Javier Téllez, Production still from Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See, 2007.
Image: whitney.org

1. THE WHITNEY BIENNALE – VoCA says – thank god for Javier Tellez! His video Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See (2007), which premieres at this year’s Whitney, showed a group of blind people experiencing an elephant through touch. It was an incredibly moving piece that injected much-needed reality into a show that – let’s be honest – had a few too many LA-inspired modernist junk sculptures.

Mitzi Pederson, Untitled (ten years later or maybe just one), 2005. Image: artfever.blogspot.com

Having said that, there was a sculpture made of rough cut shards of concrete whose edges had been dipped in glitter by California-based artist Mitzi Pederson which was lovely, as was an inverted bed of nails – a mattress frame whose jagged nail ends pointed inwards.

Omer Fast, Production still from The Casting, 2007. Image: artnet.com

The best curatorial move was an Omer Fast video The Casting (2007), in which a man describes his experience dating a ‘mad’ German girl who was into self-mutilation, intercut with his description of being at war in Iraq. Opposite the darkened video room was Walead Beshty’s sculpture of cardboard fedex boxes, upon which sat some shattered glass cubes.

The assumed, and implied security of Federal Express wasn’t enough to protect the fragile glass boxes, just as the broken spirit of the characters in Omer Fast’s video were too fragile for the environments in which they found themselves – a sobering comment on our tendency to put trust in the infrastructure that sends our citizens to war – citizens who return shattered.

There was another wonderfully introspective piece by Matthew Brannon, a pseudo-apartment, complete with floor to ceiling drapes and beautifully made prints of abstracted fruit and still lifes. The text at the bottom of each print was a self depreciating glimpse into the insecurity of being an artist, or the uncertainty of just being human.

Matthew Brannon, Holes in the Armor, 2006. Image: petzel.com

The New York Times says of Brannon’s work: He “has carved out a niche between classic Conceptualism, with its cerebral, perceptual musings, and the fragmented borrowing of Language poetry (and perhaps even the crime fiction of Jim Thompson). Mr. Brannon also owes plenty to Mike Kelley, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger, artists who have mined the depths of mainstream consumer culture and employed text in their works…We’ve been there and done that, of course. Yet, Mr. Brannon reminds us, even that didn’t sate our desires, cure our phobias or make us happy.”

As usual, there was good – like the smart Sherrie Levine pixilated prints titled After Stieglitz – and bad at the Whitney, but somehow we had less to complain about this year – so we won’t mention the awful video by Olaf Breuning.

In any case, the overall theme seemed to be one of disillusionment.

2. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM – The Gustave Courbet exhibition. In our opinion, Courbet was a hit-and-miss painter, but the show was worth it for his infamous The Origin of the World (1866) – click HERE. Interestingly, he had also painted allegorically similar paintings showing the grotto at the source of the Loue river in France.

Gustave Courbet, Self Portrait (The Desperate Man), from about 1843. Image: nytimes.com

Gustave Courbet, The Source of the Loue, ca. 1864. Image: albrightknox.org

It was also interesting to note how influenced Courbet was by contemporary photography, including Gustav Le Gray and E. J. Bellocq. The self-proclaimed “most arrogant man in France” seemed to have been just that, if the number of self-portraits and his famously large scale painting The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory of 1855 were anything to go by. He put himself in the centre of the scene, eclipsing any of the other characters, a self-styled genius at work. We kept thinking of Lucas Samaras.

Lucas Samaras, Self Portrait, Photo Transformation. November 22, 1973
Image: areaofdesign.com