So, the 2012 Whitney Biennial artist list has been released, and there are broad outlines that can be immediately discerned. Here's a snap temperature-reading of the coming exhibition, pulled together by co-curators Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders and opening in March:
1. THIS IS THE FILMMAKER'S BIENNIAL
Looking to see a good movie? Why not go to the to the biennial? The curators have done an impressive bit of star-wrangling this year, getting both Werner Herzog and Frederick Wiseman — two of the greatest documentarian filmmakers alive — to participate, as well as bringing in work by graffiti-artist-turned-actor-turned-director Vincent Gallo. Herzog, of course, is the vatic Teuton best known for art-film spectaculars like "Fitzcarraldo," and well as Hollywood movies with A-list actors like "Rescue Dawn" and "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans" (not your traditional Hollywood flicks, granted). But he's also greatly admired for groundbreaking documentaries like "Grizzly Man" and "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," which plumb near-mystical, deep-running truths in the lives of extraordinary people in extraordinary situations. His work was memorably included in the New Museum's 2008 "After Nature" exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, and at the Whitney his display will focus on the forgotten Dutch artist Hercules Seghers. Wiseman, meanwhile, is the Zen master of documenting how systems of Foucauldian order — from hospitals to "Public Housing" to "Stat Legislature" — actually function (his newest feature, "Crazy Horse," looks at exotic dancers in a strip club). Gallo, of course, is the Kohl-eyed provocateur whose confessional films seem to merge Gus Van Sant with a Herzogian weirdness, and who is best known for "Brown Bunny" (aka "that blowjob movie"). Kelly Reichardt, then, is the director and screenwriter of such critically acclaimed indie films as "Old Joy" and "Meek's Cutoff." Charles Atlas is a filmmaker who has made celebrated documentaries as "The Legend of Leigh Bowery." George Kuchar, who died in September, is the most traditionally-defined "artist" of the group, a crafter of short and often bizarre outsider films (he's famously obsessed with the weather), who was also featured in the last New York Film Festival.
2. POLITICAL ART IS WOMEN'S WORK
Sussman, the curator, is best known for organizing the intensely controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial, which brought often-uncomfortable political discourse — including what was known in the '90s as "identity politics" — into the museum, with visitors memorably being handed a button by Daniel J. Martinez that read "I Can't Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White." An uproar ensued, with the New York Times's then-chief art critic Michael Kimmelman declaring "I hate this show." This time around, the political bent can be discerned from the list, too — and intriguingly, it's mostly from a female perspective. Of the 20 women included in the show, Andrea Fraser stands out as an icon of feminist institutional critique, revered for her canny send-ups of the male-run museum world (a kind of inoculating self-criticism the Whitney loves indulging in, unless the artist's name is Hans Haacke or Christopher D'Arcangelo). K8 Hardy, then, is another feminist artist, whose W.A.G.E. artists's-rights group is an heir to the Art Workers Coalition. Georgia Sagri, an enfant terrible of the performance art circuit, is an engaged participant in refocusing the Occupy movement against entrenched interests in the art world, most notably in the baffling and off-putting Occupy Artist Space, which somehow found the specter of the 1 percent in the one of New York's most artist-supportive nonprofits. (She's best known, however, for her run-in with transgressive masturbating-and-urinating performance artist Ann Liv Young.)
3. THE BOUNDARIES ARE BEING NUDGED
The Whitney Biennial always throws a few curve-balls to keep us on our toes, last time around peppering the show with war reportage both dramatized (Omar Fast) and journalistic (Nina Berman). This year, we've got the Red Krayola. Who, you ask? Founded in 1966 by a bunch of art students at Houston's University of St. Thomas and led by artist Mayo Thompson, the group was a psychedelic noise-rock band that brought avant-garde music to the southern college-campus circuit, playing envelope-pushing shows (lots of static and banging and drones) at the height of the '60s and then persisting as a music-nerd touchstone. John Kelsey, meanwhile, is both a cerebral downtown artist/art critic/catalogue-essay maven and the co-founder of Chinatown's indie Reena Spaulings gallery — which creates a nice symmetry with curator Jay Sanders, who was tapped for the biennial after working as a dealer at Greene Naftali gallery. (Expect cries of Jeffrey Deitch-style commercialism over these picks, and the fact that two Greene Naftali artists were included in this list — Richard Hawkins and John Knight — might come back to haunt Sanders.) Then there's Robert Gober, the eminent surrealist sculptor who will be following up his smashing Whitney show of Charles Burchfield's paintings with another curatorial effort backing another American original, this time the late Texas painter Forrest Bess (1911-1977).
4. THERE ARE OLD GUYS AND TRENDY UPSTARTS TOO
As usual. Say hello again to Mike Kelley, Charles Atlas, Kai Althoff, Lutz Bacher (re-imported into the cannon by her MoMA PS1 show), and Jutta Koether (the closest thing to a Greene Naftali connection, perhaps). Then congratulate Kai Althoff, LaToya Ruby Frazier (of "Younger Than Jesus"), Nicole Eisenman, Nick Mauss, Liz Deschenes, Moyra Davey, Oscar Tuazon (he's big in Europe), and Tom Thayer for continuing their promising runs through the cursus honorum.
5. IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE LIST
Mike Kelley, zany L.A. sculptor, became a Performa hero in 2009, so don't judge books by their covers. Also, the Red Krayola?
Anyway, here's the list:
Kai Althoff
Thom Andersen
Charles Atlas
Lutz Bacher
Forrest Bess (by Robert Gober)
Michael Clark
Dennis Cooper and Gisèle Vienne
Cameron Crawford
Moyra Davey
Liz Deschenes
Nathaniel Dorsky
Nicole Eisenman
Kevin Jerome Everson
Vincent Fecteau
Andrea Fraser
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Vincent Gallo
K8 Hardy
Richard Hawkins
Werner Herzog
Jerome Hiler
Matt Hoyt
Dawn Kasper
Mike Kelley
John Kelsey
Jutta Koether
John Knight
George Kuchar
Laida Lertxundi
Kate Levant
Sam Lewitt
Joanna Malinowska
Andrew Masullo
Nick Mauss
Richard Maxwell
Sarah Michelson
Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran
Laura Poitras
Matt Porterfield
Luther Price
Lucy Raven
The Red Krayola
Kelly Reichardt
Elaine Reichek
Michael Robinson
Georgia Sagri
Michael E. Smith
Tom Thayer
Wu Tsang
Oscar Tuazon
Frederick Wiseman