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.