It was all well and good with the art world when the Biennial was still mostly filled with weird objects made by people who wanted to be the latest links in the Pollock-to-Warhol-through-Koons stylistic chain. But now a slew of performance, Internet, sound, video and installation artists, plus the likes of cartoonist Chris Ware (who created “Billy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth”), are taking over. Big time. Upon seeing the Biennial artists’ list, one prominent Chelsea-district gallery owner said, “What went wrong at the Whitney?” And well-known painter Gregory Amenoff, who teaches in Columbia University’s hot graduate art program, asks, “Does the Whitney really have a constituency anymore? This Biennial certainly doesn’t seem to represent what most people in the art world actually do.” What does Whitney director Maxwell Anderson think of his unconventional curator’s big show? “Larry’s perspective,” he says, “which I share, is that traditions don’t fare well in the contemporary art world. The Whitney follows the instincts of artists, rather than the art market.”
Hardly anybody has ever approved of an entire Biennial. Complaints in the ’80s involved which galleries got their artists in and which were shut out. In the'90s, the show turned into an affirmative-action battle between the “hegemonic culture” (white male artists) and “the Other,” meaning artists of color, polemically gay artists and almost any woman artist other than Helen Frankenthaler. The high point was a mock-admission button saying I CAN’T IMAGINE WANTING TO BE WHITE
Rinder, 40, is a Timothy Dalton lookalike; he studied acting and wanted to be a soap-opera star. He speaks smoothly, asks follow-up questions to artists’ arcane explanations of their work and listens as if he means it. But he guards his reactions closely. Not once when I tagged along on his studio visits to spacious lofts, funky apartments and light industrial spaces in Chicago and Texas did an artist seem to suspect Rinder of leaning one way or the other about inclusion in the Biennial. “Excellent,” Rinder would say at the door, cheerfully unclear whether he was referring to the art or his having looked at it.
Rinder spent the first several years of his childhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with his Latvian jewelry-designer mother and systems-analyst father (“a creative fellow, too, he does computer ‘meta-art’ in retirement”). In spite of a constant family lack of cash, Mom frequently packed up young Larry for educational trips to England and France. After a “Smallville”-ish high-school spell in Connecticut, Rinder was told by his father that while he’d be willing to underwrite, say, four years of poetry-writing in Greenwich Village, he wouldn’t contribute a cent toward college. A supportive aunt stepped in and Rinder went off for a year, to arty Reed College in Oregon. But when he came home for the holidays, Dad said, “As I expected, you’ve turned into an a–hole, and you’re not going back.” So Rinder put in a couple of years at art school in New York before returning to Reed to graduate as a performance artist. Although he also holds a graduate degree in art history from Hunter College, he still has an artist’s attitude.
Rinder was an outside adviser for the ‘91 and ‘93 Biennials (“Both times, I came to New York with lists, and none of my artists got in”), and served as one of six outside curators assembling the 2000 show. (In effect, this was an audition for his current job.) He moved East from Oakland, Calif., where he was in charge of public programs at the California College of Arts and Crafts. His partner stayed in California, and it’s been a frequent-flier relationship since then. Did I mention that Rinder can be very funny? On a flat, hot highway between Austin and a little Texas town where there was yet another artist to be seen, I dorkily asked Rinder if he’d met his Lithuanian significant other through some kind of ethnic connection. “Right,” he said. “At a weekend mixer for Gay Baltic Youth.”
After the practically endless process of looking at art, the other half of putting together this Biennial was whittling the participants down to a financially and logistically manageable number. That was especially difficult because so many of the 2002 show’s 113 artists (the most in two decades) would like whole galleries devoted to their oddball installations. They also want “light locks” and protection from other artists’ “sound bleeds.”
Rinder started the summer with a session with the nonprofit Public Art Fund. Together they persuaded the city to allow, for the first time in Biennial history, six artists to construct site-specific works in Central Park. They include Roxy Paine’s $60,000, 50-foot stainless-steel tree and Brian Tolle’s underwater machine that makes mysterious splashes in one of the ponds. Four more meetings were required to determine the final cut of the artists inside the museum. The last meeting went on for 13 hours. Near the end, issues like shipping costs became as important as esthetics. But right down to the wire, Rinder and his three assisting curators still debated basic issues, such as whether Chan Chao’s photographs of Burmese pro-democracy insurgents or Stephen Dean’s video documentary of the Indian festival of Holi were actually art, or more like journalism and anthropology. (Both Dean and Chao made it into the show.)
In the car during a July day of Chicago studio visits, I asked Rinder if he had a bead on the coming Biennial’s character. “There’ll probably be a lot more of what might be called youth culture or even skateboard culture,” he said. “I’m really interested in that stuff.” He’s certainly in step with the Zeitgeist. In some universities these days, art-history departments are turning into “visual culture” departments, where anything from old TV sitcoms to singles’ classifieds is considered as rich a subject for deep analysis as a painting or sculpture. Rinder’s Biennial–in just the “A’s” on its artists list–includes the L.A. group Archive, which conducts psychic-led “interviews” with famous dead artists; Gregor Asch, a.k.a. DJ Olive the Audio Janitor; and Peggy Ahwesh, who digitally re-edits bits of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. There are only a handful of painters in the show.
To Rinder, modern art’s grandest project has been tearing down boundaries–between “primitivism” and Western art in Picasso, between high culture and low in pop art, and so on. Then why not, I ask, simply break through all the barriers once and for all? Why not just sail out on the great ocean of American cultural excess and select a few indie films, rap videos, techno-nerd Web sites, cobble together a Biennial with them–and forget about the idea of “art” altogether? “I did consider radically opening up the Biennial to all of American culture,” Rinder says. “I wanted to ask, ‘Why a certain performance artist and not a marching band from New Orleans?’ If we liked the band, we’d pick it and worry about the rationale later.” Surprised at what he’s just said, Rinder adds, “There’s nothing in this Biennial, though, where somebody would say, ‘I just can’t believe a person actually did that!’ " Many art-worlders, however, just might be saying exactly that about the entire 2002 Biennial.
