> Two or Three Films I Know
Blind, for the Use of Those Who See
Javier Téllez
The 35-minute film which makes literal the famous parable of six blind men describing an elephant is both a simple and beautiful spectacle and a bracing challenge to the very concept of blindness as metaphor.
The Alchemy of Comedy…Stupid
Edgar Arceneaux
This nine channel video installation uses a stand up routine with comic David Alan Grier to examine the mechanics of comedy.
Home 2
Olaf Breuning
Swiss multi-media makes a sequel to his 32minute Home, a two-screen installation that features Brian Kertstetter as a bored Everyman yammering in a hotel room about what he would do. In Home 2, we find Kertstetter as world traveler without a clue, traipsing blithely through other cultures without any sense of their difference.
Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn
The San Francisco-based performance duo create a surreal realism in which Kahn, sporting a Viking helmet and a bloody nose, wanders crazily through the crazier city of Los Angeles.
Emergency Needs
Kevin Jerome Everson
Using found footage of the press conference with America's first black mayor about the 1968 riots, Everson edits together a 7-minute meditation on race and history.
T.S.O.Y.W
Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler
T.S.O.Y.W. is short for The Sorrows of Young Werther, the title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 18th century novel of young and tragic love. Granat and Heitzler rethink the classic story as a tale of a lover who steals a Harley to cross America. The two shot two separate films with the end results being shot on parallel screens. Unlike most other pieces, T.S.O.Y.W. received the endorsement of the Biker blog "Hell for Leather" whose headlines reads "Whitney Biennial shows bike film that doesn't suck."
Tearoom
William E. Jones
While researching a 1962 police sting in Mansfield, OH, filmmaker William E. Jones unearthed police surveillance footage of a public bathroom where gay sex occurred. Minimally edited, the resulting film chronicles both a historical tragedy (every one pictured faced a minimum one-year prison sentence) and a political perversion (the footage looks suspiciously like low-budget gay porn).
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
Spike Lee
Spike Lee's 4 hours and 15 minute epic documentary looks at how the government failed its people in time of crisis.
Notes on the Death of Kodachrome
Jennifer Montgomery
Auspiciously about the discontinuation of super-8 film stock, Montgomery's film explores the intersection of technology and memory with her friends filmmakers Todd Haynes and Lisa Cholodenko and novelist Joe Westmoreland.
Silent Film of a Tree Falling in the Forest
Mungo Thomson
This 7-minute short exploits a classic ontological question to frame a meditation on the nature of the visible and the unseen.
Henriette Huldisch
In 1932, a year after the Whitney Museum of American Art opened its doors, the museum's founder and benefactor, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, initiated the Biennial, a re-occurring event designed to focus attention on up-and-coming American artists. Since its creation the Biennial has changed considerably — even instituting at one point a seemingly oxymoronic one-year biennial — but what has been consistent throughout is the importance the exhibition places on discovery.
Film was not part of the original Whitney exhibition. For years even painting and sculpture were kept in separate programs. But in the '70s, things started to change. In 1973 a program of combined media was introduced, video followed two years later, and in another two years film was added to the program. The first group of video artists included seminal figures like Paul Kos, Beryl Korot and Bill Viola among its 18 artists.
In the ensuing 30-some years, the Biennial expanded its definition of film and video to include animation, documentary, shorts and feature films, and experimental cinema. And while the Biennial remains a showcase for film practice rooted in the art world, it also continues to showcase contemporary feature directors like Tom Kalin (Savage Grace), Todd Haynes (I'm Not There) and, this year, Spike Lee.
To understand how the Whitney Biennial fits into the film world at large, we spoke to Henriette Huldisch, who, along with Shamim M. Momin, curated the 2008 Biennial.
Each year there seems to be a different twist on the film/video section. What's new this year?
What we did very differently this year — and it was a very deliberate decision we made early on — was to forgo the more conventional method by which a work would only be a screened a few times over the course of the show. When the film and video program isn't as visible, it often doesn't get as much press. We decided to show everyone's film and video at least once a day. We wanted to create a situation where film and video had as much parity as painting and sculpture on the floor.
What the advantage in that?
It allows us to invite a lot more of the general audience in to see work they might not otherwise visit — although these people may be walking in and out of screening rooms.
Most people still think of this as "art" exhibition, not a film/video show. How do you bring them together?
We were very specific that we didn't want the film and video section to have little to do with the rest of the exhibition. So were really careful to pick certain works that would have relationships to the works shown in the gallery. And vice versa.
Like, for example?
One piece that surprised many people was Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. It was a documentary that wasn't even made to be shown in a cinema space. It was broadcast on TV on HBO, and it is a chronicle of a cataclysmic event in recent American history that was very important to address. It has overtones of dealing with the post-industrial American landscape and its attendant ecological issues, and it also raises questions of the public versus the private — what happens when issues of the public concern are put into the hands of private interests. Some of those same issues are being addressed by sculptural work in a completely different way. It is not an obvious connection by any stretch, but we did want to make those connections.
Where else are there connections?
[Natalia Almada's] documentary Al Otro Lado (To the Other Side) deals with the US/Mexican border in terms of drug running and human traffic, as well as a place of cultural exchange. While it engages the U.S./Mexican border specifically, it also deals with borders in general. There is an interest in the American territories and border states that you see in a lot of other works as well. In a similar way, William T. Jones's Tearoom, which is appropriated footage from the early '60s of the Ohio police shooting illicit homosexual activity in a public bathroom, touches on different types of boundaries and definitions of public and private. Some of the sculptors are working through the issues as well. Ruben Ochoa's [If I had a rebar for every time someone tried to mold me has to do with a certain class-based topography of Los Angeles and the upkeep in different neighborhoods.
How do you find the work you curate?
There is no distinct criteria of how we found the work. We looked at film festivals, and there is a circle of people working outside of the commercial industry and we always look at their work. I feel that our responsibility in general is as an art museum, so that is one thing. But also the Whitney Museum does not have a large permanent cinema space. So we can show 35mm films, but a retrospective in 35mm isn't a good idea.
In the New York film community, how do you position the Biennial?
In the cultural landscape of New York, there are repertory venues or art houses that serve that demographic quite well. What is generally very underserved are venues for people who are working in other types of modes that are not commercial, particularly short films, the avant-garde, and to some extent different modes of documentary and films that are not easily broadcast.
How do you think film has changed at the Biennial?
In recent times many artists coming out of art school and showing in the gallery system are very influenced by Hollywood cinema and engaging certain narrative tropes while there is also a strain of the avant-garde that is very abstract and perhaps more interested in questions of painting. That is an interesting reversal of what you might think people are doing.
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