laughing, sneezing, sneering, coughing, kids. Burns is saying that most art-viewers in public places automatically shut out everything that interferes with what is considered a very private experience - looking at "art."

Roman de Salvo's TIC Headquarters, 2000 is a bank of clocks in a separate space at the entrance to the show. The title stands for "time in cities," and it simulates the row of clocks found at busy travel centers that give the exact time all over the world. I include this with the active pieces because the clocks are stripped of everything but the second hands, which move, but awkwardly, with great effort - suggesting a silent warning… "slow down."

After much thought I decided not to review the Cinematic Program, in which longer films are shown in the Whitney's screening room on a twice-a-day schedule, each just once a week. I saw about three-quarters of them and found them tedious and hard to sit through; I knew I could not do a dispassionate report. The fault may be mine, but I must add that even on days when the museum was crowded, there were never more than a few people in the audience, and fewer who saw a whole program. So with regret, and apologies to the artists, I leave it here.

FINIS

About the Author:

Therese Schwartz, an artist known for her geometrically based panoramic collages, has had numerous solo exhibitions, both domestically and internationally. Her works can be found in museums, corporations, and private art collections, among them: The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Corcoran Gallery of Art; Syracuse University Art Collection; Herbert F. Johnson Museum; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum; Ciba-Geigy Corporation; Barnet Arden Collection; Phillips Memorial Gallery; Women's Interart Center Museum; Advanced Elastomer Systems; PepsiCo Corporation; Monroe Geller Foundation; and the Huntington Museum.

An accomplished essayist, Ms. Schwartz has written feature articles in such publications as Art News, Arts Magazine, Women Artists' News, and Art In America, where she contributed a four-part series entitled The Politicization of the Avant-Garde, which continues to be widely used as a research tool for art historians.

For the Arts4All Newsletter, she has contributed The Year that Was: Marching toward the Millennium, a four-part series on the state of the art world at the turn of the century, as well as Cinema Everyday a report from the 1999 New York Film Festival.

Resources:

Therese Schwartz's look at painting and sculpture at the Whitney Biennial appeared in the April Newsletter.

Michael Geisert writes in this Newsletter about the Internet art included in the Biennial.

For more information on the Whitney Biennial and the artists whose works are represented: http://www.whitney.org/exhibition/2kb_fs.html