Whitney Biennial 2008: Painting's Failure (Again)
Saturday, March 22, 2008 at 10:24AM 
It has become almost obligatory in a Whitney Biennial review to bemoan the lack of painting, which tells us that a certain idea of “painting” remains a standard against which to measure this art exhibition's failure. But painting is always included, differently each time.
The 2004 Biennial congratulated itself for the inclusion of painting. Chrissie Iles wrote a whole essay on it in the plush exhibition catalog, Richard Prince, Alex Hay, Robert Mangold, Mel Bochner, and David Hockney played grandfather to a younger generation of painters with the belief that such intergenerational dialog could “make sense of a world gone wrong,” suggesting a “continuing desire to reaffirm art’s ability to articulate alternative thinking, and restore a sense of meaning to a world in which the nihilistic and the restorative coexist in all too fragile balance.” In response to 9/11, the curators hauled painting back into the Whitney as the paternalistic fold of alternative thinking - a history of art, built on ruptures and continuities, for which painting - unlike any other medium - remains the authoritative model. But the paternalistic tone of authority that Modernism lay claim to was lost in the conviction that painting was now only a matter of making the next move in a game.*
In the 2006 Biennial there was an awful lot of painting, by more than twenty artists. This was in the inclusive mood of the art fair and the “alternative spaces” that sprout in its midst. There was some citing of Dave Hickey here and there, some criteria for alternative culture, and references to de Toqueville. The older generation here was represented by the drawings of prison-house punk rock legend Daniel Johnston, and the previously censored ‘70s sex paintings by Dorothy Iannone. For the most part, painting appeared as an expression of rebellion, really only still in the world as a medium because of its contingencies. The most realist were Marilyn Minter’s glamour-trash, and Rudolf Stingel’s ennui, the most sensitively beautiful the s&m watercolors of Monica Majoli. Curatorial choices were for the most part driven by the desire to express a cultural attitude.
It is almost as though in the 2008 Whitney Biennial the art historical “grandfather effect” has taken hold, with the pendulum swinging back in the other direction. And notice how tidily the elders line up, it’s a structuralist’s toy:
John Baldessari - conceptual art
Robert Bechtle - photorealism
Mary Heilmann - pop abstract expressionism
Olivier Mosset - the monochrome
It is not the case, therefore, that painting isn’t important to this exhibition - it is quite important. A more interesting question is what might be occurring in claims for painting as a relevant medium for our time? Ellen Harvey, Karen Kilimnik and Joe Harvey are the painters on board.
One of the things that strikes me about this show is the stated embrace of failure. In her own voice, Ellen Harvey says through the headset that her painting installation Museum of Failure: Collection of Possible Subjects and Invisible Self-Portraits (2007) “is a monument to failure, the ghost of the piece that might have been...hand made representation is automatically a failure - let’s start off by failing as extravagantly as possible.” Photography appears in two ways - first as the hole in a carnival prop, through which one puts one’s head, and second in the carefully rendered self-portraits, taken from photographs that have obliterated their subject by a flash in the mirror. It is the naive and false despair of the beginning art student, struck by inadequacy in the face of nature and photography. Why the feigned appeal to such misunderstandings and false anxieties? Harvey's failure is just another parody of a diehard narrative that keeps re-appearing because we can congratulate ourselves for knowing it. Photography and the death of painting: Standing between the trompe l’oeil wall of obliterated self-portraits and the discomfort of a bank of fluorescent light, perhaps we are to feel obliterated by the flash as well? The overwrought machinery of it fails me, and I respond to this as rhetoric, as just another move in the game to legitimize the ambition to simply keep on painting. And this is what Ellen Harvey excels at, it is all about finding that one little hook in order to maintain sheer continuity in fear of its end. Painting is only the prop.
Likewise, Karen Kilimnik’s “bad paintings” of peacocks and horses, nearly serve more as the prop for the chandeliered room that contains them (not pictured here) than as paintings on their own. Like Kilimnik, numerous artists have toyed with the context of exhibition but without taking so much obvious pleasure in playing the role of a false aristocracy. In Kilimnik’s playacting dollhouse, viewing her paintings, luscious as they occasionally may be, is only possible - we are told - because of the social conventions of the class they serve. Whatever space for the unconscious there might be has been wallpapered over by culture’s demands to fit the role. It’s the stuff that good little girls are made of, and we are put in the uncomfortable position of wanting to submit.
Differently, each of these three younger painters confound the categories that their elders so neatly embody, and what they share is their call upon space beyond the traditional limits of painting. Harvey devises proposals that allow her to continue tediously filling up space as though she were an anonymous tradesman, her earlier landscapes as "beauty" displacing graffiti, for ex., and Kilimnik's miniatures invite us to a "let's pretend" world that feeds on status and glamour in the spirit of denial. Harvey and Kilimnik express little trust in inherited conventions, even as they compulsively perform them, milking the endgame for whatever it's worth.
Joe Bradley’s flimsy monochrome assemblages put their weight elsewhere. His paintings nearly march into space in a manner closer to sculpture than to painting. This call upon space knowingly owes some inheritance to Russian Constructivism, Stella’s early shaped canvases and Minimalist theatricality. His reference to the ludic pleasure of childhood succeeds in holding a rather bizarre tension between abstraction and representation, not adequately represented by the press photograph, which registers figuration a little too quickly. We are equally submitted to the cultural code by it's very gendered terms, primary colors, and infantilizing form and scale, but the false burdens of elitism and representational malaise so rhetorically presented by Harvey and Kilimnik fall away here. By turns humbly joyful and overpowering, there is something of a figural logo militarism that parades about the room, so that abstract sensual pleasure and impending corporate anonymity and subjection appear at once. This was unexpected, and didn't feel like just another overwrought move in the game we all know.
By Catherine Spaeth
* Chrissie Iles, "Altered States," Whitney Biennial 2004, Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, Debra Singer, c. 2004, Whitney museum of Art, pp. 56-69.
Photo Credits: Ellen Harvey, Museum of Failure: Collection of Impossible Subjects & Invisible Self-Portraits, 2007 (installation view, Luxe Gallery, New York, 2007). Rear-illuminated hand-engraved plexiglass and aluminum frame, fluorescent lights, wall paint, and oil on canvas, twelve parts, in secondhand frames, 96 x 120 in. (243.9 x 304.8 cm). Collection of the artist; courtesy Luxe Gallery, New York;Robert Bechtle, Six Houses on Mound Street, 2006. Oil on canvas, 36 x 66 in. (91.4 x 167.6 cm). Private collection;Olivier Mosset, Untitled, 2007. Sprayed liner on canvas, 48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9 cm).;Karen Kilimnik, the castle great staircase, Scotland, 2007. Water soluble oil color on canvas, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm). Collection of The Stephanie and Peter Brant Foundation;Joe Bradley, Installation view, Joe Bradley, Peres Projects, Berlin, 2007; from left: Cavalry, 2007; Itz, 2007; Night Runner with Strike, 2007; The Thing, 2007. All photos courtesy of the Whitney Museum of Art.