Bodiless mannequin heads discuss the meaning of human existence. Video screens flash phrases like "White boys drunk in an icebox." Psychics attempt to contact a dead artist's spirit through the "resonances" of one of his works.
Sounds like a contemporary take on Surrealism — or perhaps a comment on the meaning-lessness of post-modern society?
But the 2002 Whitney Biennial, which runs from March 7th to May 26th, is not so easily quantifiable.
Many of the works are indeed bizarre, unsettling, and even absurdist. However, taken as a whole, the exhibit presents an intri-guing and multi-faceted glimpse at the concerns being explored in contemporary American art.
Designed to exhibit of-the-moment art and artists working in America (par-ticularly artists receiving little or no recognition), the Biennial was first put on in 1932, only a year after the Whitney was founded around a core collection of 20thcentury American art donated by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.
Many well-known artists, such as Jasper Johns, Georgia O'Keefe, and Keith Haring, have debuted at the Biennial, and the Whitney has a tradition of incorporating the best work of each Biennial into their permanent collection.
The 2002 Biennial includes over 100 artists, who are either American by birth or are currently working in America. In an effort to represent the huge variety of work going on today, the Biennial has expanded to en-compass not only works in painting, drawing, photography and sculpture, but also in video, film, performance, sound, architecture, Internet art, and installation.
I came to the exhibit thinking that the variation in media would provide a weirdly fragmented experience. I thought that it would be hard to find connective threads between film and sculpture or between Internet art and painting. But I found the opposite to be true.
Although a multitude of ideas and aesthetics are explored, there seems to be an obvious connective element running through the works that the non-traditional media, such as film, audio and the Internet, emphasize rather than eclipse: technology.
An introductory panel placed at the entrance of the exhibit states that although there is no overriding theme organizing the Biennial, the cur-ators found "the-matic threads" link-ing the works in each of the three floors being used. The curators termed these three threads "Beings," "Spaces," and "Tribes." They refer to the respective emphases placed on humans and the body, literal and metaphorical space, and cultural and ethnic groupings.
Yet I found that many of the works either rely upon, or refer to, the digitalization of contemporary life. The Biennial's most noticeable thematic thread is the way that technology affects each of these sub-themes. There was a message about the interaction between technology and our "beings," "spaces," and "tribes."
I was most drawn to the installation works, almost all of which employ either film, video, sound — or all three — as well as more traditional media. Appropriately enough, they seem synthetic both in their reference to manmade rather than organic products, and in their incorporation of sev-eral of the viewer's senses at once.
In these installations, the viewer is drawn directly into the artist's world, which is in many cases a disturbing one, blurring the boundaries between the human and the machine.
Peter Sarkisian's "Hover" is one of these disturbingly synthetic works, playing not only with the interaction between real and artificial, but also the interaction between the work of art and the viewer.
"Hover" is a three-foot cube in a darkened room. An image of a woman and child, both naked and sitting within a box the same size and shape as the cube itself, is projected on each side of the cube. Since each side depicts the same image from a different angle, it is almost at if the viewer is staring directly into a transparent box containing the woman and child.
At first, the woman and child move slowly, exploring the box and gently touching each other, accompanied by the sound of wind and running water.
The film is gradually sped up, and the woman and child pick up speed as well, moving more and more frantically. The music gets faster and faster. The woman seems to scrape the sides of the box with her fingernails, and the child slams against the woman's body.
Finally, the bodies of woman and child merge, becoming a flesh colored blur smeared around the inside of the cube. Then the music stops, the image is gone, and only the cube remains.
Fascinatingly, the space outside of the work mirrored the inside. More and more people entered the little room as the film proceeded, attracted by the increasingly faster music and images as they walked by.
So as the cube became more and more frenetic and filled with energy, our little "cube," the room we were in, became increasingly crowded, with more and more people moving, rustling and whispering.
I found that merging of inside/outside really interesting, and whether or not the artist actually intended it to happen, for me it illustrated what the best work at the Biennial accomplishes.
It is an experience that deconstructs both remote, artistic space and immediate, real space, and yet ultimately brings the two together.
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