A Sad Treatise On The Meaning of Meaninglessness

WARNING! The title of this post has been appropriated in part from Werner Herzog's* description of his own contribution to this year's Whitney Biennial.

Bored at the Whitney.

Seeking Meaning and Finding Meaninglessness.

These might have been the options I'd considered as headings for this blog post, had I not, in a somewhat desperate effort to find an explanation, frantically been scouring the pages of the event guide that accompanies this godforsaken exhibition and come across one of my favorite filmmakers' quotes in description of his own piece in the show. Oh, but wait; isn't he, well...German?...and hasn't he been, well...making films for a very long time?... and well, isn't this the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial exhibition-- a show intended to focus on contemporary art within U.S. borders?.... And, as if to add insult to injury--why is he being lauded as a "romantic visionary, who is best known for his unorthodox approach to capturing authenticity in his films"?--never mind that I believe both of these to be true... but then, why is he in this show?... I stand confused.
Admittedly, I myself, have not been feeling particularly inspired lately, and so approached my visit to the Whitney Biennial with high hopes of changing my despondent mood. To put it succinctly, I had hoped to feel revitalized, renewed...well, let me just go ahead and say it then: Inspired. Oh, but has this become a dirty word? I obligingly paid my $16 admission fee and in return, expected paradise or even hell. Some stirring, some kernel of feeling or provocation might have been enough. Any surge of emotion would have been preferable to purgatory, to numbness, to absolute boredom. To the significant frustration of my family and friends, my museum visits are usually daylong events, ending with me begrudgingly agreeing to exit, despite a consistently gnawing feeling that I have prematurely departed, albeit with an armful of notes for referencing and cross-referencing my newly acquired insights and discoveries. See, I too am somewhat of a closet anthropologist of all things culture. The 2012 Whitney Biennial features such a sad array of uninspired, desperate art that I was very willingly ready to depart after only a couple of hours of diligently combing through each and every one of the 4 1/2 floors it barely occupies, in search of something. It came as no surprise that on the day of my visit to the Whitney, most of my fellow visitors were huddled in the bar-room like set installed for screenings of Wu Tsang's Wildness, 2012, which documents the underground E side L.A. Latin/LGBT immigrant community; or were crowded into the Film/Video Galleries listening to Amy Taubin's interview with independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, whose three films spanning from 2006-2010, were also being screened. Once again, the pull of real life human interaction wins out over the stale, unemotional 2 & 3-D pieces claiming conceptual and intellectual profundity, but devoid of any visceral participation, which constitute a disproportionately large part of this year's Whitney Biennial. The one other saving grace to the bland installations is Dawn Kasper's personal and authentically executed Nomadic Studio Practice Experiment. I admire Dawn's resourceful ingenuity and can't help but wonder what she will come up with, once she has exhausted her list of museum hosts. It isn't the conceptual nature of most of the pieces in this year's biennial that I take offense to. I have great respect and love for conceptual art which raises questions or makes a statement prompting exploration, or provokes a shift in thinking; for isn't the role of art to take us beyond...well, at least beyond, the obvious?
 Since I landed in Soho in the early eighties, practically penniless, with one old dusty-blue suitcase in hand, I have seen art and artists come and go. A minority went the way of fame and fortune, in the blinding limelight that was the art scene of that decade, or faded into the few remaining hidden backstreet lofts that still survive the outdoor mall Soho has become; or died from epidemics, cancer or despair; or in the case of those more given to practical resilience (myself included), moved into more affordable quarters in the border boroughs and adopted lifestyles alternative to the already alternative lifestyle of an artist life in NYC... just in case life wasn't already challenging or complicated enough as a result of that small original transgression. But this is the way of the living, is it not? Change and Transformation. Only passion begets these; and passion back then was as easily exchanged as 4 quarters for a dollar, and for some of us--those who never made it to the Whitney, alot more common. But passion and inspiration are still all around us, and to my understanding, passionate and inspiring art continues to be made, even in those Soho backstreets and in the outer boroughs. So, why are the curators of the Whitney Biennial finding it so hard to locate? As artists, we notoriously make use of our personal experience and react to the times in which we live. If nothing new remained to be said, then no message would need to be communicated and art would no longer have a purpose. This scenario is unfathomable. Contrary to the apparent theme of this year's participating artists, artists continue to make art and the world keeps looking at it and being affected and alas, even transformed by it!
 The art that constitutes the 2012 Whitney Biennial is neither unorthodox nor authentic, and therefore, tragically lacking the power to transform. I am not suggesting that the curators of this year's biennial should have gone to any great lengths to find contemporary painters, sculptors or performance artists with the power to inspire or provoke. Perhaps, that would be a bit passe. Perhaps the trend to seek the more seemingly original, the more au courant--is a need that supersedes that of our recurring, inexhaustible quest for meaning. New things keep happening all the time, and their newness does not automatically make them noteworthy. The pieces being displayed at this year's biennial are laboriously explained in the copious text on the display tags that accompany them. Throughout the exhibits, the stated message is that as meaning is largely ephemeral, meaninglessness must be the answer to all complex questions. But judging by the extensive explanations in text, there also appears to be some insecurity in the art's ability to carry this message. Was this the point then--? Frustrated effort?... or did I blink and miss it? Is the role of the Whitney Biennial to show us the thread that stitches along the collective unconscious of the contemporary art world? or is it to sew in a thread of a particular color and tightly seam it shut? If the first, then we can gather that humanity is feeling helpless and hopeless and that a great sense of apathy and spiritual vacuum continues to pull artists with their dusty-blue suitcases to the fringes of society and dark corners of metropolises the world over and they are making art that nobody sees or cares about. Oh, but wait...this art is at the Whitney! People are seeing it! So that point is irrevocably moot then!
The activist in me is wildly kicking. I refuse to believe that this is the brave new world of art. If the statement at the heart of the 2012 Whitney Biennial is that as a species, we are feeling the need for meaning and purpose but there really isn't any, yet not only do we choose to continue to make art irregardless, but choose to accept the perceived meaninglessness and futility of living and art making; then we have become a sad lot, indeed.
Still, I take comfort in knowing that for the price of an admissions ticket, at the museum gift shop one could buy a pack of edible organic sidewalk chalk, instead.

*Original quote by Werner Herzog: "an extended essay on the meaning of meaninglessness"