Inside Out
About 25 years ago, artist
Chris Burden arranged to have a friend shoot him in the arm with a rifle. He
also crawled over broken glass and was briefly crucified on top of a Volkswagen
Bug. Works like "Shoot" made Burden famous within art circles, after a
Guinness Book of World Records fashion. But Burden's masochistic
performance art had something in common with more mainstream American art of
the 1960s and 1970s. Like pop and minimalism, it was provocatively easy to
make. Aside from the hours spent documenting such feats, and recovering from
them, Burden's art didn't occupy much of his time.
At this
year's Whitney Biennial, the prestigious roundup of new American art, Burden's
"Pizza City" is one of the highlights of the show. There are no guns or glass
shards here, however; Burden has abandoned drama for a childlike laboriousness.
Composed of thousands of miniature parts, "Pizza City" is a scale model of a
sprawling, whimsical metropolis, laid out on table tops--a model train set
minus the trains. Some of the houses, shrubs, trees, and cars actually come
from train-set manufacturers. The other elements are miscellaneous: plumbing
fixtures, kitchen appliances, yard-sale leftovers, all ingeniously recycled to
become skyscrapers, factories, freeways. The result is likable, but not much
more. It's a kid's toy, albeit one that an established artist devoted seven
years of his life to making.
Such cottage industriousness is the ruling spirit of the
1997 Biennial. At its best, it translates into a kind of stoop-sale liveliness.
There's lots to look at; most of it has an introverted, made-from-scratch
intensity. Like Burden, Michael Ashkin does scale models, though his are
solemn, not whimsical: stretches of miniature Western highway so realistic that
photographs of them are indistinguishable from photos of real highways.
Ashkin's fastidiousness pales beside that of Charles Ray. For a film project
called "Self Portrait with Homemade Clothes," Ray learned how to sew his own
clothing and grind his own eyeglasses, then traveled to Switzerland to learn to
make a watch from scratch. Obsession is the name of the game. Devote three
months to a project, and you're a hobbyist. Devote seven years, and you're in
the Biennial.
Obsession
has always been a buzzword in the art world, a less corny, more
secular-sounding synonym for "inspiration." But suddenly it's a word that art
is measured against. Obsession, after all, is what connects increasingly
popular outsider artists such as Henry Darger, a Chicago janitor who painted and wrote a
15,000-page fantasy about little girls with penises, to insider artists such as
Burden, Ashkin, and Ray. Darger isn't in this exhibition, but his work ethic
is. In the catalog essay, curators Lisa Philips and Louise Neri give a nod to
the insider-outsider connection, but they dismiss it as a fluke of economic
history--they claim that in today's weak market, artists have more time on
their hands. This is ridiculous. For most artists, fewer sales means
less time to work, more time spent paying the rent. The explanation for
the ethos of laboriousness strikes me as much simpler--it serves as proof of
the artist's personal commitment. Even the worst work demands from you the
admission that at least the artists are authentic. They've put in too much
sweat equity to be bluffing.
Of course, getting shot in the arm is about as
far as you can go in the "I'm not bluffing" department, which may be why the
curators call Burden one of the two role models for the mostly younger artists
in this Biennial. (The other is Vija Celmins, who paints numbing, meticulous
copies of nature photographs.) But the real role model here is Marcel Duchamp.
Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even," familiarly known as
the "Large Glass," is the granddaddy of this kind of hands-on conceptualist
art. Duchamp worked for more than 12 years on the "Large Glass," devising pet
names for its idiosyncratic imagery and writing detailed, incomprehensible
notes. (Calvin Tomkins, an ardent Duchampian, calls them "magisterially
unclear.") As anyone who has ever been to Philadelphia to see it knows, the
result isn't particularly engaging. By the time he made it, Duchamp was opposed
to visual art as such. He disparaged painting as "retinal stupidity."
Many of
the works on display here could be seen as personal variations on the "Large
Glass." They vary enormously in appearance, since appearances are not
necessarily important. They can be big and messy, as in Jason Rhoades'
factory-floor-style installation, or small and neat, as in Bruce Conner's
inkblot drawings. The only visual quality they have in common is a dogged
intricacy. This intricacy isn't just unlike minimalism; it is its ideological
opposite. Minimalist art was simple, serious, and totally public. It sat on the
wall and left us to make up our own minds about what it was all about.
Obsessivism drags us into its space, though we remain voyeurs. Minimalism
enforced a poker-faced code of silence. Obsessivism chatters to itself in a
bizarre idiolect. Both, however, leave us out in the cold.
For me, the low point of the show--and of obsessivism in
general--is Annette Lawrence's "Moon" series. Lawrence draws large spirals
composed of hundreds of calendar dates ("12/2/95, 12/7/95, 1/1/96, 1/5/96,"
etc.), arranged, we're told, according to a Mayan counting system. Once, work
like this might have at least had a polemical feminist edge. Now it just comes
across as a new form of navel-gazing. It's menstrual narcissism.
In his
most recent book, philosopher Arthur Danto claims that this bleak retreat into
the fortress of the self is a permanent one. Art history has flickered out, he
says, and though art will continue to be made, each artist will follow his or
her bliss, without any larger motive or connective scheme. It's "Pizza City"
forever. Walking around this Biennial, which happens to be the last of the
20 th century, I had the glum feeling that Danto was right.
On the other hand, millennial melancholia has a
way of being wrong. There are reasons to be optimistic about the future of art,
even at the Whitney. One of them is Kara Walker, a young African-American
artist from Atlanta who makes narrative murals in a 19 th
century-style silhouette technique. Walker's works are a sort of lewd fantasia
about the Old South, full of sex, cannibalism, chivalry, folklore, and humor.
It isn't always easy to figure out what she is talking about. Her stories, too,
can seem hermetic, like pictures from a private universe. But most of the time,
her cutouts are generously imaginative and outward-directed, connecting viewers
to their shared national past. Walker makes History painting, that musty
patriarchal fossil, seem like the most seditious and vital new idea of the
21 st century.
