The Whitney Biennial 2004

This article was published by DC based magazine, Intellectos, in August 2004.


The Whitney Biennial
Reinventing our vision and culture of the apocalypse

Betty T. Kaos

With the stranger than fiction headlines of the current newspapers, it
is very easy to believe that we are living in the apocalypse. Today's
world is fraught with disaster, strife, conflict, greed, the breakdown
of democracy, unjust corruption of government, and all means of chaos
that even the most banal person could not fully ignore. The civil
unrest of our social climate will indeed affect the most creative of
people, the restless souls of the artists. Many of the contemporary
artists in this exhibit reflect their social awareness in
anthropological terms, whereas several other artists reflect back to a
more meditative state of being. When America is glaring with code
orange and security checkpoints searches people at all landmark
locations, a slow but mass hysteria grows, and we want to turn back to
our cave to find our power animal for a sense of safety.
Unfortunately, even fairy tale fantasies and escapism is still
pervaded by evil witches and dark forces. Now let us look into the
caves of these several artists.

Lee Mingwei is a Taiwanese American artist originally trained as an
engineer; he studied fine arts at Yale's prestigious graduate arts
program. Mingwei classmates were an eclectic group of thinker from all
around the world; one student was a European ballerina with no
training in the fine arts, another was a scientist. Lee travels back
and forth between America, both the east and west coast, and Taiwan.
He has shown his work at the Whitney Museum in Venice, and in Museum
of Modern Arts, Queens. Lee Mingwei designed, with a team of fabricators,
a large modern rendition of the ba-gua, the Chinese esoteric eight
sided structure, used to ward off tresspassing ghosts. His work is housed and
performed at the Whitney Atrium Gallery, located near Grand Central. For
several weeks, visitors and passersby can request a time slot and are
selected at random from a box of applicants. Many of those selected are
local people who work in the area. Inside the wood and steel architecture,
an amateur soothsayer reads the applicant's fortune using the I-Ching.

The seeker asks a question and directs their thoughts, then throws a
series of coins into the air several times. From this, an ideogram is
drawn depending upon how the coin falls. The corresponding mark is
looked up in The Book of Changes. However, Lee considers the I-Ching
different than other forms of divination. The I-Ching is related more
to Eastern philosophy than to Western soothsaying. It is used to aid
and guide the thinking process of the mind, not to direct it into
believing a certain outcome must happen. The I-Ching is a tool for
philosophizing and rationalizing thoughts, rather than to be used as
an oracle. None of Lee Mingwei's sessions are recorded; it is a
private, intimate, and ephemeral experience.

There is much too much self-congratulating work that takes advantage
and pokes fun of the idea of American White Trash. There is nothing
new about this idea, the joke is too easy. I prefer when the idea of
kitsch is celebrated, like with the work of John Waters, or even with
the diva, Rupaul. These artists embraced their cultural
heritage and legitimized the idea of suburban and urban artistically
poor. The lens of the artist often reflects the mind of the
photographer. Here, Alec Soth's, born 1969, "Sleep by the Mississippi"
series, creates a vision that is condescending and crass. Spectators
laugh at a photograph of a half naked man with a mullet, or at an
overweight black lady dressed in her lingerie sitting by the road. It
seems that the subjects were told not to smile, but to project lust.
This isn't sexy, this is sad. The work is nothing new; so here is
stark, here is banal, here is facetiousness. We all have our roots as
cavemen, we all descended from simians. Drawing a line of the rural as
trash is not a legitimate form of confidence building and separation.
One craves a more intimacy between the artist and subject, rather
these people were participants pulled from an ad placed in the
suburban town. And much like an early self-dubbed
anthropological-photographer-explorer infiltrating a native population
and objectifying the subject with their lens by portraying people as
savages, this artist too has failed at capturing individual human
spirit. Tourists should be more aware of their own arrogance and
ignorance.

David Altmejd's, born 1974, "Delicate men in positions of power" is a
bizarre installation created with such varied material as wolverine
heads, rhinestone bijous, mirrored glass, fake flowers, icicles, and
wax. The piece is decorated with childish graffiti, Nazi swatizikas
and Stars of David scrawled with pen onto hidden secret areas. The
wolverines appear relaxed in their state of decay, a calm expression
reflected in their decorated glass castle, brings to mind Superman's
fortress of solitude. The delicate rhinestone trinkets conjure up
memories of Eastern Europe in a bygone era of old world craftsmanship
and arts. Are these wolverine heads of solace those of the Jews or the
Nazis? Does it matter? It is hard to discern if these are beasts of
disdain, they seem to be created with much love, and not contempt.
Somehow this art piece feels incredibly relevant to our current
cultural climate of big business and corrupt government. Maybe the
piece explores how these figure heads see themselves, as lonely gods
in a land of barren surplus, like the lost Vegas deserts with
artificial irrigation and casinos. It is beautiful, it contains much
wealth, but none of it is naturally inhabitable, none of the land can
bear fruit, it is an oasis of hedonism and pirate booty, and just as
lonely.

Much of what we see today is not just the reflection of ourselves, it
is the output and influence of our generation. We create the culture,
but the media curates it. However we have the right to say specific
images do not reflect us, that we are not being heard and that a
chosen few are being seen and used to represent the whole. The
philosophies of these different artists are all valid to a point, but
we as viewers do ultimately chose what our own reality is, whether or
not everyone has the same vision.