When size really does matter

By TIM WILSON

The world's smallest contemporary art biennale took place earlier this year in a New York apartment from which, if you stood in the right place (just by the kitchen table), you could see the Hudson River. You couldn't see all the works, though. One painting had been dispatched overseas by its painter Pieter Schoolwerth, which left a sole canvas on imposing display in the living room.

The other works, by Swiss video artist Ursula Hodel, had their exhibition hampered by the inability of the curator and apartment dweller, Adrian Dannatt, to operate his video player. "Blast," he muttered to himself as he fiddled with the rebellious technology. Eventually we managed to get the video in Dannatt's bedroom to function. We sat at the base of his bed watching images of Hodel, a long-faced woman well past her prime, masturbating and, in another piece, washing her hands.

Such intimacy is rare in any biennale - at once welcome and awkward, a little like Dannatt himself. During his early adolescence he played William in the British television series Just William, based on the books of Richmal Compton. He became a star and travelled the world before washing up on the shores of Manhattan.

I'm told he once played a witty trick on the British press by assembling a group of models and informing the press that they were artists. The resulting slew of interviews, duly clipped, became his own artwork.

That was frivolous, but Dannatt's biennale, featuring two artists, raises some valid issues about how art is packaged. Not coincidentally, the Whitney's Biennial had just opened on Madison Ave. It was the biggest exhibition of its kind in 20 years, with multiple sites, events and artists, and predictably met universal scorn from the popular press. "Witless Whitney", said the Murdoch-owned Post.

The general feeling was that the works were too representative or unrepresentative, too insincere, and not enough like art - the usual symphonic of critical throat-clearing.

I thought the Whitney's Biennial wasn't so bad - more banal than bad - but the critics, often as if noting a virtue, referred to its size. This is part of a trend that Dannatt has noticed towards blockbuster or large, big-name exhibitions. "You can't get around the Met in under a day," he grumbles. Actually you can, but afterwards you feel like you've been fed through a tube.

Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art is gathering its skirts for a temporary relocation to Queens while it undergoes a huge expansion. One views the growth of the Guggenheim franchise (New York, Las Vegas, Bilbao) with alarm.

A couple of months before visiting Dannatt, I had dragged myself through the Warhol exhibit at the Tate Modern in London. I'll declare a prejudice early: I have a profound indifference to Andy Warhol. He seemed amusing and wicked when I was a youth festering in Wanganui, but his early work (pre-1963) displays moral ambivalence, his later efforts (post-1973), creative exhaustion. He introduced art to the values of graphic design, and if not released then certainly fostered some of the ennui the New York critics now proclaim.

Nevertheless, I visited the Tate because I was a tourist and because, unless I think about it, I have nothing against Warhol. What I do remember of the exhibition is that it covered 21 rooms and took about two hours to get through.

By room 10 I wanted a drink, by room 16 I wanted to kill myself and by 18 I wished that Valerie Solanas, the woman who attacked Warhol in June 1968, had been a better shot.

German author Thomas Mann wrote in The Confessions of Felix Krull, "That is how it is in museums: they offer too much: the quiet contemplation of one or a few objects from their store would certainly be more profitable for the mind and soul; as soon as one steps in front of one, his glance is lured on to another whose attractiveness distracts the attention, and so it goes through a whole series of exhibitions."

Perhaps this preoccupation with size represents a terminal stage in the prosperity America enjoyed in the 90s: large, rich times require large, rich diversions. Yet how curious that at a point when commentators are assuring us of the public's ever-diminishing concentration span, the size of the segments of culture on offer seems to be increasing.

Dannatt insists that the biennale is of civic rather than aesthetic usefulness. "Invite a few hundred young artists," he says, "and the whole contemporary art wagon will roll in behind them, band and all, boosting tourism, hotel spending and your town's global profile."

Consider how many cities have one: Venice, Lyon, Valencia, Istanbul, Yokohama, Sao Paulo, Berlin, and Kwangju in Korea. Dannatt adds, "The latest contenders are Tirana in Albania and Liverpool - surely a perfect pairing."

Other trends may have given rise to the blockbuster exhibition. Celebrities sell magazine covers, artistic celebrities sell thrilling stories. Take Van Gogh (lovelorn, wild), Pollock (drunk and primitive) and Warhol (media-savvy, part of the celebrity crowd) and you have instant public interest.

This is unfortunate, for although art is now sensibly avoiding the hubristic questions such as "Why am I here?", it is being packaged in a way that suggests big answers will be supplied.

During my visit to Dannatt's "195 Hudson St, Apt 2A Biennale" a storm blew in from New Jersey, and we watched from the second floor as people scurried about in the streets below.

Dannatt's daughter screamed with excitement, his son, Louis, was more fearful. We talked and Dannatt looked at me, quite serious for a moment, and said, "The best way to appreciate a piece of art is to live with it for two years."

That's a little out of the range of most of us, but the less-is-more argument for more and less art sticks: less volume, greater concentration.