Shit We Saw at The 2012 Whitney Biennial

OK, so we know The Whitney Biennial 2012 closed months ago. And we know we should have told you on our blog about the shit we saw right when we returned from the ‘Special Friends of The Whitney Biennial Preview Party’ that we, The Biennial Project, attended. Well if that bothers you - ‘Eat Us’ (we’ll enjoy it). This can only mean that you have not gone on our Facebook page and joined ‘liked’ The Biennial Project Page because we did report on the exhibit there. So that this doesn’t happen again please like us at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Biennial-Project/208168052547147

In presenting ‘The Shit we Saw Whitney Biennial 2012 Edition’ we would like to add the precursor that some of what is written are our own opinions and words and some of the text we used has been lifted directly from other people’s articles. We do not know anymore where most of this came from because we keep terrible track of our footnotes. If we plagiarized you please take this as the compliment that it is meant to be. It means we like your voice - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

Anyhow let’s start off by mentioning Tom Thayer’s reddish room of puppets and crane paintings. These make him a modern mythographer by way of William Kentridge and Balinese shadow-plays. Thayer’s work lyrically combines elements frail and feeble in nature, crudely parroting reality, in an effort to reveal the poetry that underlies our own existence. The very kind lady in the wheelchair pictured below told us all of that. She also said his work feels most at home alongside the ostensibly shambolic music of freewheeling experimental Brooklyn groups like the No-Neck Blues Band and Amolvacy. She then asked if we would kiss her pineapple. We liked the portable children's record players so much we bought one on EBay later that week. They turn and make playful music from playful record albums. So much fun!!

Next let us visit the exhibition of Dawn Casper who set up her studio on the 4^th floor of The Whitney for the duration of the show. She made a deep statement about society not supporting artists or something like that, or maybe just the bad economy in general, we’re not entirely sure. She is very smart. What a great way to get free rent and great exposure for a few months. Everybody asks her where she goes to the bathroom. They ask all day, really. The Biennial Project didn't ask her where she goes potty. We simply asked her to sign one of the 'Limited Edition Whitney Biennial 76 Artists Trading Cards' we made of her, to honor her Whitney Biennial Achievement. She almost signed, then read that we listed her old LA address on her card and was like totally freaked out because some of her friends, who according to Dawn, are nice girls, are living there now. I mean we got this address off the Internet. If we wanted to stalk Dawn we know where to find her. She can be found at THE FUCKING WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART where she works everyday. The stupid little docent even told her not to do anything she didn't “feel comfortable with”. Really! Like we were going to watch her TAKE A DUMP or something. REALLY!!

Next we thought Fluid Employment by Sam Lewitt was neato!! He directs ferroliquid across a magnetic plane, shaping bubbles on a darkly oiled path.
There is little explanation accompanying the work. This nice Tibetan Monk pictured below told us that the title’s significance, in lieu of Kasper and Frazier’s work, may suggest a quest for direction and connection in a world low on fiscal fuel. We just thought it was really rad because it moved and changed shapes and seemed a little toxic and dangerous. Also The Biennial Project enjoys chemicals, A LOT!!

The Biennial Project loves a 'What the Fuck Moment'. Kate Levant gave this to us. You all probably remember when in September 2009 Kate set up a Blood Drive at Zach Flreur Gallery in NYC. This was really cool but Biennial Project member Eric felt left out because he still, in the good old US of A can not donate blood because he is a man who 'sleeps' with other men’. All this even though he is HIV negative and isn't nearly as slutty in his 40s as he was in his 20s

Kate Levant scavenged the materials for her 2012 Biennial installation from a burned-down house in inner-city Detroit; an area often associated with economic distress and daunting foreclosure rates. Sheets of foil insulation lining, cardboard, and other materials found in the insect-infested ruins are transformed into a strange, visually powerful sculpture that suggests the eternal oscillation

between life and death. Each element strikes a tenuous balance between cohesion and dispersion, disintegration and growth. Describing these components as “wrecked, still trying to contend,” Levant sees this makeshift sculpture as a reflection of the landscape of Detroit, which amid its crumbling structures and faltering social systems is mutating into something new and unknown.

Kate likes cooking. She likes making soup from scratch, especially stock. She also likes making funky salads. She is quite prolific. "Kate Levant takes audience participation to a new level.” She like breaking things …for the physical act and for the result. Kate likes cleaning things up and packaging things. If she could be anywhere doing anything right now she might be in Houston with her friend Jacques sipping syrup, driving a convertible, and letting off firecrackers. Her junior year Kate dressed up like an Ewok. They’re awesome. A group of little dudes that can’t communicate but are like, “What’s up!”

The psychedelic, avant-garde rock band from Houston, Texas, RED CRAYOLA, performed on April 13th but we and any other visitor were able to talk to them live in The Whitney. They were so COOL!! The band was once paid ten dollars to stop a performance in Berkeley. When we returned in May they were still there, very tired but still speaking to strangers.

We were hoping that Kai Althoff's work would be more homoerotic sexy. We like to be a little turned on when looking at art. A half woody or semi in a museum is sort of pleasurable after all. His piece shown here looked different each time we went. Granted it was cool looking, but we once again were not part of the in crowd who knows when all the dam performances and movies were to take place at this Biennial. We live in Boston and New York is like 4 hours away (3 if Anna drives). They did give us a schedule and posted it online and everything but we can't even get to work on time let alone get to NYC to see thousands of performances.

Anyhow, Kai Althoff neither owns nor rents a studio.

Kai Althoff's paintings, installations, and mise-en-scènes reflect a struggle with complex and dialectical notions of love and hate, sexuality, and interior and exterior worlds. The German artist Kai Althoff is a second-generation Neo-Expressionist storyteller whose works constitute what might be called a scattered surrealist symphony of both youthful anomie and bohemian optimism. He is most notorious for vibrant, vaguely homoerotic scenes that could have been painted by the love child of Edouard Vuillard and Egon Schiele

We are sure Mayra Davey is a very nice lady and all but these mailed photographs seemed like something we did in art school. WE also can see them anytime we want at Boston’s ICA. We liked what famous Czech painter and sculptor Bo Petran said -"Big fucking deal”.

Lutz Bacher’s “Pipe Organ” (2009-11) evinces a distrust of modern technology via an aging Yamaha synthesizer organ tinnily played by robotic apparatus. The organ is decked out with huge tin pipes that bring to mind missile shells.

We spotted Lutz outside with her gallerist and we did not take her photo because she does not like her photo taken. Even The Biennial Project can play nice with people who play nice with us. Sometimes.

Hometown Boston boy Luther Price’s work!! He is neighbors with Anna in Revere, MA and often comes over for green tea and small town gossip, but it is a totally unfounded rumor that they are lovers. Wicked Sick!!

We spent some time with Werner Herzog’s five-screen digital projection of details from etchings by Hercules Segers; We enjoyed the visuals and cello music performed by Ernst Reijseger enough but we were more happy to rest our tired, dirty, throbbing feet and grab a five minute nap in this chamber of solitude.

Wu Tsangs installation and movie was our favorite thing at the whole biennial and she/he is not only one of our favorite artists but also one of our favorite personalities and LGBT leaders. We'd love to tell you more about the work but we're tired of writing for tonight and want to watch TV. We'll fill you in later.

XXOO, The Biennial Project

We know it has been February 23rd since The Bronx Museum of the Arts
announced that Sarah Sze was chosen to represent at The Venice Biennale for The
USA at the upcoming 2013 Venice Biennale. The Biennial Project did not report to you about this then because we were busy that week doing our thing
at The 2012 Whitney Biennial and throwing ‘a time’ at The First Windsor-Whitney Biennial.

The Biennial Project is all balls out not only because we love, love, love her work - we are doublly proud because Ms. Sze (pronounced ZEE) is, you
know, a Bostonian, born and raised right here in capital city of the Bay
State, the home base for us, The Biennial Project.

Wicked fuckin’ pissa!!

Let’s make a Packie Run and buy some scratchies,and get retarded.

Sarah is no average chowder head. She comes from a notable family. Her great Grandfather, Dr. Alfred Sao-ke Sze was the first Chinese ambassador to the
US and her Grandfather Szeming Sze confounded The World Health Organization.
Grandma Bessie Li was a pianist. Her Dad Chia-Ming Sze is a
Chinese-American architect whose firm is located at 326 A Street in Southie.
He designs lots of municipal projects around town. He can be reached at
chiaming@szearch.com or by phone 617-451-2727. Sarah’s Mummy is Judy Sze and
like most of Boston is of Irish descendent and is a retired schoolteacher.
We would never want to label her Lace Curtin. Judy's father was Alexander
Mossman, known as Sandy, an advertising executive who was Brookline Rat born on December 28th, 1897. Her Bother David Li Ming Sze  attended Buckingham, Brown & Nichols in Cambridge and is now a general partner at Grey Lock Partners a private Equity firm located in San Mateo, CA and sits on the boards of Facebook, LinkIn, and Pandora to name a few.

Sarah grew up on Beacon Hill in a 4 bedroom, 1890 mansard-roofed house
located at 44 Pinckney Street. According to Zillow the 3.242 sqft house is
valued at $2,165,447 and the 2012 property taxes were $24.197. Her folks
still live there. It's not the Triple Decker we are used to but we are sure
it has tons of chacta ­you knows.

Sze attended the Beacon Hill Nursery School with the other Brahmins at 74
Joy Street. Beacon Hill Nursery School which was founded in 1955and whose primary mission is:
"to nurture our students' innate curiosity and lay the foundation for a
lifelong love of learning. We believe that children who develop strong
self-concepts and social and emotional skills are most successful both in
school and later in life."

Sarah left the Hill to further her education on the other side of the
Charles at The Shady Hill School at 178 Coolidge Hill in The Peoples
Republic of Cambridge. When Sarah Sze started as a Beginner at Shady Hill in
1973, a teacher described her as being "good at imaginative play." When she
graduated from the school's ninth grade in 1984, a teacher commented on her
"considerable artistic ability."

After Shady Hill, Sarah went on to Milton Academy which is a coeducational
independent preparatory boarding and day school in Milton, Massachusetts
consisting of a grade 9­-12 Upper School and a grade K­8 Lower School. Milton
is noted for its prestige and strong academic programs, having produced many
notable alumni, including Nobel Laureate, T. S. Eliot, several members of the
United States Congress, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts,
Saturday Night Live comedian Jenny Slate, James Taylor and a handful of
Kennedy's.

 The Biennial Project knows of this institution as Mouth-on Academy because of the oral sex scandal that happened there a few years back when a 15 year-old female student gave head to five boys on the Hockey team, one right after another.

We like to think of Sarah as a teenager in the 80s hanging out in the Pit in Harvard Square or The Rat in Kenmore. She’d be rockin’ out to Tracy Chapmen or The J Geils Band, spraying her locks into a Hair Wall otherwise known as The Quinzee Claw or the Revere Claw.

Sarah Sze was invited back to Milton in 2007 to be the graduation speaker
when she gave the students permission to fail or be failures. Sarah’s sick
nasty work entitled ‘The Edge of One of Many Circles’ is a permanent
installation at Milton Academy’s Schwarz Student Center. Sarah installed
it in 2006.

After graduating Summa Cum Laude from Yale University in 1991, Sarah spent
a year in Japan working in Television and studying ikebana, which is Japanese
flower arranging. In 1992 she once again donned her skally and returned to
Taxachusetts where she worked in a Boston public school art-education
program and painted on weekends.

It was that she met her Barney husband Siddhartha Mukherje while he was at Harvard Medical School. He then worked at Man’s Greatest Hospital, MGH .He authored the 2010 book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and was described by TIME Magazin, as one of the 100 most influential books of the last 100 years, and by the New York Times magazine as among the 100 best works of non-fiction.

Unfortunately New York City attracts Boston artists like flies on shit and
Sarah and Siddhartha moved down to the big apple so she could attend SVA.

Whateva!!

In 2002 Sarah hopped on ‘the Pike’ and returned back home to Boston as
the second resident artist to participate in the series RSVPmfa, in which
artists are invited to respond to and work among the collections,
architecture, and grounds of the Museum of Fine Arts. At the MFA she selected the
activity-filled West Wing entrance, which extends to a second floor that is
visible through an elliptical balcony. Fascinated by the energy of the many
distractions in this area, as well as by the movement of the viewer through
space via escalators, Sze had a field day constructing her piece to unite
the first and second floors. It was anchored on a corner of the second floor
and swept up into the barrel vault above spanning the space above the first
floor and descending from a supporting column to the floor of the lobby. On
the first trip home Sze was greeted by Beacon Hill neighbors at a party
sponsored by the Beacon Hill Village.

Maybe she was craving a Regulah at Dunkies! Because Sarah banged a U-ie again in 2004 and returned to Red Sox Nation to put up the permanent installation ’Blue Poles’. This piece is a whimsical miniature fire escape on the front of MIT's Sidney-Pacific Graduate Residence. The work, commissioned by MIT's Percent-for-Art Program, is titled "Blue Poles", in honor of Jackson Pollock's 1952 drip painting by that name. This is totally ‘the shit’ and it is made of small blue steel ladders, balconies and stairways welded into fire-escape-like clusters, "Poles" climbs to the roof of the six-story building from just above the front door. In designing "Blue Poles," Sze said that she was inspired by her childhood memories of fire escapes on apartment buildings near her home. Those rickety iron or wooden structures, used both as places to relax and as escape routes, are rarely found on new buildings; "Blue Poles" reconnects the Sidney- Pacific residence to its urban past and to the myriad ways people adapt to crowding, anonymity and summer heat. Sze made "Blue Poles" during a yearlong residency at Alexander Calder's former studio in Sachet, France. Sze described her own work as related to Calder's in its focus on gravity and air and play. Some people thought this looked sketchy but we, The Biennial Project say that Blue Poles is The Pissa!!

Sarah must have been craving some jimmies from JP Licks and candle pin bowling because once again she took the Salt and Pepper Bridge ‘across The River’ to install ‘Model for Corner Plot’, Agassiz House, Radcliff Yard,Cambridge, MA.

This was Wicked Frickn’ mad

.

So don’t we know that Sarah loves that dirty water because last year she returned once again to Boston not only to root for Da Broons, but also to do a residency with The ICA with Trajai Harrell in which she produced The Untitled
Still Life Collection, a dynamic exchange between visual art and dance. This
was made possible by the Contemporary Art Centers (CAC) network administered
by the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA).