mitchco a go go!

I was in New York City for about four hours on April 1st with my friend Caleb, and we managed to spend about ninety minutes of that at the Whitney Biennial. It was the first time either of us had been to one, and while we were short on time and a bit rushed, we managed to see a good bit of the exhibit. I jotted down some hurried notes while we were racing through the galleries, which I’m going to transcribe here, in two parts. Note: rather than alphabetically, the artists are sorted in order of how I saw them.

Part One:

• Julia Fish
  Reminded me of a slightly more zany Agnes Martin.

  Threshold, North [ spectrum : blue ], 2009–2010:
  

• Maureen Gallace
  Flat, colorful landscapes with bright, clear light reminiscent of Hockney.
• Aurel Schmidt
  My favorite piece by her was called Master of the Universe/FlexMaster 3000. Check out the materials used: Graphite, colored pencil, acrylic, beer, dirt, and blood on paper. Beautiful. The whole thing was over 7ft tall, and sort of astounding to behold.
  

  Detail of Master of the Universe/FlexMaster 3000, by Aurel Schmidt

• Storm Tharp
  Beautiful, haunting portraits. Reminded me a bit of Stephen Gammell’s illustrations for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, with a more 70s/graphic edge.
• Marianne Vitale
  There was a ton of video stuff, but this is one of only two that I noted. I’m just going to copy/paste the Whitney’s description:

  “Welcome to the future of Neutralism,” Marianne Vitale declares at the beginning of her video Patron. Staring directly into the camera, Vitale orders her audience to stand up, open their mouths wide, recite tongue-twisting rhymes, and “spit at the ceiling.” While insisting on compliance with her videotaped instructions, Vitale’s performance parodies authoritarian posturing, especially when her abusive demands border on the surreal (“imagine your feet soaking in gopher urine”) and her monologue evolves into a poetic flight of mean-spirited aphorisms. Vitale’s tone recalls the rhetoric of early twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Futurism, whose members wrote breathless manifestos calling for radical change. While Vitale’s philosophy of “Neutralism,” which she never defines, may be grounded in a sense of irony, her direct address nonetheless retains something of the historical avant-garde’s conviction of art’s ability to jar viewers into action.

  Yeah, that hits the spot.

• David Adamo
  A spare installation that managed to be both moving and humorous, in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. Clearly post-Beuys, so of course I dug it.

Tags: Aurel Schmidt, David Adamo, Julia Fish, Marianne Vitale, Maureen Gallace, Storm Tharp, whitney biennial

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 5:43 pm and is filed under art, reviews. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.