The Whitney Biennial 2006

Set amid a world of respectability and order—it is Madison Avenue, after all—the 2006 edition of the Whitney Biennial of American Art looks like the site of an artistic explosion. Walls ripped open, tree branches torn, art scattered everywhere and bewildered onlookers; confusion reigns on all floors. When I visited the exhibition in late March, I half expected to see NYPD officers and a ropedoff crime scene around the corner. Instead, the wall labels informed me that everything was under control. The holes in the walls, as well as the silver tree branches, were part of an installation by artist Urs Fisher (The Intelligence of Flowers, 2003–2006). For this work, Fisher used, as his raw material, chains, silver, candles and the Whitney walls. By opening holes between galleries and suspending lit candles on rotating silver tree branches from the ceiling, he has created an eerie and oddly meditative environment. The gaping holes in the gallery walls open vistas onto still more art, his installation complicating any straightforward understanding of the piece. What are we supposed to look at, exactly? The dripped wax circles on the floor, the rotating branches, the holes, or the other artists’ work, which can be seen through them? Fisher’s installation is the first thing you see when you enter the exhibition space, which is fitting, since it so thoroughly summarizes the contents of the show.

Questioning the nature of what we are looking at is at the heart of the 2006 Whitney Biennial. The exhibition’s very title echoes this theme. “Day for Night” refers to François Truffaut’s 1973 film La nuit américaine, and emphasizes the cinematographic technique through which night scenes are filmed in full daylight by employing special filters. In the movie, as in the exhibition, things are often not what they appear to be. According to Adam D. Weinburg, director of the Whitney museum, this theme emerged as the curators were completing the selection of artworks.

A theme as vague as ‘deceitful appearances’ could arguably be applied to everything and nothing. However, the majority of works in this year’s biennial suggest novel ways of thinking about our understandings of art. A large number of the pieces play with media to confuse viewers. Marilyn Minter’s Stepping Up, 2005, and Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled (after Sam), 2005, blur the line between painting and photography. Minter’s work (one of two in the show) does so through the accuracy and deftness of its hyperrealism; whereas Stingel’s work is a painting based on a photograph taken by Sam Samore (hence the title). By combining the odd luminosity of the piece with its mammoth size, he turns a photograph into a painterly landscape of the artist’s creative soul. These artworks reflect what Rosalind Krauss has described as the “postmedium” condition: a time in which classical medium-based categorizations have lost their meaning.

The artistic ambiguity present at the Whitney this year is not restricted to the media employed. A considerable number of artworks feature subject matter that is initially difficult to identify. For instance, Anne Collier’s Cover (California Girls), 2005, is a photograph based on the cover of a 1970s lifestyle magazine showing two people lying down on a white canvas. Bright blue, red and white paint has been splashed over their bodies and the background in a manner that complicates any understanding of the piece. The resulting image looks more like an action painting than a figurative photograph.

The ambiguity in both media and subject matter, along with the sheer number of pieces in this exhibition (99 artists and over 120 works in total), makes you feel like you’ve been trapped in a ‘data smog.’ In her catalogue essay, “The Technocultural Imagination: Life, Art and Politics in the Age of Total Connectivity,” Siva Vaidhyanathan points out that “consumers and citizens have found cultural menus so full and materials so abundant and inexpensive that they have become overwhelmed and dazed by the Data Smog around them.”

The diversity and multiplicity of works in the Biennial do feel like an ‘art smog.’ Since the whole of contemporary art, even within the confines of the Whitney Biennial, continuously exceeds our grasp, I found myself attracted by artworks that seemed more user-friendly, as though my eyes could focus only on simple things. Jim O’Rourke’s video installation Door, 2005, featured a single door handle and lock. Combined with an interactive sound system, the heavily reworked video suggests the eponymous door is being open and shut repeatedly. I was mesmerized by its simplicity and repetitiveness, though I am not even sure the door was actually moving. It might have just been the lighting and colouring effects in the video.

Another artist who focussed on simple details and gestures is photographer Angela Strassheim. The four works exhibited at the Biennial from her “Left Behind” series, 2004, depict homely scenes. They are simple moments extracted from the cycle of life, but with a twist. Having previously worked as a forensic photographer in Miami, Strassheim imbues her images with a hard-to-pinpoint, yet very present, lugubrious edge. One of the images, entitled Untitled (Father & Son), 2004, shows a father combing his son’s hair in a mirror. But there is something odd. His facial expression and his heavy hand resting on the boy’s shoulder give the scene a sacrificial feel.

The constant questioning of the artworks’ form and content both contributes to and reinforces the ‘art smog’ aspect of the show. Just as in La nuit américaine, the exhibition feeds on its own production process. Wherever you look, the smog seems never to dissipate. This makes it difficult for viewers to follow a linear path. What emerges, instead, is a subjective linearity, constructed post-viewing by each visitor; a personal itinerary through uncharted waters. ■

“The Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night” was on exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art from March 2 to May 28, 2006.

Jean-François Bélisle is an art historian who lives in Montreal.