"It's American art. You should like it."

Went to a Whitney Biennial member viewing hours event this morning, on a gray Sunday morning from nine to eleven--too early for a Sunday morning, especially after outer-borough food adventures last night (excellent Thai in Elmhurst, in honor of Adri and Jason). But I liked the idea of seeing the Biennial at a less insanely crowded time, plus they promised continental breakfast! Keight and I joked about lemon poppyseed mini-muffins and Lipton tea bags with tepid water--it actually wasn't too far off from that: coffee and tea (decent coffee and the tea wasn't Lipton), mediocre bagels quartered with single servings of Philadelphia cream cheese, butter, and jam. That's all. Keight, Constance and I waited nearly half an hour to get ours. Then we wandered a little, and it was decently uncrowded. I'm looking forward to going back on Wednesday to the event for teachers about strategies for bringing kids to see the show.

Favorite pieces on a first walk-through included a fabulous room by Eduardo Sarabia and another room with an installation by Lisa Segal (the Whitney site features a great page with bios of all the artists, but I couldn't find a list of the titles of the works included ANYWHERE, nor pictures of the works in the show).

I spent a long time looking at a piece by Ry Rocklen, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, trying to decide why I was so bothered by how flat-out ugly it was. If the museum guard standing near Rocklen's work was not a deliberate part of Rocklen's submission, he should have been. He was the best part. He watched me looking at the piece. I couldn't read the expression on his face, except that it wasn't the expression of the museum guard who thinks you're standing too close. I finally said to him, "Do you like this?" He shrugged. He said, "I work here." I said, "I know that." He said, "Art. American art. It is wonderful." He was Latino, with a strong accent, maybe in his fifties. I also think he was part of the show because he was not a Whitney guard, he had some sort of security badge on that was not Whitney-issued. "It's American art. You should like it," he told me. I shrugged and kept wandering.

On the Whitney site, Trinie Dalton says, "Ry Rocklen’s sculptures paradoxically reflect at once a respect for the Duchampian sculptural tradition and an anarchic rebellion against art historical constraints. Collecting cast-off objects from the streets, dumps, or thrift stores, he doctors and assembles them into readymade sculptures charged with an eccentric delicacy that gives them a second, more 'poetic' life." Keight especially liked one of his pieces, one we were referring to as "the bed of nails." But this one that irritated me, a big ugly presentation of a bunch of cheap discount-store art, faded from display in a store window (this is what I remember from the wall description)--I couldn't figure out what was interesting about it (besides the guard), or why I should want to look at it. & I have a special place in my heart for discount-store art--my contribution to Donna's mail art show was just that. & I can like art that could be considered ugly, just not art that doesn't seem to say or do enough, even when you read the label. American or not.