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Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night is curated by Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz curator, and Philippe Vergne, the deputy director and chief curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

The exhibition takes its title from the 1973 film by François Truffaut, whose original French name, La Nuit américaine, denotes the cinematic technique of shooting night scenes artificially during the day, using a special filter. This is the first Whitney Biennial to have a title attached to it.

“Through the curatorial lens of the Biennial,” said Iles, "Day for Night explores the artifice of American culture in what could be described as a pre-Enlightenment moment, in which culture is preoccupied with the irrational, the religious, the dark, the erotic and the violent, filtered through a sense of flawed beauty. This reflective, restless mood is not unique to the United States; its presence across both America and Europe suggests a shift in the accepted values that have formed the basis of 20th-century Western culture.”

“This moment of questioning characterizes the broad context for the current moment in contemporary American art,” said Vergne. “The artists in the 2006 Biennial are working in a space between pre- and post-Modernist parameters—somewhere between day and night, between the history of forms and the forms of history. In this twilight zone, many things are called into question or obscured.”

Some of the many intertwining and overlapping strands of the Biennial are discussed below:

Uncertain Identities and Unfixed Images

Sometimes this questioning or obfuscation manifests itself as an uncertain identity—two artists are fictional personae, one artwork is unnamed and almost invisible. In other cases a slippage occurs in definition—paintings can be part of a larger installation environment, as in the work of Jutta Koether; in Bernadette Corporation, a film can also be a performance, or an ongoing street activity; a journey can also be an exhibition, as Robert Gober and Pierre Huyghe seem to suggest.

In other cases, the instability of meaning can occur in the reading of the image itself, as in Troy Brauntuch’s haunting black-and-white canvases, after-images in which delicate specters seem to slip between light and shadow, as though seen through a mist, or in Mark Grotjahn’s white paintings, in which layers of creamy white paint cover an invisible image.

In Rodney Graham’s 35mm film installation Torqued Chandelier Release (2005), a large crystal chandelier spins around in the darkness, its glass ornaments flying, until it eventually comes to rest. Based on Isaac Newton’s experiment with relative motion, in which Newton spun a bucket of water round and round, Graham’s “thought experiment” de-stabilizes our sense of space and time, overlaying scientific reference with a hypnotic beauty.

A sense of existential languor can be felt in two large black and white paintings by Rudolf Stingel, made for the exhibition. Stingel’s pensive self-portraits, depicting the artist in a creative crisis, demonstrate the way in which a classical model of painting is used to address profound doubts about the validity of the notion of historical progress.

Shock and Awe

If Stingel’s dark night of doubt looks inward, a sense of dissatisfaction with the political status quo is articulated more outwardly in Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, a large installation by Dan Graham, Tony Oursler, Rodney Graham, Laurent Berger and the young Williamsburg band Japanther. This spectacular puppet show is presented here for the first time in its installation version, in which the 24-year-old rock singer Neill Sky is elected President of the United States after instigating teenage riots to change the voting age to 14 and putting LSD (ultimately standing for Let’s Stop Destruction) in the water of Congress.