Right after it opened, Father Riley and I went to the early morning members

showing of the Whitney Biennial. The lobby was packed with people in line for

free coffee and bagels; the galleries were much less densely populated.

The show was construction and installation heavy. I saw one older woman

take her husband by the crook of his arm and announce that these things were

so very much about materiality, anymore.

The Whitney curators do a remarkable job of unburdening viewers. Each artist, represented

by three or four “representative” works and summarized in a reference-laden paragraph, was

reduced to conceptual one-liner. The more interesting artists were visual *and* conceptual

one-liners; for this category, I'd elect Omer Fast, Mika Rottenberg, and Leslie Hewitt. None of

them could be neatly explained by the theory of their artwork alone.

Omer Fast's piece was my favorite, surprising especially because it was a video; like most people,

I have a much shorter attention span for video art because my threshold for boredom

plummets with anything resembling television. Fast recorded an Iraqi soldier's conflation

of two memories (shooting a bullet into the windshield of an unarmored car in Iraq, and a

romantico-sexual encounter with a German girl on the Autobahn) and then recreated the

description. The reenactors were filmed as they held poses, and the signs of their struggle

to stay still - a tongue flickering in an open mouth, occasional blinking - were bizarre,

fascinating, and complicated.

Agathe Snow… srsly?!