Detail of of a large installation by Barry McGee.
"Lately, it seems, biennial exhibitions don’t do much except sit there, looking good and offending no one. Instead of being shows that people “love to hate,” or vice versa, these big, often international affairs now inspire mild interest or resigned indifference. Their underlying message seems to be: Careful now, don’t frighten the trustees.“Life on Mars,” the 55th Carnegie International, is the latest exercise in handsome, measured, frictionless thoughtfulness. It may actually have more than its share of interesting art and poetic juxtapositions. Yet almost nothing happens.
It has been organized over the last three years by Douglas Fogle, who was a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1994 to 2005, when he joined the Carnegie as curator of contemporary art. For his advisory committee Mr. Fogle selected Daniel Birnbaum, the director of Portikus, an alternative space in Frankfurt, who will organize the next Venice Biennale; Chus Martínez, director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein; and Richard Flood and Eungie Joo, the chief curator and director of education at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
In the lead essay of the show’s exceptional catalog Mr. Fogle notes some questions posed by his show’s title. Are there other forms of life in the universe? Can art help us explore what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called its “intimate immensity”? And, more pertinent, has the human race turned Earth itself into an alien planet, a place of rampant waste, arrogance, immorality and violence?
The show itself has little of the catalog’s pointedness. It seems selected largely from a preapproved list of veterans of shows just like this. When the exhibition’s participants were announced, I was dismayed to realize that I knew the work of all but three or four of the artists listed. Mr. Fogle has beaten some of the odds of so many usual suspects by selecting exceptional artworks and installing them with great sensitivity. Still, his failure to think outside the curatorial box is close to stunning.
Despite the international character of the Carnegie, more than half of its 39 artists are from only three countries: the United States, Britain and Germany. Worse yet, 16 of the 39, more than a third, are represented in New York by just three prominent Chelsea galleries: Gladstone, Tanya Bonakdar and Anton Kern.
Curators have about the most complicated and daunting job in the art world; they are pulled apart by pressures to raise money, write, hunt out hot new artists and oversee acquisitions, while organizing shows that attract the public. Their value and responsibilities seem less and less appreciated by trustees, who are experiencing their own kind of pressures. Jobs and budgets are at stake. These are expensive shows; don’t make waves.
Biennials need to be laboratories, not annual reports. And the world is far too full of interesting artists for shows like this to be drawn from such a small and known gene pool. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it reduces the capacity for risk and dulls the imagination." Roberta Smith
