2010 Whitney Biennial

There’s a beautiful Kierkegaard parable where a man stands before the gods in heaven and is granted the privilege of making one wish. “What would you most like to have?” the gods ask him. “Youth? Power? A beautiful woman? A long life?” The man considers, then replies, “I want only one thing: to always have the laugh on my side.” The gods think for a moment, then laugh. The man smiles, gratified. His wish has come true.

This same question might be asked of the curator of the 75th Whitney Biennial, the anticipated showcase of work by contemporary American artists. “What one thing would you like this show to have? Political import? The energy of the new?” It’s a significant question for a curator, if one is going to elevate one’s selections above being just some pretty good but disconnected visual art. The show’s title doesn’t help us: the survey is simply called “2010.” 2010 can be anything! What does 53-year-old Italian Francesco Bonami want it to mean?

In an interview with former Biennial curator Lisa Phillips, Bonami identifies the show’s hoped-for essence as: “regeneration through art.” His decision to limit the size of the show—there are only 55 artists participating—now makes some sense: it’s hard to feel regenerated after being stuffed, a sensation Bonami may be cautious about. His curating of the 2003 Venice Biennial was reviewed by The New York Times’s Michael Kimmelman as the “largest, most sprawling and also by far the sloppiest, most uninspired, enervating and passionless biennale that I can recall.”

The 75th Whitney is not sprawling, not sloppy. It’s refined and modest. If passion is still somewhat lacking, it’s from the absence of a sense of risk, as though the artists feared muddying the carpets. They mostly tread lightly, looking to pin down beauty and meaning within reach. Possibly it’s a reaction to the hubris that led to America’s recent financial crisis. Few here want to embody that destructive spirit. But destruction is part of regeneration—at least it is if we are speaking about the dramatic sort of regeneration that comes after an uplifting battle with an equally vigorous opponent. This sort of regeneration allows for a sort of spiritual rebirth.

But I think Bonami had a different regeneration in mind: regeneration in the sense of cyclical renewal. Every spring the buds come back. It’s predictable, natural.

Is it predictable that we would return to the realm of beautiful paintings—of beauty for its own sake? The show is filled with work in this vein, in the vein of humility—or some would say purity. There are the drawings of sculptor Charles Ray whose series of 47 by 31.5-inch flower drawings in ink on paper are among the refreshing and wonderful pieces in the show. R H Quaytman takes over a small room with a suite of canvases: small, white canvases with narrow rows of white sparkles glued on, op-art canvases with thin bands of red, green and grey paint. Maureen Gallace’s meditative, small-scale paintings of New England recall the Platonic world of Morandi. Tauba Auerbach’s large, trompe l’oeil paintings of thick fabric folded are at once exceptional and sort of gaudy. The small, dark, haunting canvases of Lesley Vance—abstracts mimicking still lives—are too assured to be precious or banal.

Without the inclusion of two incredibly powerful photographic series in this show, there would be no shadow here at all—no hint of the state we are regenerating from.

Nina Berman’s photographic series of a young American Marine sergeant, returned home and preparing to marry his fiancé, is like some forgotten fairy tale; the young man’s face, having under gone 50 reconstructive surgeries after its shattering by a suicide bomb, is a horrific mask—huge, bloated, earless, scarred, nostrils wide open. He stands in his uniform beside his crestfallen bride.

A reminder that when there is beauty in one place, there is suffering in another, comes from Stephanie Sinclair’s photographs of Afghan women being mended in a hospital dedicated to burn victims: their bodies are bloodied, scarred and yellowing, but their full-body burns were self-inflicted—a hoped-for escape from abuse at the hands of husbands and families.

These two series are documentary. None of the artists who create out of the fictional realm come as close to imagining comparable horrors. Why not? The lack of deep moral imagination is Bonami’s, I think, and is most apparent in his selection of video works, which almost unilaterally celebrate the exertions of the untried, youthful body. This makes the beauty and lightness that’s on display feel more like an aesthetic proposition than a cyclical return, or something thirsted for.

In the end, one does not feel regenerated, and it’s unlikely the gods burst out laughing even once. Laughter is an explosion of relief—which only comes when we have escaped from some darkness. But if the darkness isn’t shown—and it isn’t here—the lightness is less light. ❚

“2010 Whitney Biennial” was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from February 25 to May 30, 2010.

Sheila Heti is the author of the forthcoming novel How Should a Person Be? House of Anansi Press, Toronto.