December 7, 2005
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Whitney Biennial 2006
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Liz Larner’s sculpture “RWBs.”
Whitney Museum of American Art
Lucas deGiulio’s “Can Barnacles” (2005)
Whitney Museum of American Art
A still from “A Journey That Wasn’t,” a musical in Central Park, (2005) by Pierre Huyghe.
Whitney Museum of American Art
A still from “Jump” (2004) by T. Kelly Mason and Diana Thater
Whitney Museum of American Art
A still from Kenneth Anger’s film “Mouse Heaven” (2005).
Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan
Rudolf Stingel’s “Untitled (After Sam),” a 2005 oil painting. More Photos >
Jochen Littkemann/Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
Peter Doig’s painting “Day for Night” (2005). That is also the biennial’s title.
Whitney Museum of American Art
Coming soon to the Whitney Biennial: Marilyn Minter’s “Stepping Up,” a 2005 painting on metal that explores the seedy side of glamour.
November 30, 2005
This WhitneyBiennial Will Take In the World
By CAROL VOGEL
For 70 years, the sprawlingWhitney Biennialexhibition of contemporary art has prided itself on its insistence on an American point of view. But as times and tastes change and art world boundaries dissolve, the 2006 biennial’s two foreign-born curators have ventured across the Atlantic.
Not content with just recording what’s happening in contemporary art around the United States, the curators have scoured artists’ studios in art capitals like Milan, London, Paris and Berlin, a first for Whitney Biennial curators. European artists have been in recent biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but the majority have had American addresses or studios. This year, Europeans who live and work abroad will be represented, as well as American artists who reside in Europe.
Another first claimed by the museum is that this year’s biennial, which is to open on March 2, has a title: “Day for Night.”
It is inspired by the English title of François Truffaut’s 1973 film, “La Nuit Américaine,” which became famous for using a cinematic technique of shooting night scenes during the day by using a special filter. The title was chosen to reflect the kind of restless, in-between moment that the curators believe defines art now – somewhere between day and night, when work may be irrational, religious, dark, erotic or violent.
“We wanted the biennial to feel more like an exhibition than simply a checklist, to provide a context, which art fairs and Chelsea gallery shows cannot,” said Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s curator of contemporary art.
This is Ms. Iles’s second biennial; she was one of three Whitney curators who organized the 2004 event. This year Ms. Iles, who is British, has teamed up with Philippe Vergne, the French-born deputy director and chief curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Each has worked in the United States for eight years.
“Historically Europe and America have been in bed together for so long that to separate them would be very artificial,” Mr. Vergne said. “You can’t have one without the other.”
Given the proliferation of large art fairs all over the world and the speed by which images travel across the Internet, the curators said they wanted to make this biennial something more than a rambling show of new art.
“There are now over 200 biennials in the world,” Mr. Vergne said. “It’s one thing to take the pulse of the art world, but the situation has become so complex we felt serious editing was required.”
Occupying all of the Whitney except its top floor, the 2006 version of what is always a highly anticipated but also often heavily criticized event will include some 100 artists, about the same number as in 2004. There will be a fairly equal representation among mediums: painting and sculpture, photography, film, video and performance.
For the last biennial the three curators split up, traveling in different directions and seeing artists on their own. They then put together an exhibition that melded three different points of view. Ms. Iles and Mr. Vergne purposely did everything together, they said, to form a single vision.
The 2006 biennial will explore various aspects of the newest art. One is its ambiguous nature, reflected in the fact that there are artists who show anonymously and others – Reena Spaulings and Otabenga Jones & Associates, for example – whose names are fictitious. (Reena Spaulings is also the name of a Lower East Side gallery.)
There are works that blur definitions, like a painting that is also part of an installation project or a film that records a performance piece. Or a work may be left for the viewer to translate, like Troy Brauntuch’s black-and-white canvases of softly drawn images that seem to emerge from the darkness or Mark Grotjahn’s creamy white paintings that camouflage a masklike face.
The biennial’s roster also underscores the growing number of artist collaboratives, an increasingly important part of the contemporary landscape. One is the Bernadette Corporation, an international group of young artists formed in 1994 that has created films, albums, magazines and books. (One of its permanent members is John Kelsey, who, not coincidentally, is a co-director, with Emily Sundblad, of the Reena Spaulings gallery.)
While the 2006 biennial will have its share of young talent whose works have never been in a museum show, it will also feature some veterans, including mature artists who, Ms. Iles and Mr. Vergne say, have been underrecognized. Among them are the 81-year-old Warhol Factorystar Taylor Mead and the painters Dorothy Ianonne, 72; Marilyn Minter, 57; and Ed Paschke, who died last year at 65.
As always, there will be political messages. Outside, in the Whitney’s sculpture court, Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija are recreating Mr. di Suvero’s “Peace Tower,” first constructed in Los Angeles in 1966 as a protest against the Vietnam War. There will also be a drawing by Richard Serra for his poster “Stop Bush,” a version of which was plastered around Manhattan to protest the war in Iraq during the 2004 Republican convention.
Not everything is meant to be serious. There will be a good deal of tongue-in-cheek in this year’s biennial. The Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli’s “Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s ‘Caligula,’ ” which had its premiere this summer at the Venice Biennale, will be shown. The four-minute film depicts the decadent government of a Roman emperor and stars Courtney Love, Benicio Del Toro, Milla Jovovich and Helen Mirren, with Mr. Vidal narrating.
In a gallery on the museum’s fifth floor, outside the main exhibition, there will be a show-within-a show. It is being organized by Wrong Gallery, the Chelsea space that was the brainchild of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and the art critics Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick. When it opened three years ago, the gallery consisted of a glass door that looked like all the other Chelsea gallery entrances but was always locked. The one-square-foot exhibition space behind the door has been the scene of an array of performance and art projects.
The gallery does not represent any artists, nor does it sell work; it simply serves as a laboratory for art experimentation. What it plans to do at the Whitney is still unclear, Ms. Iles said. But playing off the gallery’s eccentric nature, the dates of its show will not match those of the biennial. It will open on Jan. 21 and run through May 21.
“They’re planning to do a show about the dark side of American culture and outlaws,” Ms. Iles said. “In some ways the Wrong Gallery’s unconventional approach echoes what we have tried to do throughout the entire biennial.”
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A Strategy to Restore Western Grasslands Meets With Local Resistance
Kevin Moloney for The New York Times
The edge of Escalante Canyon in Utah is shown in a composite of images. Standing at the right is Bill Hedden, the leader of an effort to retire grazing rights in the hope of preserving the area’s delicate ecosystem.
Kevin Moloney for The New York Times
Brent Robinson, with his sons Tyler and Quincy, recently relinquished his grazing rights on public lands.
December 1, 2005
A Strategy to Restore Western Grasslands Meets With Local Resistance
By FELICITY BARRINGER
BOULDER, Utah – No cows remain on the federal lands set aside for grazing here above the Escalante River.
At first glance, this would seem a boon to land and cow alike. The layered rockscape just west of this small town is immense, rolling from the river toward the sky. The grass is thin and dry. The soil, the same. How fat could a cow get?
So, seven years ago an environmental group based in Arizona, the Grand Canyon Trust, began paying ranchers to give up their grazing rights when their herds, or bank accounts, had failed to thrive. By this fall, the trust had spent more than $1 million to end grazing on more than 400,000 acres.
The deals seemed to suit all concerned, until a group of local officials decided that they were bad for the local economy and a threat to the ancestral tradition of living off the land. The group set out to end this latest, uncharacteristically civil chapter in the fraught history of cattlemen, environmentalists and dueling visions of the West’s future.
Michael E. Noel, a former Bureau of Land Management employee who now is a Republican state representative from southern Utah, led the charge to roll back agreements the trust had forged. Mr. Noel said the loss of the grazing allotments would hurt ranching, which would in turn deprive the area’s young people of the character-building chance to work on the land.
“Yes, it’s a free market to buy and sell,” Mr. Noel said recently. “But if you buy it, you use it.”
By retiring the lands, he said, the trust is reneging on an implicit agreement, and “if we allow that to occur, we go down the path of eliminating all grazing on public lands.”
The Grand Canyon Trust’s strategy had been to look amid Utah’s ancient russet cathedrals for lands that needed a long rest from grazing. If the rancher with the grazing rights wanted to relinquish them to the Interior Department, the trust would pay him to do so.
One deal involved simply paying a rancher to relinquish his grazing rights and find new pastures or reduce his herd. The trust also started a round of musical chairs, paying three ranchers to yield their allotments, then consolidating cattle on one grazing area while leaving the riverbanks free of livestock.
In tandem with the trust’s efforts, the federal land bureau was conducting environmental reviews that tended to find that grazing should end on the acreage at issue.
Bill Hedden, the executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust, said he could not understand why his efforts, involving transactions between a willing buyer and willing sellers, seemed a threat to Mr. Noel.
Mr. Hedden said he had hoped to create a situation with no losers. Ranchers could consolidate their herds in more congenial settings. Federal officials could bar grazing during a drought without bankrupting ranchers. The trust, dedicated to preserving the Colorado plateau, could show its financial supporters results.
Besides, he said, the land in question is marginal economically and at risk environmentally.
Pointing to the soil’s crust, a mat splotched with bacterial growths that replenish soil nitrogen, Mr. Hedden said grazing left both grass and crust in tatters.
“We don’t know how long this land takes to heal,” he said.
But given the resistance of local officials, Mr. Hedden is shelving the strategies he used here.
The arc of his efforts to preserve the plateau says much about the evolution of the environmental movement in the West, where the fight over grazing goes back years. Anger over the government’s stewardship of public lands helped feed the Sagebrush Rebellion, which in turn fed the Republican revolution of the 1980′s.
In the years since, the canyons that lace the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument near here drew cows and hikers. The cows sought forage on the banks of the Escalante River; the hikers sought spiritual forage in the same places. They did not mix well.
Throughout the 80′s era of state rebellion against the Bureau of Land Management and the 90′s period of criticism of grazing policies by environmentalists, the Interior Department was buffeted with lawsuits.
Grazing, in the view of local ranchers and officials like Mr. Noel, “can be one of the best tools to use to improve watersheds, to improve forage, to improve soil structure on public lands.” Grass grows better when cut back, Mr. Noel said. Manure can improve the soil.
Dave Hunsaker, the manager of the national monument, an area of 1.7 million acres, relies on the land bureau’s experts to settle that issue.
“The idea of grazing decisions is to achieve rangeland health objectives, No. 1,” Mr. Hunsaker said. “No. 2, it is to provide stability to those ranching operations on the monument right now.
“The Grand Canyon Trust,” he said, “can provide us flexibility for the future.”
Brent Robinson sold the 25,000-acre Clark Bench grazing allotment to a trust subsidiary in 2000, though he retains a basic distrust of environmentalists. Mr. Robinson said his intention was “to scale down a little bit” his herd of 300 head, a sizable herd in these parts.
But Mr. Noel and members of the Kane County commission were concerned enough about the potential retirement of the Clark Bench acreage that they sought out ranchers to appeal the bureau’s decision to let Mr. Hedden’s group buy it and to seek the allotment for themselves.
“Most of the herds here are very small,” Mr. Noel said. “But because the income in this area is very low, those 25 to 30 cows are what make the difference between being able to really provide for family that extra little thing. They can buy a pickup truck or send a kid to college or on a Mormon mission.”
Ranching is a small and declining part of the economy of Kane and its northern neighbor, Garfield County. In several recent years, the total ranching income was in negative numbers in one county or the other. But Kane officials, after some effort, found people to seek the retired grazing permits for themselves.
Trevor Stewart, one of the ranchers seeking the Clark Bench allotment, is Mr. Noel’s son-in-law. Mr. Noel said he was able to get $50,000 from the state to support Kane County when it joined Mr. Stewart’s suit.
The county’s challenge before an administrative law judge in the Interior Department is pending. But even the remote prospect that the complex choreography of ending the grazing might have gone for naught has been enough to dissuade the Grand Canyon Trust from doing more in Utah, Mr. Hedden said.
The eight-year process, however, did result in some cross-pollination. As ranchers like Mr. Robinson have warily shed suspicions and made common cause with an environmental group, the trust itself is gingerly adopting ranching to achieve conservation goals.
The purchase of the Kane and Two-Mile Ranches north of Grand Canyon National Park – 1,000 acres of land and grazing allotments on an additional 830,000 acres – was recently completed by the Grand Canyon Trust and the Conservation Fund, based in Arlington, Va. Instead of retiring the allotments, they will use them, though for fewer head of cattle.
By running cattle on some of the land, the groups may inoculate themselves against new lawsuits, even as they restore acreage damaged by grazing.
Mr. Hedden, however, remains quietly angry at the circumstances that led him to abandon his campaign to use free-market tools to curb grazing.
“We’ve been out there dealing with this,” he said. “We solved the problems of the B.L.M., and we’re hurting the Kane County economy by buying out guys who are going bankrupt? I don’t get it.”
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