Whitney's American Night

The title of the 2006 Whitney Biennial is Day for Night. You'll remember that it is the English translation of the title of a 1973 film by François Truffaut, La Nuit Americaine, a reference to the technique that allowed you to shoot in the day while making it look like night on film. Truffaut's film is a light backstage drama about the making of a light love story, filled with all sorts of gags and inside jokes about the kinds of dissimulation involved in telling a story on the screen. When the film was made, the French nouvelle vague, led by Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and others, was sputtering, losing its ideas and its stylistic edge, and falling into hard politics (Godard) and soft humor (Truffaut).

Like most curators, especially curators who are showing the works of so many artists in an atmosphere where "diversity" competes with "novelty" for the highest virtue, the Whitney team of Chrissie Iles and Phillippe Vergne intend their title to have many meanings. Day for night suggests that something might be stated by the use of its opposite. We used to call that irony, and if this show doesn't prove that irony is alive and well after September 11th, when earnest cultural types announced its obituary, at least the show proves that irony is alive. It's all over the walls.

Another clear message that the title seems meant to convey is that moving pictures predominate the contemporary art field in an unprecedented way. The media might be video, the Internet, the cell phone, the computer or digital photography, all of which offer day-for-night powers to conceal or illuminate, but the content seems to come from film culture. I'm not thinking so much of the film culture of Truffaut and his peers or progeny (if there are any these days, since the kids who were mobbing French films 35 years ago now seem to be watching sit-coms), but I'm thinking of Andy Warhol's blithe numb celebration of the ordinariness of stardom and the stardom of the ordinary. Prophetic in yet another way, Warhol was watching sit-coms back then when the serious types were watching Truffaut. I still remember the great comment Warhol made to the photographer and filmmaker William Klein when Warhol was told that Klein lived in Paris. "How can you live in France?" Warhol asked him. "The TV's so shitty."

Plumb the title a little deeper, and you might consider the show as a would-be x-ray of the pretenses of art and artists, seen by the artists whom the curators esteem. I never thought anyone needed so much technology to identify pretense, but this is the 21st century. It's better to read the exhibition as a newspaper, as reflections of the dominant themes, styles, or influences - the latest installment on what is now a continuum of art events, biennials and art fairs.

The venerable muses of Day for Night are, of course, Andy Warhol, the master of the banal who ended his life painting portraits of the very rich for lots of money. Even more so, there's Marcel Duchamp, the conceptualist who provided lifetime tenure for so many artists these days. In the galleries, a crypt-like space is a shrine to Duchamp, with urinal, bicycle wheel and other relics, and dimmed lights. Even Duchamp might say that the proper response to a display like that one would be a shrug. But why shrug when you can genuflect?

It's odd, but this homage to emotional attachment rubs shoulders with engagement, political engagement, or at least the artists' version of that. In the well or moat of the Whitney building (which the curators praised as an integral part of the exhibition - that's a mystery), Mark Di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija have built (or rebuilt) the "Artists' Tower for Peace," an update of a skeletal structure that was erected in Los Angeles on a vacant lot in 1966 and ringed by a wall covered with the work of 200 artists. Now some 300 artists have placed two-foot square panels of their work on the tower. A spire (rising from the gilded floor of Madison Avenue) to speak truth to power? Perhaps we should see it as a reality check. There's an innocence here, not just in the utopian impulse to site a Peace Tower on Madison Avenue (in a show sponsored by Altria, formerly Philip Morris, and by Deutsche Bank), but in the images on the tower that look like they were made by children and taken right off the refrigerator door. These are the kind of drippy artists' politics that we haven't seen much in years. Is this the best they can do? Let's not forget that after 1966, when the first tower went up in Los Angeles, the Vietnam War went on to its most bloody years. Open the newspaper now (the real newspaper, I mean) and you'll see that the Iraq War is turning into the civil war that some predicted. According the our former CIA director, it would be a slam dunk. There's a day-for-night moment.

A few words on some of the moving pictures in the exhibition (and more in a later installment).

Among the feature films at the Whitney is George Butler's Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, a compendium of Vietnam War era footage of Kerry denouncing the ongoing war and exposing atrocities that soldiers were committing. That took real courage at the time. Let's forget about the movie as a campaign film for a man whom history already seems to have forgotten, made by the director of Pumping Iron, about Arnold Schwarzenegger the body-builder, a man who won his election. The 2004 presidential campaign was the war that this war hero needed to win - for all we know, given the state of voting machines in the US, he may have won - and this is the official portrait that doesn't seem to have helped.

One work that already seems to be vying for the audience award is Francesco Vezzoli's promo-as-movie, Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's 'Caligula', in which Mila Jovovich, Benicio del Toro, a botoxed Courtney Love and a Delphic Gore Vidal mug for the camera as they ham the tag lines for a spoof-trailer for a remake of the 1979 film which sought with minimal irony at the time to be the most shocking film of its era - or was it the most shocking film ever made? Expanding the lurid kitsch palette here is a production design complete with chained boys and gold dildos by Donatella Versace. You can just imagine the colors. Yet you have to wonder what they were thinking. Caligula was distributed by Bob Guccione, the Donald Trump of porn, a blowhard who saw himself as a sexual revolutionary, with an ego that was probably a lot larger than another part of his body. The Penthouse founder is credited as co-director of the original and as one of the screenwriters. It's hard to top the actual Caligula, which was a masterpiece of unintentional humor - the film's tag line was "What would you have done if you had been given absolute power of life and death over everybody else in the whole world?" - so why bother, especially in an art museum. Some of the outtakes for Madonna's "Vogue" video might do it, but mugging for a mock-Caligula sure doesn't make it funnier. Don't tell that to the audience that thinks it's seeing something new. (The curators should be commended for including a picture of Jack Smith by the door to the Vezzoli installation. Smith was spoofing and honoring the Babylonian excesses of cinema on the margins of the margins decades ago.)

An audience looking for the new new thing may be disappointed by Pierre Huyghe's film, A Journey That Wasn't, a tale of two parallel treks, one in Antarctica and the other in Central Park. Disappointed, that is, unless it's looking for an homage to another contemporary art hero, Matthew Barney. Huyghes's camera follows a team of artists to Antarctica with a slow mute solemnity that makes you think of Drawing Restraint. Instead of whales or dolphins, Huyghes focuses on penguins. Did he know that a much longer ode to penguins has been seen by tens of millions of people already? Never mind. Again, it's the artists as the world-saving special forces who brave the elements to bring us art about themselves. The parallel journey takes you to more familiar ground, Central Park, where an orchestra plays in a thick fog, and a penguin adds his/her own voice to the mix. It's as pretentious as Matthew Barney, just shorter, thankfully. To be fair, in Huyghes's attention to the film image, he gets some great results. His shots of light on snow in the wind envelope you in what seems like an infinite depth.

There was work in moving pictures that I genuinely liked. 1st Light, Paul Chan's elegant projection onto the gallery's stone floor, shows two tides of movement in balletic slow motion - bodies falling down from above, and vague shapes floating upward. On the literal level, we can view this as the suicides of 9/11 and the resurrection of shapes unknown. Rebirth? Is that vague enough? Yet on a formal level, Chan's work has the elegant shadow-play of a photograph by Mark Strand or Andre Kertesz. The illuminated shaded floor can also look like an empty space in a de Chirico painting. It's contemplative, hypnotic and, in a show of over-stimulation, that's a relief. Eric Fischl got in trouble when his sculpture of falling bodies was shown at Rockefeller Center a few years ago. Chan's work is more mournful. I look forward to the debate it generates.

Other works that caught my eye were paintings by Marilyn Minter that took a glam twist in hyper-realism in which facets of light are given a lustrous tactility, whether they are in rhinestones on a woman's shoe or in beads of water. The bravura technique was dazzling, as intended, but what struck me were compositions that seemed lifted from films - an eye painted on a huge scale that could have come from Buñuel or from Blow Up, or high heels ascending a staircase that frame your view into the room that's about to be entered. It couldn't be a more unnatural point of view, yet it couldn't be normal. You've seen shots like it in a hundred Hollywood films. If you ever doubted that film frames perception, think again.

Or perhaps its better to consider how art sponsorship shapes perception. The day-for-night effect might well be applied to the exhibition's sponsors. Clearly, Altria (manufacturer of Marlboro) wants to be associated with the chic "risk-taking" of the biennial with Bush-bashing on every floor - and if cigarette smoking isn't a risk, what is? Yet I would bet that if you took a good look at Altria's political contributions, the evidence would show that most of those contributions went to politicians who supported the war in Iraq, including George W. Bush. It isn't Day for Night, but Day and Night - Altria gets to have its cake and eat it, too.

François Truffault made Day For Night at a time when he was at a dead end. After his flirtation with light drama, he retreated from filmmaking for a year.

I spoke to Philippe Vergne at the press preview for the 2006 Whitney Biennial on February 28. Vergne is also deputy director and chief curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Why are you calling this exhibition Day for Night?

An exhibition is like a film. You have data or information, and then you edit. But that's not the main argument behind giving this title. The title was given because, in serendipity, we encountered the Truffaut film, which we thought was interesting, and then we started to play with it. The original title was La Nuit Americaine ("The American Night"), but the Truffaut film was also a film about making a film, so it was modernity - a cultural project that was able to unfold a critique of itself, to be a self-critical project, which is what we hope the exhibition is about.

This is also a moment when the nouvelle vague is itself questioning a dominating canon, and the canon was Hollywood, that through the Marshall Plan was imposed in every movie theater in France at the time. The language of Hollywood was becoming a virus, and what the nouvelle vague tried to do was to change that. The idea of going against the canon, against the official truth, was also at the core of the exhibition. The French title, "The American Night," also raised the question, Where are we in a country where science has been criticized and the other option is belief systems, pre- or post-Enlightenment? Are we in the American Night?

When Truffaut made Day for Night, the adventurous days of the nouvelle vague were over, the nouvelle vague had already run its course. They were looking out into a void.

It was the tail end of the nouvelle vague, but the questioning was still there. There is this other quote by Jean-Luc Godard that we have been chewing on very much. Maybe he said it at the core of the nouvelle vague - "Don't do political film, but do film politically. It was interesting for us to see that the methodology, not specifically the aesthetic, but the methodology, was coming from an aesthetic practice that was not necessarily the visual art practice. We have Kenneth Anger [Mouse Heaven] at the entrance to the exhibition, one of the first works. He's someone who is not a practicing visual artist, but an icon, a cultural figure. That's because, in terms of the visual arts, we're going through a moment of crisis - not in a negative way, but crisis in the sense where everything is shifting. All our formats are shifting around, and we don't really know where we're standing.

How does the importance of moving pictures figure in to the choice of your title - moving pictures as a greater component of contemporary art?

It doesn't play a role. It's just there. We didn't think about this exhibition as a medium-based exhibition. The nature of the medium almost never entered our conversation. You need to read between the lines. We went to fish in the film culture pound, which means that everything is colliding together. To make a distinction between the disciplines is not relevant any more, it doesn't work any more. The artists don't work like that.

You've re-commissioned the Artists Tower for Peace. The tower is a symbol of resistance. Isn't it also a symbol of the futility of artists' politics?

If, because you think it's not effective, you give up, then you give up. If art can change the world for one person, that's good enough.

The one-person theory?

Step by step, one by one, it's going to take time. It's utopian. Art can make a difference. You're not going to stop the war, but maybe it's going to make people think a little more differently and not take for granted what is put in front of your eyes, and that's what I think the statement is behind the Peace Tower.

So, were works simply chosen for their response to the war?

It's more of a general statement - even if you look at the little drawings by Daniel Johnston [the songwriter and subject of the film, The Devil and Daniel Johnston], which are not reactions to the immediate actuality, there is this disgruntled reality that the artists are working with. Whatever the actuality seems to them is really going to be apparent in the work. We can compare them to another moment in history. The arte povera artists, for example, in Europe, the first Michelangelo Pistoletto work, the first Mario Merz work - it was a very strong aesthetic and political statement. Artists were trying to merge the field of activism and the field of aesthetics, and there are many works in the exhibition that go along these lines.

Posted by dwhudson at March 6, 2006 8:39 AM