Art Star Breaks Out In Rash!

Art's 'Star Search'
This year's Whitney Biennial is unusually cheery–
but it can still be a do-or-die deal
By Peter Plagens
NEWSWEEK
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4522510/

March 22 issue - "I'm so nervous, I gave myself a rash," says Cory
Arcangel, 26. Arcangel is a video and performance artist; in a week he's
got to do the performance part of his gig in the Whitney Museum's
just-opened Biennial exhibit of contemporary art. Meanwhile, he's also
fretting as a technician tweaks the background blue in his
video-projection piece, "Super Mario Clouds v2k3," a riff on the old
videogame. With electronic art you never know when the machinery might
conk out.

But the real reason young artists like Arcangel are getting butterflies is
that the Whitney Biennial, which runs through May 30, is their biggest
stage yet: the buzz-heavy Manhattan museum's biannual survey of the
alleged best of the latest stuff. There are 100-plus artists in the 2004
Biennial, almost half of them 35 or younger, all of them aware that
gallery owners and collectors are on the prowl. For some artists, the
Whitney pixie dust has worked. Painter Annette Lawrence, class of '97, who
teaches at North Texas State, has had 14 shows since that Biennial, "and
it probably helped me get tenure." Yet Indianapolis painter Kevin Wolff,
'93, remembers the Biennial as "disorienting and disquieting. I felt as
though I was absorbed, digested and disgorged by the publicity maw." An
even worse outcome? No publicity. "If you don't see a lot of activity with
an artist," says gallery owner Elizabeth Dee, "it seems like his or her
career is over."

If we were playing "Star Search" this year, we'd go with Erick Swenson,
whose eerily realistic hybrid animal–an antlered white deer that looks
like a whippet–demonstrates the staying power of figurative sculpture.
Robyn O'Neil's huge, faux-naif pencil drawing of a Bruegel-like winter
ritual is terrific, as are Catherine Opie's decidedly un-"Blue Crush"
photographs of distant surfers waiting for waves in a cold gray fog. In the
film-and-video categorywhose total running time must amount to
years–Catherine Sullivan's enigmatic, multiscreen epic, "Ice Floes of
Franz Joseph Land," cleverly suggests some avant-garde theater troupe from the
1920s. The big disappointment is the painting. It was supposed to be
resurgent this time around, but Cecily Brown's hyperexpressionist nudes
have become fluffy and polite, while Elizabeth Peyton's switch from
watercolor to oil-on-board makes her slackeresque portraits less
convincing than ever.

But dealers and collectors make careers–not us. If they consider
cheerfulness and techno-professionalism marketable, then some artists have
liftoff. This Biennial is the buoyant opposite of the notoriously angry
'93 exhibition with its I CAN'T IMAGINE WANTING TO BE WHITE admission
buttons. The snarkiest political artworks here are red plastic NO SMOKING
signs by Aleksandra Mir. The show is one comic "Biennials 'R' Us"
installation-art piece after another, from Glenn Kaino's sand castle to
Christian Holstad's array with a sleeping bag and Patty Hearst's face on a
pillow.

Holstad says he's probably as nervous as anybody else here. "But I haven't
really thought about it because right now I'm working on a lot of shows at
once. I didn't even know when the Whitney opening was." Good attitude. And
perhaps somedaylooking back from big museum solo shows and sky-high
pricesHolstad and a few of his classmates from the audience-friendly '04
Biennial will remember it well.
2004 Newsweek, Inc.