It seemed like a crime against nature to go from the most beautiful day this year has produced into the high-school-auditorium atmosphere of Kane Hall, even to see Lawrence Rinder, the curator of the 2002 Whitney Biennial. I lingered outside with some friends, and then went in to meet Rinder, casual and TV-star handsome in a black jacket and open-necked olive shirt. On my recent trip to New York, I had heard about Rinder's outfit at the Biennial's opening-night party, something about a misguided uptown/downtown combo of loafers, fuzzy orange vest, and something involving beads; this may or may not be true, but in any case, no such luck in Seattle.
The auditorium was packed; if New York was going to come to Seattle, Seattle was going to show up. There was a lot of leaning over seats and gabbing, a lot of waving across the room and weaving through the rows to greet long lost friends. I made at least four sightings of people carrying Artforum, the one with the four terrible reviews of the Biennial.
Rinder charmingly acknowledged the avalanche of bad press for his show, and then brushed the topic aside and delivered a lively, engaging lecture on how he had gone about curating it. He talked a great deal about how you change your conceptual framework by altering your physical habits, which includes, he said, "looking [for art] in Cleveland instead of in Chelsea." It does seem, when you read the exhibition's catalogue, that most of the artists are from New York (sorry, Larry--Brooklyn doesn't count as another city), but Rinder's selection of slides--as if to prove his point--were of work by artists from Chicago, Alabama, Los Angeles. But where, especially given Rinder's ties to the Northwest (he's been on the UW's public art commission for a number of years) were all the Seattle artists? Hmm?
His selection and his comments amounted to an elegant defense of the Biennial, and made the show seem much more coherent and meaningful than I had found it in person. Truth be told, I had come to the event with a bit of trepidation; it is one thing to write an equivocal review of an exhibition 3,000 miles away, and it is another thing entirely to look the famous and charming curator in the eye. Unfortunately, I had a dinner date, and could not stick around to do so. I shall have to meet Rinder's eye another time.
