Spirit of the Nineties

Abstract

I will presume that anyone who's culturally literate enough to be reading Afterimage has most likely heard about IFC series Portlandia, satirical rendering of Portland, Oregon, that parodies Kurt Cobain wannabes, bean-obsessed baristas, and DIY artists who think if you put bird on something it magically becomes saleable. hook of Portlandia's theme song, The Dream of '90s is Alive in Portland (a snide nod to decade in which alternative became point of pride), kept running through my head while I assessed 76th Whitney Biennial. And then I realized why: too much of art seemed to have been made by apolitical hipsters more interested in art as cultural refuge than as life's devotion. It was clear they knew their theory, but I rarely felt their passion. This would not be so problematic were it still 1990s, were we not continually engaged in overseas warfare with actual unemployment figures hovering just below twenty percent, were life in America copacetic for all. Don't get me wrong, some of most expressively poetic works were intentionally lo-fi and intimate in scale, accurately reflecting state of so much under-the-radar artmaking in United States for past two decades. And more earnest works-such as Tom Thayer's elegiac installation of cardboard cranes and portable record players, Liz Deschenes's minimalist silver prints from 2011, and Lutz Bacher's reconstructed Pipe Organ (2009-11)-were suitably mournful. But many works betrayed art world's insularity, and facts remain: our soldiers are on perpetual deployment; collective economic and mental health of nation is fragile; and this is no time for self-referential, hermetic indulgence. I wonder if 2012 curators, Jay Sanders and Elisabeth Sussman, were aware that most highly trafficked gallery during 2010 Biennial was one containing Nina Berman's sobering photojournalistic series, Marine Wedding (2006). If not, they should have been. Audiences are still hungry for questions (and answers) great art can provide. Despite Sanders's protestation in exhibition catalog that he and Sussman did not simply search for next artist in an ... art historical formal line, (1) many artists seem to have been selected solely on basis of their art historical allusions. Elaine Reichek's machine-made, large-scale embroideries-which riff on such wide-ranging painters as Agnes Martin and Titian- were little more than sycophantic in this regard. But fawning went both ways, especially with choice of Werner Herzog, filmmaker known for such epic works as Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972). Herzog intended Hearsay of Soul (2012)-his four-channel digital projection of etchings by Hercules Segcrs (with complementary excerpt from his film, Ode to Dawn of Man)-to be an audiovisual paean to seventeenth-century Dutchman he considers godfather of modernity. It's plausible tribute: Segcrs's craggy landscapes, laid against monochromatic backgrounds of autumnal ochre or subdued blue, are indeed harbingers of Paul Cezanne's quarries. But Herzog's enlargement of Segers's experimental prints, accompanied by haunting sounds of Ernst Rcijseger's cello, is bit of cinematic cheat; one wonders if images would be as enthralling without aid of magnification and music. Additionally, such visual adulation obscures fact that Chinese painters under Song dynasty used similar landscapes to illustrate interior essences- or what Herzog calls hearsay of soul-some six centuries earlier, and one wonders if curators would let anyone other than an arthouse maestro get away with such Eurocentric, ahistorical claim. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Elsewhere in catalog, Sussman makes claims exhibition doesn't live up to when she asserts that their selections were the antithesis of. . . art school art. (2) How, then, does one account for such technically paltry works as Oscar Tuazon's For Hire (2012), an architectural structure cum catwalk comprised of modular building materials, and artist's self-professed excitement that he created a sculpture without definitive form? …