Edible Apple Phones and Other Oddities

"apple phone tree" by Hannah Roisin
(St. Gregorys School)/Alan Outten

Design and the Elastic Mind
February 24–May 12, 2008

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today
March 2–May 12, 2008

Museum of Modern Art

If the MoMA's last major design design show, 2005's SAFE, was a kind of dystopia of homeland security paranoia, Elastic Mind can be seen as the opposite -- an eco-chic utopian future where technology, science and nature work in harmony to make our lives more, um, elastic.

They define elasticicity as a kind of sped-up adaptability necessary due to the "momentous changes" of the Internet and cell phones. Designs that embrace tech, and better-yet, biotech, we're told, can do some strange and groovy things. Or can they?

The catch is that the bulk of these objects are prototypes. They don't work, and probably never will. Certainly, not all design has to be a fully-functional finished object like an iPod. Design is about ideas and problem-solving, even social commentary. But some of these "elastic" creations are a real stretch (pardon the pun).

What are we to make of "Victimless Leather," an imagined lab-made leather jacket cooked up in vitro? Or "BEE's Prototype," a glass vessel where trained bees might smell out cancer? Or "Sniffing Others," prosthetic nose pieces that would allow us to smell the genetic code of potential lovers? It's hard to take this stuff seriously.

Worst is an LED persistence-of-vision device that attaches to a dog's tail so that Rover can communicate to us. Woof-woof. Translation: yeah, right. This I'd expect to see in a SkyMall catalog, not at the MoMA.

Amidst this collocation half-ironic gee-whiz fakery, there are a few things that actually work: the "Power Assist Suit" is a wearable exoskeleton developed in Japan that can double your lifting strength; a diagnostic ingestible camera pill; and rapid prototyping technology that allows one to sketch a chair and table, and then "print" it to exact specifications.

The best section looked at data visualization (information design, I suppose). The "Million Dollar Blocks" project maps New York City, showing blocks where more than $1 million is spent to incarcerate its residents.

But my favorite display, called "No Robots Please!" was dreamed up by children. Asked by Alan Outten to design for the future, they imagined an “apple phone” (see above image): “…it produces apple that are used as telephones. So if you are having a private conversation, you just eat the apple.” Almost as cool as the iPhone, kiddos.

Sharing the sixth floor is "Color Chart," a show about artworks that employ and address commercial color. Despite uncomfortably appropriate sponsorship by Benjamin Moore, it's a nice bright counterpoint to the confusing and crowded design show.

The show opens with a 1918 canvas by Marcel Duchamp "Tu m'," a surreal allegory involving the light spectrum. The story picks up in the 50s with Elsworth Kelly and Yves Klein, who, appropriately enough, take a ready-made approach to color. Kelly used chance to arrange various shades of commercial color on a canvas ("Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance II" (1951). Klein, who invented his own shade of blue (International Klein Blue), is represented by a charming little book, "Yves: Peintures" (1954), that purports to show reproductions of monochrome paintings, but is actually simply signed sheets of commercially printed color paper.

Things really pick up speed in the 1960s. The maestro of commercial techniques, Andy Warhol is represented by two gorgeous paint-by-numbers canvases. There's a series of smaller paintings by Frank Stella commissioned by Warhol and named after the prosaic paint colors used ("Delaware Crossing," "Hampton Roads," etc.).

The 70s highlights are Sol Lewitt (beautiful colored-pencil wall drawing) and films by Richard Serra ("Color Aid," depicts the artist leafing through sheets of colored paper) and John Baldessari ("Six Colorful Inside Jobs" shows the artist as housepainter redoing a room in various hues).

Best is a 1985 Dan Flavin room installation called "untitled (to Don Judd, colorist)" that takes color-art to light speed is Flavin’s signature florescent tubes in T-shaped arrangements, a sensuous color bath in pink, red, yellow, blue and green.

More recent works are more cerebral, and less celebratory. One standout is Byron Kim's "Synecdoche," a wall of 8x10-inch panels, each painted its own hue of pink, brown or beige, representing a skin-tone portrait of various individuals painted from life. The piece was shown at the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Another is Cory Arcangel's "Colors," the 1988 Dennis Hopper movie tweaked to show only one horizontal line of pixels on each go-through (to see the whole piece would take 33 days). The lines are repeated vertically, creating shifting and entrancing bands of color.

Review Roundup

• The Nassau County Museum of Art, "Pop Art: A Critical History": "In serious art museums, curators are supposed to have something new to say about a subject before doing a show, some reason for gathering together prized artworks. This is not the case, unfortunately, at the Nassau County Museum of Art, where exhibitions too often are cobbled together more with an eye toward getting people through the door than with any real educational purpose. Curatorial issues aside, the museum staff should still be held accountable to the highest levels of professionalism; the Nassau County museum falls short. I won’t elaborate on the many misstatements and errors in the exhibition catalog, but suffice it to say that this document is not worth the glossy paper it is printed on." Harsh! [Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes]

• Andover's Addison Gallery of American Art has a show on mid-century California "cool" art and design. The show was organized by the Orange County Museum of Art. "Angst-free, not monumental, anti-grandiose: California cool is laid back yet cleanly articulated, impersonal yet intimate, strict yet hedonistic, and seriously playful." [Ken Johnson/NYTimes]

• A Japanese print show is up at the Brooklyn Museum. "It is not a masterpiece show, though there are some terrific works in it." [Ken Johnson/NYTimes]

• The Japan Society is showing 19th Century lacquerware by Shibata Zeshin, the biggest-every show of the artist's work in this country. "The word 'genius' in the exhibition's title is for once fully appropriate."[James Gardner/NY Sun]

• Coming to the Morgan is the first retrospective of Philip Guston drawings in 20 years. "This scheduling decision underlines the Morgan’s intention to entice a wider and younger audience, one interested in contemporary art." [Carol Vogel/NYTimes]

• Hartford's Wadsworth Antheneum Museum of Art has some Impressionism on offer. The show comes from the Royal Academy of Arts in London via the Phillips Collection in D.C. "More than just a collection of pretty pictures, the exhibition has an interesting social story to tell. It chronicles the transformation of the French coastline into a fashionable tourist destination." [Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes]

• The Bard Graduate Center is showing a surprisingly colorful exhibit of Shaker design. [NYTimes]

• The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, "Intimacies of Distant War" looks at art inspired by the Iraq War. [NYTimes]

• Whitney Biennial: "We may be getting only Beuys-Lite, Acconci-Lite, and Haacke-Lite, but art is back on track." Really? [John Perreault/Artopia]

• Chicago's Field Museum is showing "Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids," another kid-magnet exhibit that began at NYC's Natural History museum. One highlight is the skull of an extinct pigmy elephant that was discovered by the ancient Greeks, who believed it to be a cyclops. [Chicago Tribune]

Museum Minutes

• Big bucks for the Whitney as its chair Leonard A. Lauder is forking over $131 million, the museums biggest-ever gift. It's among the top for any museum -- bigger than the recent $100 million Stephen A. Schwarzman donation to the NYPL and a same-size gift by David Rockefeller to the MoMA. The Lauder dollars will go towards growing the Whitney's undersized endowment with the caveat that the museum must hold onto its iconic E. 75th St. Breuer building. [Carol Vogel/NYTimes]
  

• In the wake of the opening of their new Broad Contemporary Art Museum, LACMA announced the purchase of nearby land. A city official hinted that a subway station would be built there. Subway, Los Angeles? Really? Skepticism reigns: "This is a story about [Michael] Govan and LACMA expanding the museum's footprint and acquiring a valuable real-estate chip that could hold a new wing or mixed-use building or could be resold down the line." [Christopher Hawthorne/LATimes]

• The Astoria-based Museum of the Moving Image is in the midst of a $65 million expansion that will include a prominent array of video monitors. Look for an opening in '10. (Odd that this story quotes the architect about the direction of the museum -- "away from ... just about film" -- instead of the MMI director.) [Lisa Delgado/Rhizome]

• Hoop it up! A sports museum is coming to the Wall Street area. Plans are to display the Heisman Trophy, a winning NASCAR automobile, basketball sneakers and other sacred objects of the athletic world. [Richard Sandomir/NYTimes]

• The Rubin Museum's director of public programming is aggressive in seeking out visitors, with events such as those featuring celebrities like Sam Shepard and Lou Reed themed, at least tangentially, to Himalayan art. [Celia McGee/NYTimes]
  

• Tyler Green on the reason behind MoMA's missing 20- and 30-somethings: "Because MoMA charges $20 for admission. When you set an admissions fee that high, one of the visitor groups you're almost certainly going to impact is young people. ... museums are cannibalizing their future audiences." [MAN]

• Kids rule at the American Museum of Natural History even after dark. For $100, you can join the slumberparty under the blue whale, although you have to bring mom or dad. [Deborah L. Jacobs/NYTimes]
  

• Now this is where I'd spend the night... Period rooms! A lovely slideshow of newly redone rooms at the Met and London's Wallace Foundation. [NYTimes]

• No sleepover, how about a corporate dinner party, a.k.a. external events? "In May, the Museum of Modern Art will host the International Contemporary Furniture Fair’s opening-night party for its annual trade show. The Whitney Museum of American Art will host Vanity Fair’s 75th anniversary party in September." [William L. Hamilton/NYTimes]

• What unique challenges to museum directors of single-artist museums face? Let's ask the keepers of Warhol, Naguchi, Rockwell, O'Keeffe and Still . [NYTimes]
  

• ...this and and much-too-much more in the NYTimes' special museum section. [NYTimes]
  

Sexy Frenchies

"The Arcadian Shepherds (aka Et in Arcadia Ego)" by
Nicolas Poussin (photo courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Feb. 12 – May 11, 2008

Gustave Courbet
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Feb. 27– May 18, 2008

I’ve got your Whitney Biennial hangover cure: some good old-fashioned sexy French oils.

Numero uno is Nicolas Poussin, perhaps the first great French painter and originator of the Neoclassical style.

While it purports to focus on the artist’s use of landscape, the show is a nice chronology of the artist’s development.

In my view, Poussin's most stunning paintings were done early in his career, when he lived in Rome where he soaked in the Renaissance love affair with Greek and Roman mythology, painting small, sensuous canvasses under the influence of Titian.

In “Landscape with a River God; Venus and Adonis” (1626) the unclothed god and goddess embrace with ardor amidst a sun-soaked idyllic landscape as putti play under a tree and a river god salves the thirst of a greyhound. The stunning painting was cut in half some two hundred years ago, its pieces reunited for the first time in this show.

Almost Courbet-like in its blatant sensuality is “Sleeping Venus and Cupid” from the same year. A prostrate and naked Venus sleeps, legs akimbo, and long hair hiding her lady parts as two shepherds lasciviously watch from behind some bushes.

My favorite might be “The Arcadian Shepherds (a.k.a. Et in Arcadia Ego),” (see above) which depicts three figures — two young men and a lovely toga-clad woman — in a moment of surprise as they come across a tomb on which sits a skull. Its cryptic inscription reads “et in arcadio ego” — which means something like “I am death even in Arcadia” and may be read as an allegory for loss of innocence. Or, if you’re a reader of the “Da Vinci Code,” it’s proof of a sinister conspiracy of some sort.

The second half of the show features the artist’s decidedly less-sexy mature style – larger canvasses, smoother brush work and more sober and allegorical works. One example is the deeply strange “Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun” (1658). In this work, a blind giant is aided by a man named Cedalion rides on shoulders. One arm outstretched, Orion walks through verdant scenery, seeking the light that will cure his blindness. But hovering above is a blue-skinned Diana, who commands the clouds to cast a shadow. Whatever it means, the painting displays Poussin’s mastery of light and landscape, especially in conveying depth and distance.

As an aside, it’s evident from the show’s catalog that Poussin and his “Blind Orion” painting are favorites of Phillipe de Montebello, the museum’s departing director. Perhaps it says something about the man that he’s drawn towards these notoriously difficult and intellectual works.

The great Cézanne famously said that he strove to “recreate Poussin after nature,” meaning that even when copying nature directly he still thinks of aspires to be as perfect as Poussin. As it happens, Cézanne was also a fan of Gustave Courbet, and is said to have carried a photograph of the artist’s super-sensuous “Women with a Parrot” in his wallet for many years. More on that painting below.

A self-styled Bohemian, Monsieur Courbet made a name for himself thumbing his nose at convention, declaring a new style of “Realism” in opposition to the prevailing Romantic and Neoclassical styles -- rejecting the prevailing Poussin-like mode of mythologizing, dramatizing and historicizing and paving the way for Manet, Cézanne and Picasso.

Arranged thematically and in loose chronology, the Courbet retrospective presents a nice overview with plenty of self-portraits, such as the jaunty “Self-Portrait with Pipe” (1941), adept landscapes, superfluous hunting paintings, a few peasant scenes and several portraits, including a famous 1853 one of his friend, the Anarchist philosopher P.J. Proudhon.

Sadly, due to their monumental size, his two greatest works – “Burial at Ornans” (1849-50) and “The Artist’s Studio” (1855) – are not included in the show and remain in Paris. The lack of the latter painting — a kind of Sergeant Pepper’s portrait of the artist and his friends — is cleverly handled by hinting at it through a patchwork display of single photographs and paintings, such of one Charles Baudelaire. (No, Baudelaire isn’t included in Sgt. Pepper, I checked. Poe yes, Baudelaire non.)

The high point of the show are, of course, the sexy bits.

“Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine” (1856-77) depicts two women laying under a tree. Hot and tired from the summer sun, or perhaps, it’s hinted, some other more erotic exertion. The disheveled woman in the foreground looks distractedly towards us, her features distorted, as if melting. This electric painting points the way towards Manet and Gaugin.

In Cézanne’s favorite painting, “Women with a Parrot” (1866), a naked wild-haired woman is in the midst of a reverie. Head twisted backwards with the hint of a toothy smile, her luminescent white flesh and twisted sheet make her seem to float above the deep, lush landscape where, dream-like, her bed lies. Perched on an outstretched hand is her pet parrot, its colorful wings outstretched. A brilliant flowing composition, the painting presents what might be an allegory of masturbation. (Interestingly, Manet did a much more demure “Woman with a Parrot” the same year.)

Unlike Poussin’s sexually-charged “Sleeping Venus,” Courbet’s nudes dispense with mythologizing veils like that of the Oriental Odalisque used by his contemporary Ingres. Although, certainly “Women with a Parrot” has an otherworldly feel.

For true clinical realism, the show includes Courbet’s notorious crotch-shot, “The Origin of the World” (1866), which was purchased along with a tacky lesbian canvas (“Sleep”) by a Turkish diplomat. A later owner, the French psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan, displayed “Origin” behind a specially made curtain. While the works retains much of its shock-value after all these years, its brilliant, bluntly poetic title transmutes the work into something far more than pornography.

After taking in both shows, I wandered around the museum’s second floor, coming across three paintings by Poussin and nine (!) by Courbet that remain on display separately. These include two exceptionally lovely works – Poussin’s “The Rest or the Flight to Egypt” (c. 1627) and Courbet’s “Nude with Flowering Branch” (1863). What a testament to the depth of the Met’s collection.

Review Roundup

• "Color Chart" at MoMA: "The show is a rejoinder to the notion of color as the province of formalists, and to the idea that Minimal and Conceptual art comes only in shades of black, white and gray. That 'Color Chart' coincides with 'Jasper Johns: Gray' at the Metropolitan Museum is a happy accident..." [Karen Rosenberg/NYTimes] "...the show feels like a book on improving your sex life that's illustrated with charts from Masters and Johnson—technically carnal, but kind of cold." [Peter Plagens/Newsweek] "...a smartly analytical show worth thinking about." [Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker] "... a connect-the-dots kind of show... hardly more than an historical footnote." [Linda Yablonsky/Bloomberg] "...radiant, if reductive and ultimately tedious..." [Ariella Budick/Newsday] "...an exhibition so simple and right in its conception that one marvels at the fact that it hasn't been done before." [Dan Kunitz/NY Sun] [March 2 – May 12, 2008]

• Whitney Biennial: "...the year of the Art School Biennial. ... a very narrow slice of highly educated artistic activity and features a lot of very thought-out, extremely self-conscious, carefully pieced-together installations, sculpture, and earnestly political art." [Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.] "Its heart may be in the right place, but it emits an awfully faint pulse." [Richard Lacayo/Time] "If there's anyone left who still doubts that we're living at the end of the American empire, they can find confirmation for this state of affairs at the current Whitney Biennial..." [Leslie Camhi/Village Voice] Also: James Kalm has a number of videos. [March 6 - June 1, 2008]

• "Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe" at the Gugg: "For all of his pyrotechnics, Cai traffics in loaded imagery without quite pulling the trigger—not for nuance’s sake, one suspects, but because it would be bad for business." [Howard Halle/TONY] "...an artist playing air guitar with history--making a strenuous gesture to create the impression that he's summoning a powerful reality, when in fact he's merely toyed with it." [Richard Lacayo/Time] "...direct, visceral and dramatic, more concerned with spectacle than with symbol or allusion."[Ariella Budick/Newsday] "...dramatic, engaging, entertaining and thought-provoking." [Ed Pilkington/Guardian] [Feb. 22 - May 28, 2008]

• "Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008" at the Cooper Hewitt: "...why is the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition so enthralling? Mainly because of the sheer sumptuousness of its contents." [Ken Johnson/NYTimes] "...ridiculously overreaching timeline, presumably intended to make an antiquarian taste "relevant," negates any notion of serious scholarship." [Martin Filler/CultureGrrl] [March 7 – July 6, 2008]

• "John Milton at 400" at the New York Public Library: "If only this fine display, selected from its extraordinary collection of Miltoniana, had a significant fraction of the space now devoted by the library to a show about Jack Kerouac!" [Edward Rothstein/NYTimes] [Feb. 29 - June 14, 2008]

• "Zhang Daqian: Painter, Collector, Forger," at the MFA (Boston) "highlights the many facets of this complex man’s career as scholar, collector, and, most intriguingly, master forger." [Miles Unger/NYTimes] [Dec. 15, 2007 - Sept. 14, 2008]

• "Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings" at the Met: "...a spare, studious show that offers, along with many stimulations, a retreat from worldly tumult — the religious fervor, the courtly pomp, the expressive self-promotion — that fills much of the museum." [Holland Cotter/NYTimes] [ March 1 - Aug. 10, 2008]

• Four "first-rate" shows at Yale: "A New World: England’s First View of America," ("the only surviving visual record of England’s first settlement in North America") "The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, 1830-1925," "Colorful Impressions: The Printmaking Revolution in 18th-Century France," and "Making it New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy" ("forgotten but captivating American expatriates who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 'Tender is the Night' and set the standard for flashy bohemian living.") [Benjamin Genocchio/NYTimes] [-June 1, - April 27, - May 4]

• The Silicon Valley Computer History Museum: "...although the museum has the largest collection of computer artifacts in the world and has raised tens of millions of dollars, it remains relatively little known." Don't miss the slideshow of old mainframes and supercomputers. [Katie Hafner/NYTimes]

• The National Cryptologic Museum, an odd museum created by the NSA that's located in one-story motel off I-95 in Maryland near the agency's headquarters: "The World War II era is the focus of some of the largest displays. The 11 examples of the German Enigma machine, the legendary encryption device, include two for visitors to punch the buttons and feel the rotors turn." [Peter Wayner/NYTimes]

Abject Mess

"Silent Film of a Tree Falling in the Forest" (2005-2006)
by Mungo Thomson (photo courtesy the Whitney Museum)

The Whitney Biennial
March 6 - June 1, 2008 (March 6 - 23 at the Park Ave. Armory)

The dance marathon, tequila bar and zoo raised my hopes that the evil spirits of the '06 Biennial had been cast aside. The '08 edition is a bit better, but darkness prevails again. The zoo has no animals, the bar was closed and I only saw one dancer doing her thing.

The co-curators tout the show's anti-market sensibility, evidenced by its use of humble materials. It's true, there's plenty of cheap stuff, notably unfinished lumber. Also debris and a mess of other random objects. But the overriding aesthetic isn't so much as against the market, as against ideas, beauty and craft. Maybe distrusting is a better word as this art's passionless cool puts it in opposition to nothing.

Exemplifying this nihilist mode is "The Grand Machine/THEAREOLA" (2002), a kind of psychotic radio station or factory by the late Jason Rhodes on prominent view in the museum's first-floor project room. It's littered with items assembled in their own incompressible order -- CDs, desk chairs, and other random things annotated by nonsense scrawled messages like the in-joke graffiti of an addled artist. Sort of like Sarah Sze, but without the fractal beauty.

In a similar vein is Phoebe Washburn's "While Enhancing a Diminishing Deep Down Thirst, The Juice Broke Loose (The Birth of a Soda Shop)" (2008), a bare-wood structure peaked with flowers growing amid golf balls or nourished by Gatorade. This isn't a statement, environmental or otherwise, as much as a ramshackle riddle.

The critic's favorite is Jedediah Caesar's sculptures, which encase studio debris in resin creating a big multicolor block -- "Helium Brick aka Summer Snow" (2006) -- a visual stand-out amdist the otherwise dull offerings. Also above the fray are Charles Long's Giacometti-like sculptures inspired by bird droppings. Made of river sediment, papier-mâché and plaster, they evince a kind of simple poetry.

Another artist referencing poop is Amanda Ross-Ho, whose installation's major feature is an over-sized cat box. (Thankfully, no giant cat.) The piece also features a peg-board wall to which are attached various scrappy images such as could be found in a studio. And artist Fia Backström contributed a wall covered in Whitney-logo wallpaper decorated with cryptic words like "Communal" written in a brown shit script.

Several artists use architectural forms to explore emptiness and incompleteness. Examples include William Cordova’s "House That Frank Lloyd Wright Built 4 Fred Hampton and Mark Clark" (2006), an empty wooden house frame whose title alludes to at the place where two Black Panthers were killed by the Chicago police in 60s. Rubin Ochoa's "Accidental Disjuncture" (2008) is a messy pile of chain-link fence, concrete and rebar -- "construction worker aesthetic," in the Whitney's words. Reading the wall text was mandatory, and more often than not didn't help.

The pied piper of the inscrutable mess aesthetic is Rachael Harrison, who's also now showing at the MoMA and the New Museum (she also contributed to the 2002 Biennial). For this show she has a homely room, juxtaposing a wall of scribbled-on photos of sculptures and a video projection of "Pirates of the Caribbean" staring Johnny Depp. Called "Sops for Cerberus" (2008), it apparently refers to the two-headed Hades guard dog that it's necessary to bripe (sop) with cake. Oblique and abject, the unsettling work relishes unanswered questions and unworkable meanings.

A more playful take on brokenness are Walead Beshly's glass boxes cracked through FexEx shipment. Also enjoyable is Eduardo Sarabia's stockroom of larger-than-life 99-cent store-like objects that may be poking fun at commerce. Sarabia is also the bartender-creator of the aforementioned tequila bar.

The strongest works are videos, including Omar Fast's "The Casting" (2007), a look at psychological fallout of the Iraq War, and Javier Téllez "Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See" (2007), a poetic look at relative truth featuring an encounter between an elephant and several blind persons.

Over at the Park Avenue Armory are a few attempts to bring joy to an otherwise depressed display. These participatory pieces include the tequila and the dance marathon as well as opportunities to sign up for a therapy session or to have your portrait drawn. Most of the installations, including a "chill-out room" done by DJ Olive -- seem designed to mesh with the rave-like series of events, including a wedding/performance by a tacky goth-punk outfit called the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.

The biggest kick comes from the Armory building itself -- a charming relic replete with wood-paneling, jewel-like chandeliers and a herd of wall-mounted animal heads.

In one of the better rooms, a uniformed collective calling themselves MK Guth work at weaving red ribbons into yards of braided hair. Visitors are invited to write on the ribbons their answer to the question "What is worth preserving?"

Unfortunately, for this Biennial, my answer would be not much. Purportedly anti-market and democratic, the '08 show is in fact decadent and dispiriting.

Review Roundup: Whitney Biennial Edition

This week there will be no Museum Minutes. Instead, we give you a special Whitney Biennial Edition of Review Roundup. I've boiled each review down its choice adjectives and deduced the critic's favorite. Coming later this week is the Museum Hours review.

The consensus seems to be befuddlement. Overall not offensive or belly-flop bad, but with plenty to be annoyed with. Common complaints include that the art is meaningless, depressing, dull, sophomoric and ugly and the installations are claustrophobic. Favorites are Jedediah Caesar sculptures and Javier Téllez's elephant video. Phoebe Washburn and Mika Rottenberg also gets shout-outs.

Most Adjectives: Holland Cotter, The New York Times
Impressions: "unglamorous, even prosaic," "transitional," "low-key," "uncharismatic surfaces, complicated back stories," "hermetic, uningratiating," "the attraction of abjection"
Trends: Collaboration, humble materials, anti-market, un-beautiful, commissioned works, questioning art, refuse art
Favorite: Javier Téllez " Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See" (2007) -- "beautiful"

Mixed Feelings: Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker
Impressions: "poetic," "mildly unhappy and restlessly alert," "shaggy," "remarkably free of forced ideas," "exasperated modesty," "quizzical and anxious," "burbling, flimsy," "displacement and loss," "a 'you had to be there' feeling"
Favorite: Omar Fast "The Casting" (2007) -- "virtuoso exercise"
Lit Allusion: Becket
Trends: Anti-market, architectural references, questioning, collaboration

Most Negative: Ariella Budick, Newsday
Impressions: "morphous, random and mostly incomprehensible," "a flimsy levee, hastily piled against apocalypse," "wan political statements, reluctant commodities, unpersuasively subversive gestures and acts of broken narcissism"
Favorite: Javier Téllez "Blind, for the Use of Those Who See" (2007)
Lit Allusion: T.S. Elliot
Trends: Refuse art, impotence of art

Most Depressed: Howard Halle, Time Out New York
Impressions: "desultory, even sad," "congested and disheveled," "little to get the blood boiling or even set the heart racing"
Favorite: Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn "Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out" -- "bizarre and hilarious"
Trends: Declining importance of Whitney Biennial, depressing, claustrophobic, Bush-era art, art-school art

Trend Inventor: Carly Berwick, New York Magazine
Impressions: "wryly self-aware neo-hippie outlook"
Trends: Social networks
Touchstone: Gordon Matta-Clark

Best Alliteration: David Cohen, The New York Sun
Impressions: "boho," "neo-hippy," "self-consciously scrappy," "youthful cool," "casual idealism," "sweet silliness," "decentered," "disheveled," "deflationary, antiheroic"
Favorite: Jedediah Caesar's head-cheese-like sculptures
Trends: Collaboration, ephemeral, failure

Contrarian View: Lee Rosenbaum (Culture Grrl)
Impressions: "witty," "fun," "scuffy"
Favorites: Jedediah Caesar, Mitzi Pederson

Peter Goddard, Toronto Star
Impressions: "multiple ambiguities and fluid relationships," "more about art practice than whatever that art-practice might signify"
Trends: Materials focused, heedless of beauty

Stephanie Lee Jackson (Brooklyn Days)
Impressions: "Tim Hawkinson and Gordon Matta-Clark Redux, Half-Baked and Ripped-Off," "lamer and more half-assed"
Favorite: Mika Rottenberg "Cheese" -- "seriously hilarious and well-executed"
Trends: Lack of curatorial vision, unfinished

Robert Ayers, Art Info
Impressions: "frankly disappointing re-creation of spaces resembling small commercial gallery rooms"
Favorite: Mika Rottenberg "Cheese" (2007) -- "genuinely entrancing"

Ben Davis, Art Net
Impressions: "half-finished or things falling apart," "defensive self-abasement," "leftovers," "half-digested"
Favorite: Julia Meltzer and David Thorne

Sara Rose, Associated Press
Impressions: "noisy, frantic," "an exercise in frustration," "art-school feel."
Favorite: " Walead Beshty -- "mesmerizing"

Libby Rosof, Fallon and Rosof
Impressions: "the art world still in crisis," "schizophrenic"
Favorite: Jedediah Caesar "Helium Brick aka Summer Snow" -- "visual joy"
Trends: Collaboration, lack of traditional media, plethora of videos

Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City
Patty Johnson, Art Fag City (II)
Impressions: "like an art fair"
Favorite: Phoebe Washburn
Trends: ill-conceived layout, lack of Internet art

Edward Winkleman
Favorites: Phoebe Washburn, Ellen Harvey -- "incredible"
Trends: "raw lumber is hot!"

Carol Lee, Paper Magazine
Impressions (Armory): "art strewn about in this powerhouse landmark is hard up to compete with the majestic building itself, which really exerts its personality in a rumbling and brooding way like John Huston in Chinatown"

Mark Berry, Ion Arts
Impressions: "sophomoric"
Favorite: MK Guth's "Ties of Protection and Safe Keeping"

Plate of the Day
Favorite: Robert Bechtle

Art Forum Diary
Impressions: "Dominated by sculpture and lacking much in the way of color, the show looked at first glance formally cohesive but felt, well, a bit grim."

Blake Gopnik, Washington Post

-- Bonus Biennial Feature Roundup --

Alexandra Peers at Porfolio notes that gallerist Suzanne Vielmetter (Culver City, CA and Berlin) has 5 artists in the Biennial -- making up about 5 percent of the entire show. NYC's Friedrich Petzel and LA's David Kordansky also have 3 or more artists represented.
She quotes Jefferey Deitch on the Biennial: "This is a different kind of aesthetic ... This is not our world."

Art Info runs the numbers, noting the preponderance of 30-something NYC and LA artists.

Daniel Kunitz at the Village Voice profiles the principals behind the Art Production Fund, who proposed and put together the Armory part of the Biennial. The art producers are responsible for a whole bunch of flashy and difficult installations and peformances, including Vanessa Beecroft at the Gugg, the Marfa Prada and a Tom Ford/Sotheby's motorcycle "painting" at the Armory in 2006. Most recently they facilitated "Electric Fountain," a sculpture by Tim Noble and Sue Webster now showing at Rock Center. The two are proud that they rely on corporate rather than government funding.

Time Mag.'s Richard Lacayo interviews the Biennial's co-curators Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Monin in two parts. They discuss topics including "non-monumentalism." Sounds familiar, no?

The Brooklyn Rail's Phong Bui interviews two-time Biennial artist Daniel Joseph Martinez. They discuss his politically charged work, including the influence of growing up in segregated 1960s LA.

Paddy Johnson gives a behind-the-scenes dish on the Biennial's press preview, including that Jerry Saltz took the last complementary bagel.

Paper Magazine has some party photos from the opening.

The New York Times has an excerpt from Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn's video "Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out." And their T Magazine has a video interview with the co-curators.

Fireworks

Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe
Guggenheim
Feb. 22 - May 28, 2008

I guarantee you'll be slack-jaw wowed the minute you step inside. Seven automobiles suspended overhead, some upside down, flash colored lights like fireworks or some Vegas hallucination. Up the ramp, you soon encounter a streak of tigers stuck with arrows, then a pack of flying wolves on their way towards death against a sheet of glass.

(One nightmarish figure you won't run into is longtime Guggenheim director and art-as-commerce evangelist Thomas Krens, who recently announced his overdue departure.)

This art's mind-bending and breathtaking visual punch is certainly a delight -- kids love it -- but is it all style and technical trickery? With his theatrics and fireworks (more on that later), is Cai Guo-Qiang the Michael Bay of contemporary art?

But this isn't Jeff Koons eye-candy stuff. Cai's work takes on weighty topics -- the stuffed tigers and wolves are meant to be stand-ins for civilization and ideology.

Another installation -- "Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: the Ark of Genghis Khan" (1996) -- takes on globalization. A Mongolian-style raft of roped-together animal skins floats overhead, backed by three working Toyota engines. And if you didn't get it the first time, mounted to one wall are old copies of Newsweek and Forbes with sensationalist Asia-phobic headlines.

A room-size "mini-retrospective" curated by Cai called "An Arbitrary History: River" features a twisty artificial river and boat. You can take your turn on this charming water-park ride floating past several other works like several of his smaller-scale pieces from the 90s such as "Snake Bag - Multiculture" (1993), with live snakes presumably meant to make us think of multiculturalism, and "Trap: Project for the 20th Century" (1997), including live birds and a model PT boat.

The metaphors are awkward and heavy-handed. His political messages are silly, safe or obvious. But while Cai is trained in stage design, what's left manages to be more than amazing stage sets. Even if it's not up to its grandiose pretensions, this is art -- a dash of surrealism, a twist of Hong Kong Disneyland, a sprinkle of Damien Hirst.

Cai is best known for his pyrotechnic performances. Born in China and currently living in New York, he travels the world, putting on elaborate earthworks-inspired displays with gunpowder explosions in the air and on the ground. In "Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters" (1994), part of his "Projects for Extraterrestrials" series, a line of gunpowder explodes through the Gobi Desert. In another ET project, "Fetus Movement II (1991), set in a German military base, the artist is attached to seismograph, electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram to take measurements during the explosion.

Unsurprisingly, many of his pyro-performances have taken place around museums around the world. Here in New York, he collaborated with Grucci Brothers in "Transient Rainbow" (2003) a smoke rainbow executed from Roosevelt Island to commemorate the MoMA's temporary relocation to Queens. And in the summer of '06, he set off smoke bombs on the Met's roof garden.

He also does more mainstream displays. As early as 1994, he executed a performance for the Asian Games. In 2001, he did a massive show for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation event -- easily the most elaborate fireworks I've ever seen. And this year he's a key member of the team organizing the opening and closing ceremonies for the Bejing Olympics.

Conveniently for collectors, each of Cai's performances is paired with a large drawing done using gunpowder on paper. They resemble cave paintings of a shamanic snake oil salesman. Better are the videos of the performances, and a video of the making of the gunpowder drawings.

Visual blitzkrieg, overloaded metaphors, and mystical goofiness aside, there's something likable about Cai. For all the monumental bang, his materials are natural and humble: bamboo, burlap, gunpowder, paper, clay, etc.

For me, the standout is "New York's Rent Collection Courtyard," a recreation of a Mao-era Chinese sculptural installation depicting the oppression of peasants by the landlords. First appropriated and recontextualized by Cai in 1999 for the Venice Biennale, where it won the top prize, the work ingeniously uses the original Chinese artisan collective to sculpt the 20 or more clay figures. (Oddly he was sued for copyright infringement and won.) Last Sunday, two members of this team were still at work, adding some finishing touches while become a living part of Cai's art. Intriguingly, the installation's final section depicting the revolutionary triumph of the peasants will be left undone, the armatures left bare. I'm not sure if it's deliberate, but it's a nice instance of metaphor done right.

Also making use of Asian labor is "Reflection - Gift from Iwaki" (2004). This evocative piece features a boat excavated by residents of northeastern Japan, who were invited to reinstall it in the Gugg. The wrecked boat overflows full of broken porcelain, including Buddhist figures.

The exhibition continues in two semi-hidden areas. The Gugg's reading room has a porcelain bas-relief flower stained with gunpowder ("Black Peony," 2008), a limited edition of 20 available for purchase at $50,000 each, limit one per customer. For those with less jack in their pockets, head to the gift shop for some smart-looking alternatives, including some Chinese stamps given the gunpowder treatment. Disclosure: Our friend K.L. works in the museum's merchandising department.

Downstairs in the Sackler Center, there are some objects documenting Cai's "Everything is a Museum" project, which have been installed in unusual spaces in Japan, Italy and Taiwan. Works include objects by Norman Foster, Jennifer Wen Ma, Kiki Smith and Tan Du.

While there's much to find fault with, there's also something irresistibly likable. A lightness and joy, something like mid-summer fireworks display. Or could my mood be buoyed by the lifting of the Krens curse?