WHAT’S a better source of artistic inspiration: a crumpled bedsheet or Mayor Giuliani?
We finally have our answer, now that the Whitney Museum has unveiled its new Biennial exhibition, which opens to the public tomorrow.
And the winner is: The crumpled bedsheet.
This year’s Biennial includes Hans Haacke’s “Sanitation,” an installation that links Mayor Giuliani’s effort to censor the Brooklyn Museum last year to Nazism.
The mayor put the Biennial on everyone’s social schedule two weeks ago when he condemned Haacke’s work as “demeaning” to victims of the Holocaust. Haacke added to the excitement by not responding.
Haacke finally broke his silence yesterday, complaining that “Sanitation” has been “misinterpreted” by the press and the mayor.
“Fragmentary information leaked out before the work was completed,” he said. “[The leaked information] was totally off the mark.”
It was? Funny, but when you finally see “Sanitation,” it is exactly as we boors in the media described it:
A room filled with garbage cans, the sound of marching troops and anti-art quotations from Giuliani, Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson, all printed in Fraktur, the Nazis’ favorite Gothic typeface. A copy of the First Amendment is on the floor.
Perhaps The Gnome does owe the artist an apology for referring to his installation as “art.”
It won’t happen again.
The problem with “Sanitation” is not that it links Mayor Giuliani to the Nazis (hey, Rudy’s Brooklyn Museum fight was a page right out of Hitler’s playbook), but that “Sanitation” is not art.
It’s a campaign poster.
It is sound and fury, signifying nothing — except that the mayor is often an obnoxious bully. You don’t need a museum to tell you that.
Just pick up the paper. Pull out the latest story about the mayor. Hang it on a wall if it makes you happy.
That’s where the crumpled bedsheet comes in.
After watching Haacke do hours of interviews with reporters eager to get him to call Giuliani a Nazi, The Gnome headed up to the museum’s fourth floor to see if every artist in this year’s Biennial was as much a hack as Haacke.
That’s where you’ll find artist Joseph Havel’s ethereal bronze sculptures of draperies, tablecloths and curtains. You can’t miss ’em. It may sound silly, but the ghost-like sculptures are art in its purest form: A simple conjuring of a unique mood and emotion out of an everyday item.
The wall text tells us that these pieces are a big step forward for Havel.
“His earlier pieces were built from lampshades and shirt collars,” the text says. “Then, a crumpled bedsheet caught his eye.”
Havel’s crumpled bedsheet beats Haacke’s campaign poster any day.