Survey Says: Six Is the Magic Number

Carnegie and Its Ilk Suggest Less Might Be More

PITTSBURGH -- The Carnegie International, a survey of the world's contemporary art that the Carnegie Museum has been hosting since 1896, is supposed to be a place to feel the pulse of the art world.

But what if the pulse that's being taken is the exhibition's own, and what if, after all these years, it has almost stopped? And what if that's true not just of this show, but of the crowd of other surveys like it?

Out of almost 200 artworks in the International, only six or so stood out -- from a field that wasn't so much obviously bad as perfectly fine, which is almost worse. And that's the same ratio of good work to the just okay that has been in force for a decade or more at most of the world's giant art anthologies, from the venerable Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, to New York's Whitney Biennial. So maybe that unchanging ratio tells us more about the health of these shows than it tells us about the health of art making itself -- which, given the real standouts that you do find in each survey, seems to be trudging along fine.

It looks like the large-scale art survey may at last have reached the end of whatever useful life it had. (In acknowledgment of that, perhaps, the Corcoran has put its own, 101-year-old biennial of American art on hold.) After all, most art lovers are now faced with plenty of other, better opportunities for seeing the best work of our day. There are thematic group exhibitions, such as the Hirshhorn's ongoing "Cinema Effect" project, with its close-up on art video and film. Or one-person shows of established figures (such as the William Wegman show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2006) or emerging ones (the first overview of the curious mechanized work of Los Angeles sculptor Glenn Kaino, now at Pittsburgh's Warhol Museum). Almost any of these shows, with their tight focuses and considered curatorial premises, delivers more substantial rewards than your average 50-artist survey does.

That may be why, on a visit only four days after its opening, the International's galleries were almost empty.

Douglas Fogle, the curator of the International's latest edition, may sense there's a problem. For the first time, the show has been given a title ("Life on Mars") that goes with some kind of a theme ("the nature of humanness in this radically unmoored world"). But that theme is so vague as to include almost any artwork you could think of. When have humans not felt adrift in the universe, and made art about it? The show's premise feels like it was stuck on after the fact, rather than like an urgent issue that demanded exploration from the start.

The International still functions like your standard survey, based on a something-for-everyone, department-store model. But this is an age where what we need most from curators is a ferocious selectivity that pushes back against such consumerist ideals.

Here, for my money, is a fine six-artist exhibition that's hidden within this 55th Carnegie International. And maybe, with all the other options out there, six are all we need.

The Artists

Ryan Gander , an artist from London, contributes a high-definition video projection called "Man on a bridge -- (A Study of David Lange)," which may be the most compelling artwork at the International. At first, it feels like a moving-picture version of the static images of classic painting and photography. Gander gives us a 10-second clip of an ordinary man walking on the sidewalk of an urban bridge, then stopping halfway to peer over the edge. The piece could almost be one of the impressionists' "paintings of modern life," or a bit of social realism from the Ashcan School, updated with motion and sound. It seems to be about crossbreeding the momentary vision provided in traditional art with the narratives we get in contemporary media.

But in fact the piece is even more canny and complex than that. Gander's 10-second clip is looped ad infinitum, with 10 seconds of black screen between each iteration, as though to clear the mind and give us a fresh start each time we watch its scene. Maybe that's why it takes three or four scans of Gander's bridge walker before it suddenly hits you: This isn't the same clip you saw before. It's a separate cinematic take describing the same action. Sometimes the man (well-known British actor David Lange, as per the title) has his hood up, sometimes down. Sometimes he sidles up to the bridge's parapet, as though struck by something he's just glimpsed. In other takes, he turns toward the edge as though that had been his plan from the start.

One of the points of modern realism was always to register the world's contingency: To snatch single, haphazard moments of reality out of a constant flux. The 50 takes in Gander's piece follow in that tradition, except adding the idea that even the most staged, controlled production is likely to be full of accidents, and therefore unrepeatable.

Noguchi Rika, born in Japan but based in Berlin, provides a suite of 18 color photographs titled "The Sun." That's truth in advertising: Each pinhole-camera image catches a glimpse of the sun as it intrudes on an otherwise unremarkable scene. There's the sun appearing behind a young woman as she poses outside for her portrait. There's the sun high in the sky behind a building. There's the sun streaming into some grand church or public building -- with the brightness of its light making it impossible to tell which kind of structure we're looking at. In almost every one of Noguchi's photos, the light source that first made vision (and photography) possible also defeats our ability to see. In these images, the information-bleaching flare that's the trademark of a failed snapshot becomes the central subject of photography.

Susan Philipsz, Glasgow-born and now living in Berlin, makes work that is as light on the ground as any art could be. An outdoor piece of hers called "Sunset Song" is nothing more than speakers broadcasting some sweet and mild-mannered singing. The voice belongs to the artist herself, as she takes both the male and female roles in "The Banks of the Ohio," a classic American folksong. It's about a spurned lover who drowns his girl in that great river, which begins at Pittsburgh. Or at least that's what we're told. Those lyrics aren't at all easy to make out above the noise of the surrounding city. Rather than the specifics of the song, it's the fact of the singing that leaves the strongest impression: a bit of nostalgia, floating through the raucousness of modern times.

Philipsz's equipment is powered by the sun, so the music trails off as the light fades away. The special charm of this art is that at first it's barely even there, and then it's gone.

Sharon Lockhart, an American who works in Los Angeles, has made a two-hour film called "Pine Flat," shown once a day in the Carnegie's theater. It's about pure observational intensity. During a four-year stay in Pine Flat, Calif., Lockhart got to know both the kids in that rural town and the lovely landscape around it. For her languorous movie, she simply set those children down in that countryside and filmed them as they did almost nothing. A boy plays a harmonica on a rock by a stream. A girl in the grass reads a book. Lockhart suggests we can connect with such people and places just by observing them closely.

Phil Collins, based in Glasgow but born in England, provides the most powerfully emotional experience in the International. A newly commissioned piece titled "zasto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom)" -- which apparently translates as "Why I Don't Speak Serbian (in Serbian)" -- presents 35 minutes of footage of both Albanian and Serbian residents of Kosovo. They talk -- always in Serbian, with English subtitles -- about the conflicts there and especially about the role language played in them. The struggles some of the speakers have communicating in a not-quite-foreign language become a metaphor for everything that's gone wrong in that place and for the obstacles to setting things right.

When an Albanian gets his Serbian grammar wrong, the subtitles go equally astray, letting us in on the problem.

Wilhelm Sasnal, from Poland, presents a series of black-and-white paintings of subjects ranging from a grimacing monkey to a man at a piano. The problem with most painting is that it works too hard to be good: Its struggle for a signature style gets in the way of its content. Sasnal uses such a bare-bones, conventional technique that you can look right past his style, such as it is, to the things it represents. That lets his paintings function less like precious works of Old Master craft than like snapshots ripped from the everyday, with all the resonance such cryptic imagery comes packed with. In fact, Sasnal's paintings seem so straightforward in their approach that they end up feeling less contrived and coy than some of the installations and videos and fancy sculptures near them at the Carnegie. Sasnal's style is like an anchorman's English: It manages to convey a sense of pure communication, without any accent to get in the way. At this late point in painting's game, some works may be so exquisitely old hat that all we notice is their meaning.

Just by exploring that possibility, Sasnal has scored some points. And that's before we've even considered what to do with his monkey and musician.