Wisconsin Triennial Tries for a Broad Survey of Badger State Art

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Tom Berenz, Drowning in a Bathtub, 2018. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 72 x 94 inches. Courtesy the Artist.

True story: I was in the middle of a conversation with the artist Jon Horvath at the opening reception at the Wisconsin Triennial in Madison, letting him know how much I enjoyed his series of photographs on display, when a boisterous voice interjected, “Yes, I totally agree, they are incredible, aren’t they?” I confirmed politely and enthusiastically, trying to match her energy, when she squared me up and asked me what I thought about the rest of the exhibition.

I said, “It’s great to experience a rich variety of local work, but it’s also a tall order to curate such a broad survey with any semblance of thematic coherence.” The woman responded promptly, “Well I think it’s all wonderful, but of course I do, because I curated the show!” She then introduced herself as Leah Kolb, to my slight chagrin, the head curator at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (where the Triennial is running through Feb. 16, 2020).

Kolb relieved me by concurring: “Yeah, it is impossible to curate a survey of this sort to everyone’s satisfaction, but we think it’s a great exhibition given the objectives at hand.”

Imagine selecting 34 visual artists from hundreds of hopefuls of different backgrounds, using different media, pursuing divergent concepts and shoehorning them into a single show. If Kolb and her team had arrived at something like focus or consistency, one might rightly accuse her of not reflecting the diversity characteristic of the state and its art makers. On top of this, many at the reception seemed as focused on who was not included as they were with the work up on the walls. So yes, putting together a show like the Wisconsin Triennial can be a thankless task, indeed. 

Don’t just take it from me, here’s Claire Bishop’s merciless takedown of the world’s largest and proudest survey, the Venice Biennale, in this month’s Artforum: She writes that the most positive way to describe the Biennale is that the art on display is “good enough to survive a lousy curatorial premise. But just for fun, let’s start at rock bottom: that much-discussed title, ‘May You Live in Interesting Times.’ I can understand the Biennale’s artistic director—this round, Ralph Rugoff—wanting to puncture the ludicrously inflated rhetoric of previous editions’ titles, but his use of this fake Chinese curse oozes such privileged detachment that you wish the entire exhibition had simply been left untitled. It would also have been a more accurate descriptor of the show.”

Ouch! If the title “May You Live in Interesting Times” alone inspires such bile, it seems the curator had no chance from the outset. Embrace the usually beloved values of open-endedness, inclusivity and diversity, it seems, and you’re only creating additional opportunities for failure; focus up, and you’re betraying the show’s very raison d’être.

This natural conundrum also makes the Wisconsin Triennial difficult to write about it. The yawning diversity is the point; it’s supposed to be a reflection of the collective visual outlook of the state. To cherry-pick individual works creates a Heisenbergian kind of problem: pulling out particulars is to disturb the integrity of the whole. So, what I will say is that seeing this show made me proud to live in the state of Wisconsin and to contribute to its prosperity in the small ways I can. Sure, it looks a little like a yard sale, all surveys do, but oh what a yard and oh what an estate it represents. Leah Kolb selected 34 artists who together reflect Wisconsin’s eclecticism, vitality, diversity, weirdness, outsiderness, disobedience, skill, style, wisdom and class. And those things together will always look slightly incongruent and a little unorthodox; fine and fitting metaphors for our funny little state.