A favorite tongue-and-cheek moment of this year's Whitney Biennial was had when I wandered up to the fifth floor where there is a retrospective of work from eight decades of Whitney Biennials past (this being the anniversary of the storied art festival). On a facing wall of the entrance to the retrospective where painted quotes from art critics and other raconteurs through the years that have delighted in belittling the biennial as if they were invited guests at Oscar Wilde's dinner party. The tone of all of these can be summed up in Roberta Smith's observation that, "The world would be a duller place without the Whitney Biennial to kick around every two years."

While it is true that every biennial there are things to love and things to hate (and even, or especially, things that we love to hate), the work of 2010 Biennial artist Nina Berman falls into a strange category unto itself. As you pore through reviews of her work you'll notice a confluence of striking synonyms, "Unflinching," "terrifying poetry" and "heartbreaking beyond description." These were three succinct summations that accurately reinforced other reviews that have been published about Berman's body of work, Marine Wedding, which follows ex-Marine sergeant Ty Ziegal, returning home disfigured and disabled from the war to marry his high school fianceé.

Ty and Renee, 2006 by Nina Berman

Ty gets dressed for his wedding, 2006 by Nina Berman

The thing about biennials at the Whitney (and most biennials in general), is that it is easy and expected to stroll through huge exhibition halls and rooms, blithely taking in what's on display, and offering up diminishing commentary along the way. Irony and disappointment are often as much as on view at these affairs as any art hanging from the walls, and yet when you come to the room holding Nina Berman's photo essay on Ziegal, all of that is silenced. I'm certain that Berman has her own agenda with these images, but whatever that agenda is, it is humbled and present in front of her subjects, who she reveals to us with utter respect and openness to both their experience and our experiencing of them. I've heard some wonder aloud what place documentary or reportage photography has in a contemporary art venue like the Whitney Biennial, but to that I'll defer to the wisdom proferred by DLK Collection, that wrote of her work:

In terms of sheer "memorableness", I found the work of Sinclair, Berman, Casebere, and Mann to be the most compelling and likely to lead somewhere exciting or new. Many of the others seem to be working in styles that we have seen before (in the inbred world of photography), but have yet to coalesce into wholly original lines of thinking. Taking a straight photograph, documenting a performance, appropriating an image, or mastering a process are not enough to make it in the 21st century art world; there are some forgettable photographs here I'm afraid. The photographic works I found most thought-provoking in this show were those that are built on layers of outward looking ideas and realities, that took on the larger forces in our society at this particular moment in time, rather than those that were overly self-conscious or inwardly reflective. The disruptions I saw were based in the context of the times, rather than the fabric of ourselves.

This last week of May is also the last chance you'll have to see Berman's work at this installment of the Whitney Biennial. If you've been putting off going, you'll have ample time to do so before it closes, as the Whitney will have special hours (as part of another participating artist's entry): From Wednesday, May 26th at 12:00 AM through Friday, May 29th 11:59 PM the Whitney Museum of American Art will be open TWENTY FOUR HOURS. And if you are interested and moved by Nina Berman's work, she is having a special event this Friday night at the Whitney, starting at 7:30 p.m. She will be giving a slideshow and audio presentation from three bodies of work pertaining to the war and the military industrial complex since September 11, 2001, and her intent for the evening is, "to bring the war home," presumably with no subterfuge or irony, but with loads of intelligence and heart in its stead.

My Turn: Nina Berman
Friday, May 28th at 7:30 p.m.
The Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021

Nina adds this bit of info on her site:

"The event is free with admission which is Pay What You Wish on Friday nights. No special tickets or reservations are required."

Come and be moved.