Exhibit of the week: Whitney Biennial 2012

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Through May 27

Not bad, Whitney, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Every two years, the museum purports to offer a snapshot view of the best in contemporary art. More often than not, the results disappoint. But this year’s curators have managed to reinvent the show, by putting an emphasis on artists’ passions and processes. Performance and film get prominent play, as do artists’ own curatorial instincts: Robert Gober provides a personalized showcase for the little-known paintings of the late Texan artist Forrest Bess; filmmaker Werner Herzog celebrates, in dramatic close-ups, the work of 17th-century Dutch painter Hercules Segers. On the third floor, Dawn Kasper has moved into the museum along with the contents of her studio—including its bed—and is creating works on the fly. This is a “new and exhilarating species” of the Biennial. “I’m not saying that I like all of it,” but it beats what’s come before.

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Even so, the show remains “a big yawn,” said Blake Gopnik in The DailyBeast​.com. While the Whitney deserves credit for recognizing that much of the most interesting art being made today “doesn’t hang on a museum’s walls or sit on its floors,” the work here rarely impresses. What to make of the show’s first performance, by choreographer Sarah Michelson? Dancers, including one in a horse-head mask, walked slowly backward in circles; the effect was “slit-your-wrists dull.” Kasper’s ongoing performance might be even more emblematic. As we watch her napping at midday, spinning vinyl records on a turntable, or changing shirts with careless disregard for the gaze of viewers, she seems merely a “cutesy-pie clown” and “wacky-artist cliché.” Where are the “hard-nosed professionals”—the ones “dedicated to making things, and doing things, that truly matter?”

They’re here, too, but you might have to look hard to find them, said Jerry Saltz in New York. This isn’t a show for “size queens.” It’s refreshingly free of “star turns” and “smart-alecky” big statements. What you will find, in Kasper’s work and others’, are genuine attempts to draw inspiration from art’s past and to experiment, in real time, with artifacts and materials. Taking it all in, I sensed the beginnings of a “quiet, incomplete manifesto,” one that’s grasping for “ways around irony and cynicism” and also for a way to reclaim art from the clutches of its still-frenzied market. The 2012 Biennial isn’t an awards show; “it’s a hatchery.” I, for one, can’t wait to see what hatches.