Peter Doig's painting "Day for Night" (2005). That is also the biennial's title.
via Artnet Mag:
2006 WHITNEY BIENNIAL LINEUP
The Whitney Museum of American Art has announced details of its 2006 biennial. Titled "Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night," Mar. 2-May 28, 2006, the show is organized by Whitney curator Chrissie Iles and Walker Art Center deputy director and chief curator Philippe Vergne. Taking its title from François Truffaut’s 1973 film, the biennial "explores the artifice of American culture. . . the irrational, the religious, the dark, the erotic and the violent" (Iles) and "a space between pre- and post-modernist parameters -- somewhere between day and night, between the history of forms and the forms of history" (Vergne). "In this twilight zone," Vergne intones, a bit more comically than he may have liked, "many things are called into question or obscured."In their press announcement, the curators go on to discuss some of the "intertwining and overlapping strands" of the show: Uncertain Identities and Unfixed Images; Shock and Awe; Lavish Abandon; An Archeology of the Present; and Screen Life. The exhibition also includes a separate presentation by the Wrong Gallery gang -- Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, who are also organizing the next Berlin Biennial.
Among the many other eccentricities in the biennial are an anonymous performance by Momus, playing an "unreliable tour guide"; work by Otabenga Jones & Associates, a Houston collaborative named after Ota Benga, an African pygmy supposedly brought to the U.S. in 1906 and exhibited in the Bronx Zoo; a puppet show put on collaboratively by Dan Graham, Tony Oursler, Rodney Graham, Laurent Berger and the Williamsburg "art band" Japanther; and a recreation by Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija of a peace tower di Suvero originally made with the Artists’ Protest Committee in 1966 in Los Angeles.
The exhibition also features an extensive section of "political" art, including multiple broadcasts about the war in Iraq by Deep Dish Television, and the original drawing for Stop Bush by Richard Serra.
Walter Robinson adds, lest we forget:
The exhibition is sponsored, as usual, by Altria, the cigarette company.
For the full list go to Artnet News.
via NYTimes:
This Whitney Biennial Will Take In the World
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: November 30, 2005
For 70 years, the sprawling Whitney Biennial exhibition of contemporary art has prided itself on its insistence on an American point of view. But as times and tastes change and art world boundaries dissolve, the 2006 biennial's two foreign-born curators have ventured across the Atlantic.Not content with just recording what's happening in contemporary art around the United States, the curators have scoured artists' studios in art capitals like Milan, London, Paris and Berlin, a first for Whitney Biennial curators. European artists have been in recent biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but the majority have had American addresses or studios. This year, Europeans who live and work abroad will be represented, as well as American artists who reside in Europe.
Another first claimed by the museum is that this year's biennial, which is to open on March 2, has a title: "Day for Night."
It is inspired by the English title of François Truffaut's 1973 film, "La Nuit Américaine," which became famous for using a cinematic technique of shooting night scenes during the day by using a special filter. The title was chosen to reflect the kind of restless, in-between moment that the curators believe defines art now - somewhere between day and night, when work may be irrational, religious, dark, erotic or violent. [read on...]
