Exhibit of the week: 2010 Whitney Biennial

Whitney Museum of American Art

New York, through May 30

The Whitney Biennial is “the most venerable, the most watched,” and the most controversial exhibition of new art in the nation, said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. For the past eight decades, the museum has dedicated itself to creating this periodic cross section of new American art. Yet rarely has the result been “so self-involved, so unsympathetic, and so essentially clueless” as this year’s conglomeration. “It’s unfair, perhaps, to single out offenders,” but Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ Couch for a Long Time sums up the show’s worst aspects. An actual couch, covered in newspaper articles about President Obama and littered with glazed ceramics, it’s pointlessly political and visually unappealing. Such misfires are enough to make one worry about “the state of art in America today.”

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Actually, if these artists are any indication, American art is plenty healthy, said Peter Plagens in Newsweek. Most works are less politically naïve than in years past, and for once “a whole lot of regular, old-fashioned painting and sculpture” makes the cut. Indeed, “people should cheer this show,” said Jerry Saltz in New York. Gone is trendy, tongue-in-cheek postmodernism. Instead, works like Nina Berman’s photographs of a severely disfigured Marine sergeant demand to be taken seriously. Even the oddball installations have a surprising sincerity. Piotr Uklanski’s “spectacular, gigantic, semicircular fabric-planet thing,” The Year We Make Contact, seems to be a tribute, of some sort, to feminism. Mostly, though, it’s just wonderful to look at. “He’s making this out of love, not just intellect, and it’s a tour de force.”

Uklanski is hardly the only artist here who’s thinking deeply about feminism, said Kriston Capps in the London Guardian. It’s a theme in many works—not a surprise, perhaps, considering that “for the first time in history, more women than men have found their way into the biennial.” Still, gender is about the only thing that a painter like Tauba Auerbach and a photographer like Stephanie Sinclair have in common, and occasionally curator Francesco Bonami displays these women’s works in groupings that seem “ghettoizing.” But at least one piece here takes direct aim at the stereotypes that constrain female artists. For Kate Gilmore’s Standing Here, she enclosed herself in a closet-size box, then filmed her attempt to smash her way out. “It’s hard not to see Gilmore’s work as an attempt to break free from the past”—so it’s nice to find, sitting next to the video display, “demolished remains” of the artist’s prison.