Submitted by Etienne Plantegenet, Mar 20, 2008 11:50

The obvious thing about this exhibit is that Mary Heilman's paintings are pretty weak despite her pride of place. I love her work in reproduction but find it very thin in real-time performance in this context, perhaps , the irony and playfulness is lost on those who take painting seriously still. Baldasarri, who never looks good in reproduction looks powerful and meaningful in person and clearly overshadows all of the art in the main museums galleries. (I have yet to visit the Armory) The insistence that artists don't need an education or degree to be artists (which is true) is played up to the hilt here in nearly histrionic proportions--a lot of the work appearing to be thoughtless, mind numbing exhibitions of personal data and bad drawings in installations and works that i suppose exhibit some type of angst or attempt at understanding. But many of these artworks hover in an area of unresolved, second-thought, wisdom of the staircase reminders of how capitalistic necessiities in life defeat both art and meaning despite the honorable context of the museum. Its like the young curators with their insistence on social networking as an artform, personal cuteness and inside joking, and lack of quality in assemblage as a commonplace FORMAL necessity have made it clear that experience, dedication and craftsmanship are foolish pursuits of the old and critical conscious bogies of modernism and post-modernism. So in the age of Post-humanistic code art we get the watered down bastardized versions of each artists response to being unnecessary adjuncts to the flow of cash and celebrity that comes with being art stars. if you want to be included in their highly social and subjective presentation. Someone who I've never understood the Broo haaha about, John Baldesarri, comes off as a brilliant genius compared to the most of the youth oriented work in this exhibit. The pile of junk on the firt floor is an example of the anti-aesthetic, ready-made, mentality of the high school student art project. If one of its purposes is to repel than the artist is completely successful. I couldn't spend a minute with it after my initial walk-about. And while the sliced plaster garbage and junk work is a great idea it loses something in translation from the mind of the artist to its physical reality. The fact that DC found this work of high interest shows us how debilitating an exercise in futility this particular Whitney Biennial is compared to mind boggling and ground breaking exhibitions of the past and current gallery exhibits in Manhattan and around the world. All in all the desperation of this show's faux humbleness in the face of the irrelevance of 'fine' or even what might be called the canon of the deshabilles of the 21st Century becomes irrelevent when you walk up the stairs of whitney cave into the light of the permanent collection on the 5th floor. Where one can see what talent, drive, dedcation to a medium and a activity can produce. For me the real artists are those whose work transcends the medium and the message and so far at this early viewing I have yet to find one artist that reaches the caliber or quality of the canon upstairs. EP. March 2008

Note: Comments are screened, and in some cases edited, before posting. We reserve the right to reject anything we find objectionable.