Exhibit A-list

Plus:

• By the numbers
• Blurred identities: This Biennial will feature an unusually high number of collaborations and pseudonym

The Whitney Biennial has a tendency to turn the most seasoned art lover into Goldilocks. The identity politics of 1993 were too hot to handle; the too-many-cooks mélange of 2000, with its unprecedented six curators, left viewers cold. But judging by the advance buzz, this year’s show—which runs March 2–May 28—may be just right. Organized by the Whitney’s Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne of Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, this Biennial is the first with a title: “Day for Night,” lifted from the François Truffaut film whose name refers to a cinematic technique that allows sunlit scenes to masquerade as taking place after dark. The phrase’s shadowy associations are suited to our twilight-zone times, when reality is fodder for prime-time entertainment and wars are waged over rumors. But while some works will tackle politically charged subjects, others will remain enticingly oblique. Just as there is no single thematic approach, no one medium will command center stage. Expect paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, videos—even a rock opera. If it sounds like a lot to tackle, start with the seven standout local artists profiled on the following pages.

Marilyn Minter
“My work is all about glamour,” Minter says. Fitting, since she’s the Biennial’s cover girl—a reproduction of one of her large-scale photo-realist paintings (based on her own photos) graces the front of the exhibition catalog. In Minter’s hands, beauty takes on a sinister edge, viewed cropped and close-up. Beads of sweat collect above a collagen-plumped mouth stuffed with pearls. A grimy heel is visible through the silver strap of a rhinestone-studded stiletto. The cross-pollination of the fashion and art worlds, and a revitalized interest in figurative painting, has sparked new interest in the Soho-based Minter, 57, who’s been showing steadily for several decades but didn’t have her first solo museum exhibit until last year, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Though Minter may go for glamour, she was happy to be out of the spotlight until the recent surge of attention. “I like being slightly marginalized,” she says. “I don’t know how anyone grows in the white heat.”

Gedi Sibony
Scrappy and almost inadvertently beautiful, Sibony’s sculptures are improvised out of things that might have been salvaged from a construction site: packing tape, rug remnants, shards of fiberboard, wooden doors. But the humble appearance of his pieces—like a cylinder of crumpled gray carpet, at once slapstick and forlorn—is deceptive. As the 1960s sculptor Robert Morris wrote, “Simplicity of shape does not necessarily equate with simplicity of experience.” Indeed, Sibony, 32, whose studio is in Dumbo, creates unexpected emotional resonance with unassuming materials. “I tend to be moved by things that display the same qualities as human beings—aggression, tenderness, melancholy,” he says. At press time, Sibony was still deciding what to install at the Biennial, where he will have a room of his own. But one thing is certain: As with people, the relationships among the individual objects will be as important as the objects themselves.

Paul Chan
The artist is a political activist with an arrest record (which may explain his reluctance to reveal his identity in photos). But don’t expect agitprop: On a visit to Chan’s Chelsea studio, he discusses art’s capacity to effect change without being didactic. Chan, 32, is best known for colorful digital animations that combine unlikely references—Samuel Beckett, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Biggie Smalls, for instance. But 1st Light, his contribution to the Biennial, is a departure. It’s in black and white, and there’s no screen; the work is projected as a rectangle on the floor, like a shaft of light shining through a window. Chan’s departure point was the Christian concept of the rapture, but the blurred silhouettes of objects rising and bodies falling are bound to read as a meditation on September 11. Chan declines to comment directly on the relationship between 1st Light, and events at the site of the future Freedom Tower, saying simply, “Art is how we understand what freedom means.”

Josephine Meckseper
In lieu of an interview, Meckseper e-mails us a dreamlike paragraph she wrote while preparing two wall-mounted “window displays” for the Biennial.“This is your receipt,” it concludes, a line reflecting the artist’s fascination with transactions. Meckseper, 41, creates installations in which the “merchandise” interweaves references to politics, commerce, fashion and art, provocatively equating political attitudes with advertising tag lines. For a recent show in Chelsea, she transformed the street-level windows of Elizabeth Dee Gallery into a display for an imaginary conglomerate, dr/gagosian/ubs. Some visitors thought the gallery was closed; had they ventured inside, they would have found fishnet stockings and photos of antiwar protestors occupying mirrored shelves next to cheap rhinestone necklaces and checkered Palestinian scarves—along with placards reading end democracy that festival of mediocrity vote communist 2008.

Kelley Walker
Don’t think of Walker’s bright-red canvases—featuring enlarged newspaper photos embellished with chocolate—as paintings. Think of them as Rauschenbergian “combines” for the digital age: Pop meets Photoshop. Walker’s choice of subject matter—images depicting 1960s civil-rights protestors—recalls similar scenes used by Pop Art bigwig Andy Warhol in his famous “Race Riots” series. In the Biennial, Walker, 36, whose studio is in midtown Manhattan, will present the pictures sideways, rotating them to signify how images circulate—endlessly recycled in reproductions in books, magazines and on the Internet. While the chocolate he swirls on top of his digitally printed canvases pays homage to contemporary art history (the foodstuff also appears in works by Janine Antoni, Claes Oldenburg and Dieter Roth), more significantly, it symbolizes the insatiable appetite of media culture. “I use chocolate,” Walker explains, “because it’s something we literally consume.”

Rirkrit Tiravanija
and Mark di Suvero In 1966, New York sculptor Di Suvero designed Artists’ Tower for Peace, a 65-foot-tall steel structure built in L.A. to protest the Vietnam War. More than 400 artists, including Donald Judd and Mark Rothko, each made a two-foot-square artwork for the project, which stayed up at the corner of La Cienega and Sunset Boulevards for three months. For the Biennial, Rirkrit Tiravanija, a 44-year-old artist whose own socially engaged projects include a self-sufficient community in Thailand (where he’s based part-time, along with New York and Berlin), joined with Di Suvero, 72, to reprise the tower. Di Suvero was ready: “We have a colonialist war going on, built on false pretenses,” he says. The new work, Peace Tower, will be installed in the Whitney’s sculpture court with contributions from 300 invited artists. There are plans to move the project to Paris and eventually, the artists hope, to Washington, D.C. “Our dream,” Di Suvero says, “is to see it installed with artworks by disabled American vets.”