WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2010
Josh Brand gives an artist’s perspective on exhibiting in the upcoming Whitney Biennial “I’ve been living in New York for about seven years, so I like to see this show as connected to the whole experience of being here – you’re always walking through the history of art and music and writing and everything that people have created here.
So much of the most intense American art of the last 100 years has happened here. I guess the Biennial is supposed to be a summary or marker of a discrete moment in American art, but I think about it more in terms of how it relates to this continuum. The idea of ‘now’ is not something you can separate from the influence of the past. Time is always mixed up and our sense of the present is coloured by parts of the past we use as a preface or context for a narrative about what is happening now.Through the whole of the past century there have been these amazing, overlapping, interlocking histories and trajectories of people making things in New York. Its rich history is really romantic and present all the time. This history of how people live and make stuff here has a subliminal influence on your habits and friendships. Everything you do is somehow a positive creative activity – from having a shitty day job in a photo lab, to listening to music, to hanging out in the park. It’s somehow really natural to feel a sense of participation in this continuity. So I guess being in the Biennial is a more formal and dramatic way of acknowledging that I am passing through this history – a kind of romantic marker of time and geography.
I would probably feel differently about the whole thing if it weren’t for the fact that I have a close friend in the show. I’ve known Richard Aldrich since before I moved here – we have been in a band together for a long time. Both of us being in the show makes it easier to think that it has some natural connection to my everyday life. The pictures I’m showing are a little more autobiographical than things I’ve shown in the past – there are always objects from my domestic life that show up obliquely, or are translated in some way into the pictures, but here they are maybe more clearly present.”
Whitney Biennial, New York, 25 February-30 May