Reverse rapture

Looking for heaven on earth at "Day for Night," the Whitney Biennial 2006

By Katie Kurtz

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After two visits to "Day for Night," long conversations with friends, and days spent thinking about the questions posed by the Whitney Biennial 2006 — an exhibition that's considered a bellwether event in contemporary American art — my thoughts returned to just four of the hundreds of objects on view: Paul Chan's 1st Light, Rodney Graham's Torqued Chandelier Release, Michael Snow's Sheep Loop, and Pierre Huyghe's A Journey That Wasn't. What these four works have in common — and what they don't share with a majority of the show — is that they're all quiet, simple, moving, and quite beautiful works of art. The pieces are light-handed in the sense that it's evident the artists acted more as conduits executing ideas than as laborers imposing their will onto materials and strong-arming something into existence.

This year marks the first year the Biennial has a thematic focus and the first time it includes works by artists from outside the United States. "Day for Night" is taken from the title of the 1973 François Truffaut film, and the phrase, as well as the picture's original title, La Nuit Américaine, refers to a process in which night scenes are shot during the day, using filters to achieve a moonlit effect. Chosen by curators Chrissie Iles and Phillipe Vergne, the title also reflects the curatorial intent "to capture the artifice of American culture, in all its complexity."

Artifice abounds on every level throughout the exhibition, but complexity — both intellectual and material — is in scarce supply. Everyone loves to be disappointed by the Biennial, but there is a bit more at stake with this year's disappointments. Iles and Vergne went in search of a dark America, looking for a landscape strewn with "flotsam and jetsam," a phrase that recurs throughout the show — both in the catalog and on the walls. As a result, it seems as if the artists wanted to prove we are living under a leaden pall of politically and ethically troubled times. Of course they found what they were looking for. How could they not? But what if they had gone in search of something different? What if they had looked for occurrences of abundance and optimism?

I'm not suggesting a delusional view that disregards real problems or espouses a Pollyannaish perspective, but the show left me with a sense of an American identity that is paranoid, strewn with garbage, and formed in reaction to disasters. Yes, we are still at war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina continues to take its toll, we live in a post-9/11 America, and a myriad of social justice problems exist. But is that all we are? If a viewer woke up from a deep sleep and walked into "Day for Night" to learn news of the past two years, he or she would leave thinking that we limp from one national tragedy to the next, sifting the rubble for clues to our collective humanity. And in between, we take acid trips, have wild orgies or masturbate, perform weird rituals on riverbanks, and spend every waking hour consuming and discarding, ad nauseam. Why is this story still being told? And might it be time to start telling a different one?

After feeling a bit assaulted by a painting propped in the stairwell emblazoned with "Eat Shit & Die," I was drawn back to the quieter works in the exhibition, ones that offered a more complex narrative about what it means to be in the world at this particular moment. They had an element of the spiritual as well, offering glimmers of light. The premise of each was straightforward: silhouetted bodies and objects floating in space (1st Light); a chandelier performing a Newtonian experiment (Torqued Chandelier Release); sheep grazing on a bluff overlooking the ocean (Sheep Loop); and a search for a rare albino penguin in the Antarctic (A Journey That Wasn't).

I came across the first instance of Snow's Sheep Loop tucked into a corner near the third-floor elevators (two other flat-screened monitors showing different parts of the loop were installed in other parts of the museum). I leaned against a wall and welcomed the opportunity for a meditative moment and watched the slow progress of a sheep grazing against a backdrop of bushes rustling in the wind and whitecaps peaking on blue water.

Graham's "thought experiment," Torqued Chandelier Release, is a demonstration of Isaac Newton's experiment with a spinning bucket of water that helped the scientist develop his theories about relative motion and absolute space. In a short film, Graham riffs off the experiment by using a torqued and released 19th-century chandelier that was shot in 35mm at double-speed, giving the effect of a dizzying elegance.

Fact and fiction merge in Huyghe's A Journey That Wasn't, a film about the artist's search for an elusive albino penguin on an unnamed island somewhere off the coast of Argentina. The documentary-style film suggests that suspending one's disbelief about the factuality of the events recorded is what makes the story enjoyable.

Paul Chan's 1st Light is an animation of silhouetted bodies and objects projected onto the gallery's floor. The shape of the projection is that of an elongated and misshapen window. A telephone pole with crisscrossing wires anchors the piece while objects float upward. Midway through, the video bodies start falling fast in the other direction, more earthward than heaven-bound. The wall text says that the piece is a "post-9/11 version of the Rapture."

Chan's piece suggests a kind of reverse rapture: bodies returning to earth to make good rather than waiting to reach heaven in order to be rewarded. Late on one of the nights I was in New York, my artist friend Sarah said, "I just want to start making work about God." I immediately knew what she meant. *

WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2006: "DAY FOR NIGHT"

Through May 28

Whitney Museum of American Art

945 Madison, New York City

For hours and prices, go to www.whitney.org.

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