The new Whitney Biennial is startlingly good. It is better–more serious, more pleasureable–than anyone, perhaps even the curators, Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, could have expected, given the general exhaustion and incoherence of the past decade and a half in art. Essay in the show's catalogue impose the usual theories and exhortations, but the artists largely elude them. All of a sudden, artists are again plainly smarter in their bones than art intellectuals in their brains. The operative work is "plainly."
Video installation is now a fully mature and independent art form that synthesizes aspects of narrative and documentary film, painting, sculpture, and decoration in real space and time. Craigie Horsfield enchants with a four-walled projection of a misty forest in the Canary Islands. Watching it, you have an experience that would be more transporting only if it included getting chilled and wet. (Also spiritually touristic is Roni Horn's distribution, throughout the museum of sumptuous photographs of a beautiful boy, hieratic birds, and gloomy icebergs, all from Iceland.) Slater Bradley's closeups of a youth choir in the cathedral of Notre-Dame stunningly capture states of gawkiness and anxiety in kids who singing channels divinity.
After Owens and Peyton, the most ravishing works in this show are Yayoi Kusama's walk-in room of colored lights and Slater Bradley's video love song to the cosmos.
The art world is dying to like the 2004 Whitney Biennial. The opening was a love-fest. Previews in magazines and newspapers essentially implored, "Can't we all just get along and love the biennial?" Nearly all trotted out the cliché "the show everyone loves to hate." Disliking exhibitions is seen by some to be disloyal or obstructionist. This is traceable to the fact that in America today criticism and even civil disagreement are implicitly discouraged; people love ot hate or even demonize those whose views differ from their own. But, criticizing flawed exhibitions isn't hating them. It's a way of treating them with respect. Mostly, the good wishes for this show stem from the fact that everyone wants the Whitney to be great again. This OK Biennial is an excellent step.
"I SAW NIRVANA THREE TIMES; I loved them," says Slater Bradley. The 29-year-old artist's fourth solo show at Team is a tribute band with a twist: an elegaic fiction in photo and video, marking the tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. The show hinges on a faked Nirvana performance (Phantom Release, 2003) starring Bradley's own "doppelgänger," Benjamin Brock, who, dolled up in stringy coif and gray hausfrau cardigan, is also a dead ringer for Cobain. Bradley (also showing in the Whitney Biennial next month) claims inspiration from the Website digitalnirvana.net where obsessive fans trade video clips of the band's performances. He and Brock have a similar stunt before, in 2002, with "live" footage of suicidal Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. Just a block away, Bradley will also open his first New York curatorial effort, "I, Assassin." (The title refers to artists, curators, collectors, critics, and dealers; "it is simply their targets that vary," he writes in the press release.
Mr. Bradley, 28, has been slowly building a fan club for his casual, curbside snapshots. Purposely shorn of aesthetic concerns, they portray friends, family, lovers, his travels and day-to-day details of life as an artist in a messy modern metropolis. Together, they amount to a kind of Generation X "Remembrance of Things Past."
Assembled by Amada Cruz, Mr. Bradley's exhibition contains an extended photographic essay and a video installation. The essay includes many tender and surprising images, among which are a number of pictures of whales decomposing on the shores of Ocean Beach in San Francisco. Seeing their endless, beached ranks is heartbreaking.
Many of the photographs contain a kind of primordial vitality. Partly it's the subject matter, with numerous shots of people sleeping, showering and eating, and partly the artist's carefree technique. Mr. Bradley belongs to the point-and-shoot school of photography, but he has a better eye than most. His photographs possess a rare, radiant humanity.
The closer you at the photographs, the greater your appreciation grows. The same goes for Mr. Bradley's video installation, "Theory and Observation" (2002). It was shot from the back of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris with a hand-held camera, the artist zooming in on the faces of choirboys rehearsing on stage. The images are set to the sound of the physicist Stephen Hawking talking about the origins of the universe and some other music. Religion collides with science in this piece, although it's done so gently neither gets hurt.