The sprawling Whitney Biennial can be challenging enough for visitors to navigate, even those armed with an exhibition catalog and audio guide. At least one person, however, is doing what he can to help. To help make it more challenging, that is.
Wearing a kimono and an eye patch, and carrying a bullhorn, someone calling himself the Unreliable Tour Guide strolls the galleries, bewildering crowds with his unique commentary. Meet Momus, a performance artist born Nick Currie, whose tour is an official, if unorthodox, part of the biennial. Between his native Scots accent, that bullhorn and remarks that range from playful to political to absurd, many people have difficulty comprehending him, perhaps a fitting problem given his mission of misinformation.
More clear is his intent to challenge art-world pieties and unsettle museumgoer expectations. At one stop on his tour, he tries to pass off a famous image from Abu Ghraib as a Dior Homme fashion statement. The comment leaves a tense silence in his wake. “I think the script will change week by week,” said Momus, explaining that his character is acting out a naïve optimism in the face of the show’s dark theme of troubled times. “The museum’s physical location is starting to influence me, too,” he said. “I notice I’ve started telling Woody Allen jokes.”
The following is an effort to decipher where the Whitney catalog description ends and Momus’s fiction begins.
LUCAS DEGIULIO
What the Whitney said: “Lucas DeGiulio creates small, delicate sculptures out of an assortment of found objects.” He is interested in “transforming familiar items into something fugitive and mysterious.”
What Momus said: “Under no circumstances are the artworks in this room preliminary sketches by Saul Steinberg for a new design, commissioned by the Vatican, for the Christian cross.”
DANIEL JOHNSTON
What the Whitney said: “The world depicted in Johnston’s drawings serves as a personal map of American culture, in which the iconographies of religion and popular culture are meshed.”
What Momus said: “Daniel Johnston is not an outsider artist. Daniel Johnston is working on Madison Avenue. All of Daniel Johnston’s drawings are in fact produced by a Hong Kong teenager who’s paid just $5 for each sheet.”
HANNAH GREELY
What the Whitney said: Her “Silencer” shows a toddler, made from cast urethane rubber, with its head under the hood of a jacket. “Greely’s distinctive slant on the exploration of objecthood comes through in her sculptures’ narratives.”
What Momus said: “Please ensure that your hairstyle does not infringe copyright, or represent anyone’s prophet.”
ROBERT A. PRUITT
What the Whitney said: “Throw Back” is a Ku Klux Klan robe “decorated with dark, hip-hop-inspired puns that deflate the object’s historicized status as an icon of terror.” He “incorporates America’s often-unsettled race relations into the aesthetics of desire.”
What Momus said: “Without reductive stereotypes of racial essentialism there can be no reductive politics of racial liberation. Therefore viva reductive stereotypes of racial essentialism.”
LIZ LARNER
What the Whitney said: Her “RWBs” is “a red, white and blue thicket of aluminum siding, wire rope, batting, fabric and ribbons.”
What Momus said: “In Lagos, Nigeria, if you car breaks down on the freeway it’s stripped within minutes of all useful components. Here you see what happened when 400 bicycles broke down on a Lagos freeway.”
April 2, 2006; Directions
