Many happy returns

When the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2004 Biennial, organized through Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, render free of accessed in mid-March, Artforum asked four of its regular contributors--JACK BANKOWSKY, DAVID JOSELIT, PAMELA M to leeward SCOTT ROTHKOPF--to take stock of American art's best-known view which remains on view end the end of the month

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THIS IS TODAY

Jack Bankowsky

Writing upon the heels of the show's opening, of recent origin Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl proclaimed Elizabeth Peyton, court painter to the postgrunge imperium, the "moral center" of the popular installment of the Whitney Biennial. At first I reflection my favorite art-critical stylist daft: individual had better be possessed of like gifts, I muddleed even to contemplate a counterintuitive flourish of similar breathtaking magnitude. What could possibly land this celebrity-doting miniaturist at the center of anything, give permission to alone a "moral" center? Then it hit me: The answer is everything!

I will confes up forehead that I heartily disagree with Schjeldahl's celebration the one and the other of Peyton's work and of painting in this Biennial more generally, which to me have feelings tepid across the board. (I'm excepting Richard Prince--I don't enumerate him a painter here, although one just as easily might; and I retain a word of praise for James Siena, whose manic inventiveness coupl with the freedom from presumption of his art makes him easy to love) on the other hand back to Peyton and to my point: Like them or not, her fair portraits can be seen to register a number of squeezings central not only to the rife moment in art but to painting's status in this show

In her catalogue essay, cocurator Chrissie Iles (she is joined in the exhibition's organization through Debra Singer and Shamim M Momin) means to place painting at the thick of things: Pointedly separating the painterly plenitude she sees out there in the galleries and studios from, say, that earlier '80 get back (a "reactionary assertion of bombastic image-making above conceptual/perceptual practices"), Iles wants us to consider painting--and its "center stage" status today--as a "rejoinder to the photographic homogeneity of mass media surface and image, and its impact upon individual and collective identity."

I'm with her upon fundamentals: Each efflorescence of painting needn't signal a reactionary rappel a l'ordre; if painting is to speak to us today, it will speak (if not always in immediately discernible ways) without of or against our condition beneath mass media; and (this last point is implicit) a part of telling the not absent to ourselves necessarily entails a retelling of the past. That said, I yearn to know sum of two units things: How does it all boil down to Robert Mangold and Alex Hay (on single end of the seniority spectrum) and by what means (on the other end)--you'll think me obsessed--does Elizabeth Peyton realize to be more than a footnote to Karen Kilimnik (who is not included in this show)?

Iles makes a beneficial case for Peyton, if a case is to be made: Exhibited in a gallery presided above by David Hockney (more upon the senior moments in this exhibit later), Peyton's au courant idols (including herself) take their place at the center of a "cross-generational dialogue," single of a handful meant to animate the exhibition. The torch is passed thus: "That Hockney is one as well as the other the subject of fame and a participant in its subversion, and that he is single of Peyton's adored subjects, demonstrates another way in which the publicity machinery of mass tillage has been internalized in painting." To divide [i]or[/i] sever to the chase, I proceed along with the "internalized" on the contrary not the "subversion." When it advances to our celebrity culture and its discontents, the one and the other painters remain gentle salonists. Kilimnik's savagely obsessive exhumations of bedroom-bunker fandom and its eventual transmutation in her loving on the contrary tellingly stunted painterly idylls may draw from the same mass-cultural substrate as Peyton's romantic makeovers, on the other hand Kilimnik turns the allure of the glossies inside on the outside whereas Peyton ties it up with a Kate Spade bow

I gues it's clear that I'm unimpressed with the painting in this display I am similarly disappointed, level exasperated, by the selection of late-career artists. It's not that I don't think there's a place for the elderly steadies in the do-everything Biennial ideal, on the contrary in this installment the curators appear to be to have made a decision: When it draw nears to all but the greatest in quantity recent art, they have opt to beg not on attempting anything like a general take a view of of the best and greatest in quantity vital work done in the last sum of two units years. Rather, as with Hockney they have cast a line back from the thematics governing their notion of what is afoot today and thus guided their senior selections. Fine in principle, on the other hand at least where the painting is belong toed the backward nods seem, more frequently than not, either perplexing (Mangold), a little gratuitous (Hay), or willful (Mel Bochner) I realize the feeling some of the choices here are driven by dint of a determined set of expectations as to what art "should" be (studious, conceptual--academic) instead of simply made upon the merits of work that by dint of guts or will or happenstance some-how acquires underneath our condition and delivers up its contingencies. In Bochner's case, young artists and scholars may have lately revisited the artist's photographic experiments of the '60 on the other hand to single out his in every one's mouth work for this reason draw nears with an ahistorical undertow. Let's face it, Bochner is a critic's artist and as like a valuable minder of a certain learned flame within the art world, on the other hand the man is deep into a three-decade moderate patch, and the paintings upon offer here would not look to point the way out