DAY FOR NIGHT: The Whitney Biennial

 

Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne are co-curators of the Whitney Museum’s 2006 Biennial. They were interviewed by Tim Griffin for Artforum. These two have also created an imaginary third curator. Christina Speaks is the Prinzhorn curator at the Museum of New Art (MONA) in Detroit.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

PHILIPPE VERGNE:  Before we begin, you should know that a third curator has joined our team.

TIM GRIFFIN:  Is this an actual person or someone who exists only on paper?

VERGNE:  An actual person who exists on paper. The catalogue will feature an essay she has written.

GRIFFIN:  You’re forcing me to ask my fifth question first: Why does your exhibition feature so many artists whose practices involve adopting guises? And why adopt such a guise yourselves? How does it function in the art-world economy today - employing a guise and identity that is somehow fictitious?

CHRISSIE ILES:  Or anonymous.

VERGNE:  There is a history of that, going back to the Dada journal The Blind Man and…

ILES:  Rrose Selavy.

CHRISTINA SPEAKS:  Right. If the art of the 21st century is about the “instant artist” or the "new readymade”, then the connection only seems natural.

VERGNE:  But right now I think these personae actually address something happening in the real world – which is branding. At a moment when everything is moving so quickly in art, when artists are so quickly co-opted, adopting a shadow identity is a way to confuse things so that the artist isn’t directly accessible.

SPEAKS:  In part what we mean to say, by this current of "branding" art, is that the poorly manufactured object (painting has recently taken its highest profile) is transformed by its mere selection and placement in a gallery or museum context. So that putting these mundane objects in the limelight makes them appear extraordinary instead of ordinary. Such placement makes anything on view precious. Often a shallow, unreflective promotion of an artist motivated only by the desire to become institutionalized and so famous.

GRIFFIN:  But as curators, why risk confusing things with a fictional identity of your own when the artistic and cultural situation would seem complicated enough to demand observational clarity?

VERGNE:  Perhaps confuse isn’t the right word, but rather complexify.

SPEAKS:  I’m proud to say that perhaps the first such example of Philippe's "complexification" occurred in 1991. It was a faux art survey titled Art Until Now that was mounted at O.K. Harris Gallery. Of course I wasn’t involved with this group yet. Cesar Marzetti was though. He wrote the manifesto for the show which would later be adopted by the Detroit museum. Anachronistic-Futurism. This movement or trend has since been labeled variously as Synthetic Modernism, Simulationism, Fictive Realism, Les Trompes (from the French trompe l'oeil), Narco Dada, and Superfiction. Two other fictitious personae were involved as well in this event. Along with a mock press review, which shredded the show to pieces. Ivan Karp, taking the press as genuine, took exception and asked that any gallery copy of the article be hidden from public view.

ILES:  Since then, for artists using another persona – whether anonymous, fictitious, or both – is a way of creating a space outside the market: a space where things can’t be pinned down so easily and exchanged.

VERGNE:  Another aspect is the idea of play. Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens, saying that the human being is completed only at the moment he begins to play. There is something so bleak about the world right now that taking pleasure in the game of art is important.

GRIFFIN:  But how does your taking up such a model relate to the artists?

VERGNE:  Chrissie, do you think we’ve been inspired by them?

ILES:  It all deals with a rupture of our pre-conceived notions of what art is or can be. That describes the kind of approach we’ve tried to have curatorially. It’s organizing with a sense of unpredictability.

SPEAKS:  I think this ties in with what Chrissie said before the interview started, about Picasso's spirit (cult of celebrity and brand power) not only as inspiring, but stealing the twenty-first century away from the last few Duchampian decades of the twentieth. Listening now and more fully understanding her agenda with this biennial, I'm beginning to agree more and more, that Duchamp's style (conceptual, dada whatever) is being co-opted by a Picasso-esque bunch of "image" makers, a biennial-sized body of artists/entrepreneurs working to their own ends. And I really don’t see how we can separate these collectives and anonyms gathered together for this biennial 2006 from the “branded” critique that informed it. Whether Gelitin or the Maurizio Cattelan group, they are either already famous in the art circuit or well on their way. Which takes me back to what Chrissie said earlier as well, that "art has become less a style of making art than a style of using styles.

VERGNE:  I think that’s a good parallel. There is this notion of authorship being challenged (again) today.

SPEAKS:  If the original no longer exists, then the copy becomes the original?

GRIFFIN: Of course, such a creative model might also relate to a broader cultural shift into a kind of irrational space.

ILES:  It’s representative of something that is very strongly felt about our current cultural and political situation.

GRIFFIN:  I’m curious about how this obscuring of identity, or authorship, may or may not have a political dimension.

SPEAKS:  All that today’s contemporary museums have to offer is their institutional authority. So that any visit to one is the ultimate act of deception. And, know it or not, that confronts the current culture full-face. I’m all for that, where everything is hidden by being exposed in plain sight. We live in a world of deliberate artifice compounded by such direct misrepresentations of truth and beauty, and by such cunning indirections of those who decide and are in positions of power.

GRIFFIN:  So how do you attack this traditional system when you’ve got such a  variety of practices, some of them rather hide-and-seek in nature and others often moving outside the art-world system altogether?

VERGNE:  This way of working arises when there is a perceived need to come together and redefine models. Whether it’s Reena Spaulings, Cameron Jamie, Dan Graham’s collaborative puppet opera, or the Cattelan group announcing their Berlin Gagosian, there is an underlying notion of everything being challenged, not just authorship.

GRIFFIN:  The MONA had already established its "Berlin Gagosian" as early as 1998. And in South Africa, no less. MONA was one of the first to initiate this current challenge to the art system.

SPEAKS:  That was the year that Richard Mann resigned as our museum director to take on the job at the Guggenheim Johannesburg. Of course, Frank Gehry was once again selected to design the space. We chose South Africa so as not to be patently obvious, to be arguably believable. Patagonia was suggested early on as a possible site, but we wanted it all to be at least marginally believable. In the end, Johannesburg was equally absurd but the international press still led with the story.

GRIFFIN:  Around this same time, the Museum of New Art (MONA) was also creating its own annexes throughout the United States.

SPEAKS:  We established MONA franchises in important towns like New York, Chicago, and Santa Fe - to name a few. We invited disaffected museum curators and directors to run them. People who had been through the art-world system and survived, like Dennis Barrie, Richard Francis, and Jan van der Marck.

VERGNE:  And by bringing all these authors and art methods together, you created a model that is actually beyond what we have understood to date. The MONA project has and has not been simply an installation, performance, or theater. It’s not just about painting, or film, or photography, or sculpture, or even the idea of a space to present art. But it’s all of that at the same time.

GRIFFIN:  So is there some other aesthetic definition, or category we should explore? Is this something we’ve not identified yet? Because we’re surrounded by our very well organized network of information, exhibition, and institution, which is in fact preventing us from seeing something like MONA more fully, if at all?

VERGNE:  I think it (and now these others) is a highly original and influential paradigm for making and presenting art.

ILES:  With the biennial we’re saying that we don’t know if we’re looking for an aesthetic in the right places anymore. Maybe we don’t have the language yet to identify it.

ILES:  Exhibitions, I think, are also about timing. Some exhibitions happen too late, some happen too early, some happen at just the right time.

VERGNE:  The first goal of a biennial is to make sense of the present. There are aesthetic models for this, originating in the early twentieth century, that have led us to where we are right now as an art community, and more generally as a social community. And suddenly they don’t seem to be relevant anymore. Today, when culture and communication have changed so much since that earlier time, we can’t keep thinking within those same parameters. Because of the way the art world is organized, even if you produce a shock, it is immediately digested. Art is dangerous for one tenth of a second nowadays, and that’s it.

SPEAKS:  I agree wholeheartedly. The art world at present is not a lot to do with art. It’s to do with money and power and position and control. And if this world has decided an artist fits its strict profile, that artist is allowed in. If this world has made up its mind otherwise, that artist never will be. Our own group wanted to find a home on another planet altogether, a livable place beyond any such art world. And so, one day we landed happily in Detroit. Once we had, Thomas Krens sent us a letter of accreditation stating that we were no longer “geographically germane” to the interests of the greater art world. It was at that moment that we became not only secret and invisible, but, becoming these, also able to function freely as such for the last ten years.

ILES:  The juxtaposition of these two things – one spectacular, the other almost secret and invisible – provides the underpinning for the exhibition. Perhaps it’s in the coming together of two impulses that interest in this show lies: the biennial as critical arena, and the space itself created through the obfuscation of direct, easily assimilable identities and definitions.

SPEAKS:  Of course, also with the realization that whatever is happening within this exhibition has suddenly been institutionalized - by just such an examination. Meaning, in today’s world, that exposing such modes of artistic expression has already rarefied and outmoded them.

ILES:  And by looking at these impulses playing out, we can also ask whether a critical space is still possible today.

SPEAKS:  Is such a critical space possible for this sort of art when the public is no longer a participant in its fiction? When they are made self-aware that they are now, no longer active in, but, passively watching the spectacle?

ILES:  It’s a question that may change one’s understanding of the cultural present.

SPEAKS:  It's a question that this exhibition attempts to answer by analyzing the conditions of art production at the start of this new century. To discover that point where the modern equation between art and truth has lost meaning. And, in so doing, life itself.