Tall, bristled shadows of yucca plants, inky specters made pure black against the sand by a pale and plummeting sun, point up a hillside rising from the highway and toward an impossible grouping of conjoined trailers. A corrugated brown trailer is tacked to the caravan-boards, roofing tar and the lack of rain hold it all together. The junk in the yard-discarded truck rims, milk crates, broken highway signs-is somebody's landscaping.
I'm outside Kingman, Ariz., and I'm stuck inside a cliché: One man's trash is another man's treasure. Indeed, perspective is formed, even forced, from one's literal point of view-whether
geographic, economic, ideological. It's true in the political realm (every news poll on, say, The Middle East or The War on Terror illustrates the polarized view in this country on current events) and it's true in the art world.
SITE Santa Fe's biennial,
Still Points of the Turning World
, is a different kind of experience for almost everyone who walks into it. This is as it should be because the capacity for an intensely personal response is one of the characteristics that sets art apart from popular movies or music. But the unanticipated division in this case is the local versus non-local reaction to the show.
Curator Klaus Ottmann intended the exhibition to be a collection of artworks each within a unique space and capable of having a presence with or without the other works in the building. This intention urges contemplation and meaning on the swollen circuit of international biennials. Fewer artists in smaller, controlled spaces allow the viewer to have a meaningful interaction rather than be bowled over by size and celebrity.
The question remains whether Ottmann's biennial can turn the course of the art world dialogue about presenting international art away from one thing and toward another. But I've realized it's difficult to care much at the end of the day about that international dialogue. Further, that art world dialogue may need to talk about quiet contemplation, but spectacle and hoopla is what local communities that host biennials really like.
Thus Ottmann's biennial at SITE (1606 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1199; through Jan. 7, 2007) may be a jolt to the system of
visitors familiar with biennials.
For Santa Feans, however, it's a bit boring.
SITE is a year-round presenting organization. We've grown accustomed to a variety of homegrown and traveling exhibitions there. The biennial springs up every 18 months or so, like the surprise goose in a circle of ducks, and is big and bold and splashy. Not this time. Our point of view as locals is that this doesn't feel much different than anything SITE has shown since the last biennial and-cringe-may not be as exciting as some of the interim work. And some of the work feels different from how marketing hype or magazines or even previous experience with the artists may have led us to expect. Is the painter Peter Doig actually doing something a bit different or are these paintings kind of mediocre for him? Couldn't someone have given Patty Chang a little focus? Why did Wangechi Mutu show a video she made in school? And who in their right mind would call that representative of Wolfgang Laib?
It's easy to feel that Santa Fe was low man on the artists' totem pole and that other work, better work, was shipped off to other cities, better cities.
But
Still Points
is also predicated in part on an idea that some degree of failure is inevitable. This is not, as some have decried, a cop-out or a defense against poor reviews-it's an ode to attempting to fulfill the ideals inside the mind. The dialogue Ottmann wants to have about biennial culture may be rejected. The artists he chose to exhibit in Santa Fe may have failed to present their best work.
But if Santa Fe is an art landscape safe enough to try these ideas on, for whatever reason, I'm glad of it-even proud of it.
