Plurals

Exit Biennial: The Reconstruction

Like everyone else, sometimes I get fed up with art. Tired of high-rent galleries, fat artistic egos, and pompous subject matter? In its new home, a legendary alternative space leaves not just the work, but the whole exhibition under construction.

Alternatives

Exit Art could have chosen its new location with its name in mind, not to mention its mission as an alternative to the Manhattan art world. As I left, I nearly wandered onto an exit ramp from the Lincoln Tunnel. It gives new meaning to the bridge-and-tunnel crowd that flocks to a Soho that even Exit Art has left behind.

One can almost forget the Chelsea scene and its pretensions just a few blocks south along Tenth Avenue. Biennials, between the Whitney and abroad, diligently comb galleries and studios. Yet they end up anointing dealers and artists, in and beyond Chelsea, creating a kind of perpetual art fair for the age of globalization. For its biennial exhibition, which coincides with its reopening, Exit Art discovers something of value in perpetual starts. It invited entries, and I knew none of its roughly three dozen artists, chosen from some six hundred submissions.

One can definitely forget New York's perpetual plans for the raw neighborhood, south of Clinton (or Hell's Kitchen) near the city's troubled convention center. When it calls its reopening show "The Reconstruction," it could be speaking for more than art.

Then again, art and real estate have come and gone around Exit Art before. Its Broadway loft, opened in 1982, found itself part of Soho's rapid growth to the south and east. As art largely abandoned the neighborhood, or perhaps vice versa, things only get worse. It still offers artists a venue, seven days a week, rather than a stipend or sales. Even the classic alternative space at P.S. 1 now conforms to museum hours in Queens.

The new space, although on street level, picks up where the old one left off. One came to it as much for sprawling, chaotic displays that tested one's endurance as for art. The opening's spotty quality is no exception, but it gives the chaos a refreshing new dimension—in time.

Artists had a month to set up, and much of the work will continue to evolve till the end of the Biennial's eight weeks. Artists arrived not with traditional or new media in hand, but with the tools of the trade. Some had yet to create the work's materials as well. Lisa Hein and Bob Seng, for example, began erecting a five-foot wall of Jell-O bricks and mortar, while Orly Genger began knitting scarves, blankets, and sweaters for what would become shifting sculptural piles, like Carl Andre grown soft or Eva Hesse grown warm and comforting. And one could see it all in the making, for the descent of artists marked the exhibition's opening celebration, too.

Reopenings

In one memorable definition, an installation amounts to the leftovers of a performance. One may enter the space. One may redefine the work by one's presence, as if filling Ilya Kabakov's Empty Museum or ordering the letters by Richard Tuttle. Yet it memorializes the artist's experience and conception. It gives an esthetic veneer to suffering and self-exposure, like the austere mix of meditation, starvation, and elegance from Marina Abramovic barely a few months earlier. It reasserts the avant-garde gesture by the artist's very absence.

Exit Art shifts the emphasis away from any authority, even that the artist, the work, or a curator making choices. By bringing the public into the picture from day one, it creates multiple points of opening. It makes each moment in the work's life indeed a reconstruction. It also creates a performance above and beyond any single artist or work. It takes cooperation, if not collaboration, simply to make the art without stepping on any of it. Monika Goetz promises to document a blind person's response to the space, but I did quite badly enough on my own.

In the good old days, back when an installation meant hanging pictures, one spoke of a vernissage. At previews then, collectors and friends gathered for drinks while the painter added a final layer of varnish. Here the gallery, artists, and anyone who cared to show up might as well have flung a metaphoric varnish at each other—like Whistler's pot of paint thrown, said a critic, at the public. After all, they would have had at least a month to get art and themselves out of the sticky puddle.

I first visited two days before the official second opening, the deadline for installations. The large staff went about its duties, open to view behind Johnny the Whip Savannah's razor-wire fence. Jenny Polak and a companion worked high above on In Situ Sanctuary, a wooden hiding place between gallery pillars, by no means ready yet for the Internet access and counter-surveillance equipment. Allessandra Lee Michelle Torres padded about in a robe and slippers. She was taking a break between stints naked in an incubation chamber like the one in which she first came into existence, but she looked almost as lost as a newborn child. Back within the tank, never quite asleep, her legs bruised where gloves allow a visitor's hands to penetrate, she seemed more exposed than in her baby photo and hospital papers pinned nearby.

Otherwise, I pretty much had the place to myself. Colin Zaug's pretend weather center descended from the ceiling, as did the upside-down house by Frantiska and Tim Gilman. Ted McGurn's freshly painted plywood loop, reaching almost to the ceiling, awaited a more daring skateboarder than I. Rob Andrews was not at work cleaning the floor, a little bit each day, with only a toothbrush. J. Gabriel Lloyd and John J. McGurk were not serving brunch from their spare, sculptural cube, and Peter Simensky was not selling his pricey, homemade candy bars, but then I never liked peanuts.

Other work remained decidedly in progress. The Jello-O bricks, still only a few feet tall, gleamed and sagged, and Kate Gilman's house invited my furnishing it. Derek Coté's cardboard scaffolding, without nails or glue, leaned in pieces by a pillar, still very much subject to gravity. A collective, TAG, had not begun spewing out its wall of mist, and Sean Langlais's log was not whistling at me yet, assuming it will have much to say. Marcus Wetzel's small island lacked its surrounding lake, Larry Bamburg's pick-up truck its own simulated water, unless I missed the point. Christoph Draeger's jigsaw puzzle of TWA 800 will leave a disaster in the making for the show's duration.

Reconstructions

A more staid curator might have broken up the sprawl, perhaps into neater themes. Some artists treat "The Reconstruction" as the gallery's entrance into a community. Tamara Gayer's Skyline, a freestanding mass of skyscrapers, copies the view outside. Christian Tomaszewski's Made in USA amounts to a more literal mirrored wall, while Lynn Koble's wall comes with sonic echoes. Joshua R. Marks maps the area's convenience stores on Plexiglas. Union Gaucha Productions supplies a bicycle rack, should one prefer to explore midtown west without an artist's homilies, free of charge.

Others interpret this community in terms of its people—as the global city. Mariam Ghani sets out computers, tea, and ornamental pillows. One can visit an imagined Kabul through either the immediate environment or a Web log. Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz offers cosmetic "makeovers" according to Puerto Rican stereotypes or fashion, depending on which cultural and commercial prejudices one hates most. Sunsook Roh leaves a Korean poem about loss of country, and Robert Chambers accepts shoebox welcoming presents from Miami artists less skilled, I can only hope, than he. Polak's sanctuary draws on terrors of Jews in a world war, the Underground Railroad before another kind of Reconstruction entirely, or immigrants today, and Anne Rowland's Crawl Space looks more accessible but no more inviting.

Others obviously take reconstruction as hard, dangerous work. Drew Heitzler scrapes his own whitewash off gallery windows. Along with all the other walls, Jesse Bercowetz, Matt Bua, and Ward Shelley simulate a ramshackle Sweatshop with more than enough graffiti outside—and goodness knows what halfway visible inside. The Beaver at Large, a pretend dam of twigs, looks more comforting, but Rebecca Herman and Mark Shoffner cut off one's path completely. Jade Townsend gives Duane Hanson a sinister turn, with a dummy construction worker dead on the floor, as if it had fallen from the installation's own scaffolding.

Last, others imagine reconstruction in personal times, as a moment of birthing, perhaps for the adult body. If Genger's knitting alludes to motherhood, Daniella Dooling makes the ritual more explicit—and funnier. Her five tapes, playing simultaneously in frantic fast-forward, show her Learning to Knit as the news drones along audibly at the same breakneck speed. Torres gives incomplete, repeated births particular poignancy, but I see the metaphor in Michelle Rosenberg's buzzing sound sculpture of intertwined headphones as well.

Papo Colo—who conceived the show with Jeanette Ingberman, the space's director—does not adopt my scheme. Rather, by keeping the sprawl, Exit Art recognizes the connectedness of all these themes. All describe reconstruction in a way that makes sense for art, as a progressive self-definition, like the "building cuts" of Gordon Matta-Clark. More important, the sheer mess keeps the exhibition alive. It keeps the visitor an active participant. It keeps installation as an act as well as an artifact. Instead of action painting, one has a kind of action curating.

Does the work sound variable at best, recycled at worst? Do the perpetual openings end up reinstating the glibness of other biennials? Does "The" in the title end up reinserting claims to authority? Sure, but hold off on theoretical paradoxes and make a graceful exit toward art. This whole definitely adds up to more fun than its parts, and one should not act surprised when another gallery in relocating, Smack Mellon, mimics its theme for its "Site 92." Besides, with a new space and a show called "The Reconstruction," one should come away most with the thought of progress and promise.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Exit Biennial: The Reconstruction" ran at Exit Art through May 4, 2003, with an opening March 8 and a "midway opening" April 5. Four years later, Exit Art plays a variation on the theme, with "The Building Show," and the Whitney at Altria calls a show "Undone."