Will 2008 be the year frustrated artists stop whining about the Whitney Biennial for being too cliquey, too scattershot, too short on women, minorities, and criminally overlooked artists like the ones doing all the griping? Hardly, but this year’s themeless Biennial, which opened last night, goes a long way toward appeasing the disgruntled hipster artist crowd with a big, rowdy slate of installations and events at the Park Avenue Armory through March 26th.
Curators Shamim Momin and Henriette Huldisch say this Biennial is largely informed by “an evident trend toward work of an ephemeral, event-based character.” So the sprawling armory is to be commandeered by outré artists like Kembra Pfahler and her theatrical rock group The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. Eduardo Sarabia has built a bar where he’ll pour his homemade tequila and “celebrate collaborative dialogue and community.”
Ellen Harvey is to “immortalize” 100 Biennial visitors in fifteen-minute portraits which are then hung on a grid as they are completed. Agathe Snow will be roping participants into a twenty-four hour dance marathon; on Sunday, multidisciplinary art rockers Gang Gang Dance trundle in with their sonic chaos.
