The Biennial Game, deCordova Style...

This time around, even though we're in the midst of what almost seems like Spring here in the Seacoast region, I won't try to play Mr. Nice Guy and hide my negative feelings. I'm back fresh from having attended the 2012 Biennial at the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Garden in Lincoln, MA, and as with all of the deCordova's ambitious exhibits, this one certainly did leave its mark on me. Just what kind of mark, and how deep, is the subject of this brief commentary.

Architectural detail of the one-time
home of Julian deCordova, now a
portion of the renowned deCordova
Museum. Photo by Ross 3 6 12.

To begin with, just the WORD "biennial" is irritating.  Few can remember how to spell it, and twice as many don't want to get caught trying to pronounce it at an opening reception where those dispicable  Lords of Political Correctness might be found lurking near the punch bowl and the crackers. The flies that congregate on the gallery cuisine on summer evenings are just a variation on that theme, and one cannot help but wish them and the PC crowd a speedy exuent.


But that's nothing compared to the chaotically unpredictable quality of the biennial itself as a concept. Whatever are the origins of a given biennial, and whatever its success or failure rate in the eyes of critics and the lay public, the biennial is here to stay. I've seen a few in my day here in northern New England, so I suppose that like everyone else, I have a right to my opinion.


Some biennials are supremely well conceived and fabulously successful. The 2011 Biennial at the Portland Museum in Maine was an example of the biennial at its very best: exciting, elegant, playful, more than sufficiently artful and joyfully unpredictable -- as good in both concept and detail, a few duds aside, as anything I've seen in Boston or other major population centers. I went away from that exhibit elated, motivated and fulfilled. Portland has a right to be button-poppingly proud of having created an environment that could bring about  such unimpeachable, across-the-board quality.


Other biennials are more disasterous than the midnight crash of two unwitting locomotives, neither of which appears to have had any idea where it was supposed to be going. A successful biennial may suddenly rise up like a dilectable mushroom in a less than superlative museum, and a real stinker may just as easily materialize in a museum that's nearly always at the top of its game in the matter of the quality of its regularly scheduled exhibits.

A bench at the deCordova Museum
in Lincoln, MA, waiting patiently
for Spring. Photo by Ross 3 6 12

As I see it, those two fated locomotives chose the deCordova as their crash site this time around, and it seems to me to have been an unlikely place for the two to tangle. I've seen many marvelously conceived and beautifully mounted exhibits at the deCordova, which for the past 20 years has been high on my list of must-see museums. Indeed, the Tools as Art exhibit, mounted several years ago at this esteemed museum, was one of the most intelligently designed and artfully mounted exhibits I've ever seen, featuring artists of astonishing inventiveness and consummate skill. I bought the commemorative book for that exhibit, and it continues to be one of my prize possessions.


And it goes without saying, really, that I will continue to praise the deCordova Museum, champion its cause and encourage my friends to go there and find the same pleasure that I have nearly always found while attending both the museum and its attendant sculpture garden -- a real gem and an accomplishment of which the deCordova family can be justly and eternally proud.


So how does one begin to explain the 2012 Biennial at the deCordova?


This exhibit was embarrassingly shallow and sophomoric. As a whole, it must have come across to many an experienced exhibit-goer as in many respects laughably silly and decidedly narcissistic: the whinings and yearnings of youthful artists with plenty of credentials and high-octane resumes, but little real substance.


Many of the artists in this biennial certainly showed us they've accumulated valuable skills from having spent hour upon hour, late at night, in their studios. But I went away from this exhibit with the gnawing conviction that the exhibit itself had no measurable pulse and no real soul -- that it was hardly half a step above what one might expect from an end-of semester "crit" at some I Wish I Were An Ivy League school. The movie Art School Confidential, that withering, brutally honest analysis of life in the prototypical art school, comes to mind.


Surely the curators must be held accountable. I have to assume that they and their jurors are responsible for the choice of this year's participants. But is not the host museum equally responsible for what comes together and lands on their walls?


I've no problem at all with an exhibit of any sort that doesn't quite come together -- that slips unwittingly beneath an institution's usual level of competence. What strikes me as hard to accept, though, is an exhibit that seems so poorly conceived that it fails on its own merits while embarrassing the museum that agreed to host it.


Why, for instance were nearly all of the participants in this biennial so youthful? Are the jurors working from a presumption that only the young can have vitality and imagination? Is a biennial merely a farm club for privileged undergraduates from prestigious halls of learning, instead of  the blessed showcase for an array of powerful, gifted, intellectually mature visions that it really ought to be?

Staircase to portions of the Sculpture
Garden at the deCordova Museum,
Lincoln, MA. Photo by Ross 3 6 12

 I don't begrudge the young their sometimes precocious accomplishments in the public arena, but the young cannot possibly be the sole source of accomplishment, and accomplishment without maturity of vision is not worth the cheap paper it was printed on.


Where was the evidence in this exhibit of genuine contemplation, borne of years of real-life experience? Where went the wisdom -- the artful ripening -- that one had a right to expect in an exhibit of this "importance," at least in the minds of its creators?


The answer might lie in looking for a way to break the strangle-hold of academia, with all of its reeking pretentions and hidebound ways, on the very idea of the biennial. My ideal would be to seek exhibitors from a broad, invigorating pool of people from all walks of life -- young and old, trained and untrained, conventional and unconventional.  A biennial should be about excellence, not about climbing, with privilege and pedigree as its twin nannies, from fancy school to public imprimature.


Perhaps a lottery system of some sort would engender fresh points of view and result in more evidence of genuine imagination. For me, the 2012 Biennial at the deCordova was a bit like a rather tedious duck-march of copycat aspirants to fame -- fame of the shallow, ephemeral kind that today's schools of art seem to be determined to sell, like some sort of  stimulating drug or designer chair --  instead of the disarmingly fresh and exhuberant display of inventiveness that one wishes a biennial would always be.

Ross Bachelder

Berwick, Maine

March 8th, 2012