HH:  No, although the biennial is not and has never been a grab bag, either. The goal is to strike a balance between inclusively representing art made in the United States over the last two years and organizing a large group show with some formal and thematic coherence. So we didn't set out with a theme in mind that we then tried to illustrate, but rather looked at as much work as we could and began to isolate strands of ideas and congruent kinds of work that emerged over the course of our research.

SMM:  I don't think we have an exact count of the artists, but we must have easily done hundreds of studio and gallery visits in the eight months of research time. Also, while we began working exclusively on the biennial in January 2007, it's not as if we began from a blank slate; both of us, as contemporary curators, are constantly looking at shows, visiting artists, and thinking about what we find significant in the contemporary scene. As for where we went, we traveled to many different cities in the States, as well as to other places that were important to the communities of artists we were talking to, including Mexico City, Vancouver, and Berlin. And of course, we did the European rounds last summer, both to see artists, and for the significant international shows, to examine different curatorial approaches against our own.

HH:  The oldest artist is John Baldessari (b. 1931), who has been a tremendously influential artist and teacher in Los Angeles for decades. While his influence isn't necessarily felt in any direct way, Baldessari's brand of witty West Coast conceptualism reverberates through the show, and his new works from Noses & Ears, Etc. and Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), Etc., two series blending photography, painting, and sculpture, are also emblematic of many of the material dialogues in the exhibition.

The youngest artist is Rashawn Griffin (b. 1980), who makes floor works and hanging works or "banners" using different fabrics, such as denim or cotton prints, as well as collages and drawings. Playing off the architecture of the exhibition space, his works combine the handmade, crafty vernacular of his materials with modular, geometric forms while invoking personal, social, or cultural narratives. The combination of formal interest and social content, often articulated through particular material choices, is also at the center of many of the works in this year's biennial.

SMM:  The fact that new work comprises a very high percentage of the show doesn't demonstrate a desire for newness in and of itself, but rather reflects the way that these artists are working today. That is to say, for the most part, they exhibit a more project-based practice — one that works in specific response to the space, beginning with a set of ideas and realized in the exhibition instead of selecting isolated works from disparate studios. We felt it critical to represent that type of practice, though, of course, it does make the installation planning that much more challenging; as each project and individual conversation with an artist would develop and change, it would thus impact every other, at least with respect to how the show was put together spatially and conceptually.

HH:  This year's biennial is one exhibition in two places. At the Armory, we are capturing a range of works and activities that are more ephemeral and live in the moment, or that have central elements of social interaction. However, the vast majority of artists represented at the Armory are also realizing a project or performance in the museum. Numerous works presented in one location are conjunct with works in the other. For example, Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler are recording the audio of a screening and live musical performance at the Armory, which then becomes the soundtrack to T.S.O.Y.W. , their double-screen installation in the museum galleries. We offered every artist participating in the biennial the opportunity to propose a project for the Armory without any predetermined framework or scale, but we were also faced with certain logistical and budgetary limitations, particularly in the nontraditional exhibition space of the Armory.

SMM:  Both of those large-scale projects create fantastical, absurdist systems that summon up critical ideas of the productive and industrial systems at large in the world. Rottenberg's ongoing investigations of labor, gender, and the various tropes and complexities therein again take center stage in her Cheese installation, in which she creates an experience loosely based on a real family, the Sutherland Sisters, who were said to have "milked" their extremely long hair to produce a very popular turn-of-the-century hair tonic. Washburn's flower-growing ecosystem is formally engaging, as well as what the artist calls "anti-industrious" and "inefficient," similarly intending to draw the viewer's attention to the system of production itself and not merely the resultant object.

HH:  There are many exhibited artists whose work is painterly or engages with painting, particularly the relationship between painting and sculpture. Rita Ackermann comes from painting and drawing, but displays a group of collaged, drawn, and painted wall works that function as reversible structures in the gallery. Stephen Prina conceives his room installation The Second Sentence of Everything I Read Is You: The Queen Mary as a painting, as well, and Ellen Harvey, who presents her Museum of Failure , is a painter who treads the line between painting with gleeful pleasure, reflecting on the medium's often-pronounced death, and defending it with what seems like a near-comic redundancy, reflecting on the medium's often-pronounced death and the near-comic redundancy of its defense. The point is that artists are constantly traversing the boundaries of media and can't necessarily or easily be categorized as just one or the other.

SMM:  Many of the artists in the exhibition are indeed looking to familiar, everyday materials as a source for the largely sculptural or architectural installations they create. This may variously represent an interest in local referents, where these materials may reflect an examination of the postindustrial urban landscape, or a layered exploration of materiality as a vehicle for social content. With others, the humbleness of the origin material or substance takes on a type of transformative sublime, as subtle interventions, careful accumulation, or deliberate deconstruction of those materials achieves a poetic beauty.