The Western Biennale is an attempt to bring together artists from California, now increasingly recognized as a center for experiment in American art, with artists from other regions of the United States and other regions of the world. The Californian artists have been proposed by the John Natsoulas Gallery, where the exhibition is taking place. The non-Californians have been suggested by myself – a choice based upon, but not confined to, the artists featured in my recent book Art Tomorrow, which is an attempt to sketch possible futures for a 21st century avant-garde. In these choices, both those that are mine and those that are not mine, certain themes recur. At a time when the international prestige of American art is probably at a lower ebb than at any time since the end of World War II, there is an attempt to portray certain American strengths. We have been fortunate in getting the co-operation of three very celebrated American artists, each of whom represents something different in the complex story of American art. The oldest is Philip Pearlstein, the President of the American Academy of Arts, and a survivor from the heroic days of American mid-20th century Modernism. Pearlstein is a great recalcitrant – an artist who opted for realistic depiction, at a time when the whole tide of taste seemed to be running the other way. He once said that it was his ambition to “make photography obsolete”, by demonstrating how much better a non-photo based kind of painting could do the same job. He has also described his approach to the visible world as a non-narrative one, devoted to a kind of rapture of seeing – the pure pleasure of the eye. It is interesting to compare his work with the equally closely observed, equally unsparing figure studies made by Annie Murphy-Robinson – a young Californian of the opposite gender. Another comparison can be made with the work of Steve Hawley, also concerned with the nude figure, but fascinated by the way in which human flesh reacts to a flood of daylight, whereas Pearlstein has always preferred to paint by artificial light. The exquisite intimacy of Hawley’s Morning Light, depends not only on the artist’s treatment of light but on the fact that his model is his wife – a fact that provides an unexpected link with the work of Edward Hopper, whose exclusive model was his wife Jo. Sean Scully, Irish by descent, born in London, and now an American citizen, represents a very different American tradition. He is one of the two or three most gifted living representatives of the great tradition of American abstraction founded by a group of New York artists, most of them immigrants, in the mid-1940s. Scully also believes that the act of looking and still more so the act of seeing – truly seeing what is there – is immensely important. In his case, however, what matters to him is his actual engagement with the painted surface. He tries to put the whole of himself, everything he thinks and knows, into the actual marks of the brush and how they relate to one another. Yet he, too, is engaged with the idea of the human body, just as Pearlstein is – the forms on his canvases are related to the idea of human scale. One of the direct ancestors of his work is the celebrated drawing by Leonardo, with the body of a man inscribed in a circle, to demonstrate his theory of the mathematical relationships that could be derived from human proportions. The third major American whose work is to be seen here is Judy Chicago, Chicago has long been famous as the most celebrated artist of the international feminist movement. Her huge installation The Dinner Party is one of the very few absolutely iconic artworks to have been made during the last three decades of the 20th century, illustrated in every textbook on contemporary or near-contemporary art. Its fame persisted even when it was for a long period not on public view. Thanks to its recent acquisition by the Brooklyn Museum it is now once again available to a wide public. The work by Judy Chicago that I have chosen for exhibition comes from Powerplay, which is perhaps the least known of the great series that have occupied Chicago’s career. I requested her huge painting Driving the World to Destruction because, though made in the late 1980s, it seemed to take on a new, sharper and even more tragic significance in the context of recent international events. It also serves, because it is an ambitious large-scale painting, to emphasize aspects of Chicago’s work that have until recently been somewhat neglected by critics. She is not simply or only a feminist artist. She is a characteristically American populist and moralist and she has her place in line of descent from the American painters of this type who flourished in the 1930s – most notably Thomas Hart Benton, despite the fact that Benton was an unrepentant misogynist. Anyone who has seen both Benton’s and Chicago’s drawings will have been startled by the close resemblance between their graphic handwriting, Chicago’s presence here is a reminder of the fact that art can still be a moral force in contemporary society. With Chicago as a key figure in the show, it will not surprise visitors to see that it includes work by other feminist artists. What maybe more of a surprise is where some of them come from. Paola Gandolfi is Italian, her sharp-edged, quasi-Surrealist art offers are commentary on the position of women in Italy. Afshan Ketabchi is Iranian - one of a group of gifted female artists resident in Tehran who have recently been exploring the position of women within Islamic society. In a multiple self-portrait, which makes ironic use of techniques associated with Andy Warhol, she illustrates the different faces she shows, or is forced to show, in different social contexts, within Iran and outside it. Another highly controversial, socially committed American artist is Delmas Howe. Howe has recently been the subject of a searching documentary film, The Truth or Consequences of Delmas Howe. Truth or Consequences is the small New Mexican town where he lives and works – it is 150 miles from Albuquerque and an equal distance from El Paso. The town is inhabited by eccentrics of all kinds, many of them artists, and also by a vocal group of Christian fundamentalists. Howe, who was born and brought up there, finds it an essential context for his art, which is a plea for gay liberation. The Miracle of the Rose, exhibited here, is based on a book by the French homosexual author Jean Genet. It also alludes to Hispanic folk-paintings of archangels, which are very much a part of traditional New Mexican culture, and, in a more general way, to the great European Baroque masters whom Howe admires, chief among them the almost certainly homosexual Caravaggio, who painted masterpieces of religious art, often filled with the idea of persecution and suffering. The Old Master influence to be found in a number of works in this exhibition will not be a surprise to anyone who has paid sufficiently close attention to very recent developments in art. One of the most fascinating examples here is the sculptural reconstruction of Pontormo’s Christ Carried to the Tomb by the Californian artist George Grant. This Mannerist masterpiece makes a subtly irrational use of pictorial space, and it is interesting to see how Grant has solved the various problems inherent in making the complex composition genuinely three-dimensional. Grant cites both Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman amongst his early influences, and one can deduce that this work, and a series of Old Master-based sculptures related to it, has a strongly Conceptual basis. The same claim can – indeed must – be made for the work of a number of artists here who work in some variant of classical style. One is the Argentinean painter Ricardo Cinalli, though his dramatic tumbling outline nude also offers a reference to the work of Picabia. Another is the Californian David Ligare, who is perhaps the best known of a growing band of West Coast classicists. The bond between classical and Conceptual work is summarized in the work of the leading Italian painter Carlo-Maria Mariani. Possessed of dazzling technical skills and a very Italian elegance of touch, Mariani has always been insistent that his work is neither ‘classical’ nor ‘representational’ in any usually accepted sense but is primarily an embodiment of Conceptual ideas. He sees himself as a direct successor of the original Neo-classicists of the mid 18th century, whose work was always idea-driven. The idea came first; the representation was shaped to fit. It is interesting to find this influence also surfacing in post-Soviet Russia. Genia Chef, who now lives and works in Berlin, is a member of the St Petersburg group the Novia Akademia [New Academy], founded by the late Timur Novikov. It was Novikov’s idea that modern commercial art had stolen the idea of beauty from the avant-garde. He was thinking of things such as advertisements for the fashion house of Versace, a brand very popular with the new Russian plutocracy. Novikov said it was the duty of the really advanced and experimental artist to steal it back again. Chef often makes use of advanced digital techniques, as he does in the fascinating double-sided digital print shown here. This was originally created for an exhibition curated by myself, which was shown in Athens at the time of the Olympics. It is thanks to Genia Chef that we are able to show work by two major post-Soviet Russian artists, Oleg Kulik and Boris Mikhailov. Kulik is sometimes characterized as the bad boy of contemporary Russian art, celebrated for performance work in which he impersonated a savage dog. In fact he has a strong sense both of Russian destiny and Russian nature. Also, as the video shown here demonstrates, a feeling for the beauty of the human body. Mikhailov is Russia’s premier documentary photographer, who pushes the documentary impulse past its limits, until it becomes something else – a Goya-esque vision of what contemporary Russia and the contemporary Ukraine have become. The images shown here are linked to his famous series Case History, which is about a community of down-and-outs in his native city Kharkov. As the titles hint – both are called Pieta – the plight of the disenfranchised in Eastern Europe carries a strong religious echo for Mikhailov. Here once again, and very unexpectedly, we find a clear reference to the pre-Modern Old Masters. Another artist from Eastern Europe comes from an even more complex social and cultural situation than the Russian and Iranian contributors to the show. Mersad Berber is contemporary Bosnia’s leading artist, and he is, as his name suggests, of Muslim origin. Driven out of Sarajevo by the civil war, he re-established himself in Croatia, with studios in Zagreb and Dubrovnik. He has now been able to return part time to Sarajevo. The large drawing shown in this exhibition belongs to a series made when civil war was in the air, but had not as yet broken out. The series features both Muslim and Christian imagery, often combined. The protagonist of the series – a persecuted Christ-figure – was modeled by a gypsy called Berisha. Gypsies are still a despised and persecuted race in much of Eastern Europe. The digital techniques employed by Genia Chef are becoming increasingly prominent in contemporary avant-garde work. Other examples here are the images shown by the young British artist Marc Wayland, a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, by Viktor Koen, who is Greek, by Anthony Goicolea, who is of Cuban descent, and by Gerald Heffernon. The transformative powers of the computer are clearly going to have a major impact on the development of 21st century art, and they are now available worldwide. Equally universal is a renewal of the fascination with science that inspired so much of the experimental art of the early years of the 20th century. Tim Maslen and Jennifer Mehra are two young Australian artists who concern themselves with ecology; the equally young Jamaican Jiivanii Redmarks experiments boldly with photographic materials; in his Battery and Angels series Chris Daubert ingeniously puts simple electrical forces to political use. He is not the only artist here who makes use of unorthodox materials and unorthodox ways of making art. Perhaps the most extreme representative of this strand in contemporary art to be included in the show is Ken Little, who combines meticulous craftsmanship with unexpected materials. Little’s signature works, made of dollar bills pieced together over a metal armature, have been described as “the dream projections of dreamers who dream of dollar bills, of capital in flight. They are the dreams of mindless, brute power, the consequence of corporate and governmental conformity.” In this sense, they are just as much about contemporary politics and contemporary society as Judy Chicago’s Driving the World to Destruction. Nevertheless, those who are interested in the science of archaeology will note the resemblance between these pieces and the jade suits in which some prehistoric Chinese rulers were buried, or to Aztec skulls covered in turquoise mosaic. Once again, as in a number of other works in the exhibition, what is truly contemporary is strengthened and given resonance by an historic echo. In all this, however, there still remains a place for relatively traditional ways of making art. Jerald Silva claims that his watercolor paintings are both “intimate” and “incorrect”. This may indeed be the case, but they are also works that make dazzlingly skilful use of a long-established medium. The conclusion really is that there are now no boundaries to contemporary art. Art has become whatever artists from many cultures choose to make it. Edward Lucie-Smith, 2005