Countdown to the Whitney Biennial

Through a series of random thoughts, I remembered that this year’s installment of the Whitney Biennial is going to start very soon so I checked out the Whitney website to see who’s who in the Biennial this year.

The first thing I found out is that the Whitney has a „Collecting Biennials” show running as a preview for the show and looking at the list of artists I became nostalgic. My favorite works by far last year were John Baldessari’s cut up people (imagine this image very large and with superimposed colored blocks) and Leslie Thornton’s hybrid short-movie about the atomic bomb (click here for a movie still). For me, these two works were LOUD: large-scale contraptions that played on your senses, perception and eyesight (I distinctly remember a „can you spot the city through that blue hole” game while watching Leslie’s movie and a „how many different images can you make out from one Baldessari image” game). I like art to be more than a pretty (or ugly as it is currently fashionable) image, I like it to stimulate me intellectually. I like to have to flatten an image only to find out that I am still far from getting the full picture. And I like to have to imagine a 3D world from the 2D movie screen in order to start to understand the intricate connections between people and intentions through time and space. This is probably why I feel cheated by purist Minimalist works like Robert Morris’ „L-Shape”. To me they lack the sense of visual intrigue, the play on trompe l'oeil. More on other Minimalist works I like in other posts.