Whitney Biennial

The biennial is a lot to wrap your head around and it goes without saying that there's going to be some work you hate and some work you really like.  If it seems like a random assortment of art styles, strategies and media then that simply reflects the reality of artistic production in America today.  Therefore, we are left with a show that is distinctive yet disparate.  I found it a bit exhausting but that may have been due to the fact that I had already been to MoMA earlier in the day.  When in New York never try to go to the Whitney and the MoMA in the same day, its murder.  But we were on a tight schedule and we had to do it.  So I came away from the biennial mostly liking work that I expected to like - Walead Beshty, James Welling, Mungo Thomson, Carol Bove.  There was a considerable amount of installation work - one of my favorites was an installation created by Phoebe Washburn that consisted of an assortment of fish aquariums outfitted with various hoses and pumps that moved Gatorade between the tanks in order to feed and grow flowers.    Mungo Thomson's Coat Check Chimes was wonderful in the way that it "bracketed" my experience of the show - greeting me on entering the museum and as I picked up my coat to leave.  The piece is made up of custom tuned hangers that are placed above the regular coat check conveyor.  As the conveyor is moved to find your coat it causes the hangers above to rattle and clang together like wind chimes.  Like much of Thomson's other work it can be read in part as a statement on emptiness and duration.  Everything that you view in the show between dropping off your coat and picking it up functions as part of the piece.  Your experience of it - how long it takes before you hear it again - is based on how long you decide to spend in the museum looking at the show.