The inevitables

Death, taxes and the Whitney Biennial. This year it runneth over into the Park Avenue Armory. Skip the video, etc. and concentrate on the building -- the "Veteran's Room" is the showstopper, all Louis Comfort Tiffany run amok. What a visual intoxicant: the faux Moorish, crazy, silver-on-maroon ceiling, the gigantic columns, wrapped halfway up in rusted chain. The radiator grilles are chain mail. The fireplace is tiled in swirly aqua glass. There's enough fanciful wrought iron for it to acquire fetish status. Elsewhere, the lofty spaces are time capsules -- the heavily carved wood, the stained glass, the crumbling walls covered with plastic. The Moose Room is poorly used, but climb up to the balcony for a howler of a view. And for a bit I thought the banging of the steam pipes was a sound piece. Oh, and public access is ONLY through Mar. 23.
Now the museum -- Jedediah Caesar, on the second floor, owns the show. He invented his own medium: the artist filled boxes with studio detritus (paint, bottles, socks, cups), poured in resin, had the hardened stew sawn into slabs, then polished...From afar, it resembles travertine. Up close, identifable things surface -- the serpentine of corrugated cardboard, an artichoke, a walnut shell. Nutso, and bravo. What's Latin for Caesar Fossil? (Looking at the wall of this new material, I felt like an archeologist.) This isn't just transformation, it's alchemy. I love this work.
Need more? "Helium Brick" justifiably hogs the room, a giddily, triumphantly fucked-up, hulking confecton of rainbow colored polystyrene. As pitted as a politician's conscience, it's the star attraction of the second floor. The resin (that stuff, again) reacts with the foam, the result is a Ken Kesey Grand Canyon. Everybody wants to touch it...(Backstory: It was inspired by the filthy, days-old snow of New York City. Evidently, they don't have this substance in the artist's native LA.) This is change you can believe in.
Back on the ground, a few other things I liked: the lush, allusive photograms of James Welling, Phoebe Washburn's daffodils growing in Gatorade (hey, this is NY), Charles Long's albumen prints of abstractish drips on asphalt, in reality great heron excrement (hey, who knew?); his papier mâché, sorrowful, Giacometti-like bird sculptures. Worth contem- plation: Carol Bove's "The Night Sky Over New York, October 21, 2007, 9pm", bronze rods in sync with the sky on that night. Okay; stunning, suspended, etherial bronze rods. Also in sync with the piece over the bar at the Four Seasons -- I knew it looked familiar...

Conclusion: don't sweat the onions.


Whitney Biennial at the Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67 st.
212-616-3930
through March 23

Whitney Museum
945 Madison
1-800-WHITNEY
through June 1
www.whitney.org

images, from top:

Jedediah Caesar, "Dry Stock"
Urethane resin, polyester resin, pigment, aluminum, titanium, wood, and mixed media
Collection of the artist
courtesy D'Amelio Terras

James Welling, "Torso 3"
Chromogenic print , 45 x 34 in. (114.3 x 86.4 cm)
Collection of the artist
courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

Carol Bove, "The Night Sky over New York, October 21, 2007, 9 p.m."
Bronze rods, wire, expanded metal , 146 x 192 x 96 in. (370.8 x 741.7 x 243.9 cm)
Collection of the artist
courtesy Maccarone, Inc., New York