ART REVIEW : Four Floors of Evolution : The ’91 Whitney Biennial divvies up painters, sculptors and photographers from the ‘50s to the ‘90s floor by floor--and the curators’ conceit works

This year, the conceit is “artistic generations.”

The 1991 installment of the Biennial Exhibition lately opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art surveys the aesthetic landscape of the last two years in the work of 70 painters, sculptors, photographers and installation artists. For the first time in a decade, the entire building has been turned over to the show (which continues through June 16), but the installation has not been guided by essential affinities among individual works of art.

Instead, placement has been determined by the moment the artist first came to prominence: Fifteen who initially gained notice in the 1950s and ‘60s have had their works installed on the second floor; 26 who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s occupy the third floor; and 29 younger artists, most of whom had their debuts in the late ‘80s and haven’t been included in prior Biennials, will be found on the fourth floor.

As conceits go, divvying things up by generation is not a bad one. Overall, the difference in tone between the “grandparents” on the second floor and the rambunctious “kids” on the top floor is dramatic and inescapable--an Old Masterish assuredness vs. an edgy, exploratory chaos. But, more important, a bold line is drawn under the coexistence, at any given time, of diverse and overlapping communities of artists.

This emphasis on generations speaks subtly but firmly to the present moment. Since the last Biennial, the visual arts have been the much-publicized object of scurrilous attack by assorted hooligans claiming to be the guardians of both righteousness and the public weal. Against these pious minions the Whitney’s generational array lines up artists who have persevered from the 1950s to the 1990s--or, shall we say, from the era of Joseph McCarthy to that of Jesse Helms.

Whitney Biennials typically respond to perceived shifts and movements of the art world, as seen from the vantage-point of its capital city. The 1989 installment seemed strangely becalmed, rather like the end-of-the-’80s art world itself, while in 1987 it reflected the high-rolling, high-power gallery scene in New York. Two years before that, it had gone slumming in the then-booming East Village.

This time, the Biennial declares E Pluribus Unum . The show’s organizers--Whitney curators Richard Armstrong, Richard Marshall and Lisa Phillips--have been pointed in certain selections. Artists who are black and Latino--among them Carlos Alfonzo, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Luis Jimenez, Celia Alvarez Munoz, Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems--are included in numbers far greater than at any previous Biennial.

Feminism and the politics of the human body--especially gay sexuality--are also prominent, despite (and perhaps because of) recent political efforts to obstruct artistic engagement with them. The two most obvious inclusions: collaged paintings and photographs by David Wojnarowicz, who was directly embroiled last year in an outrageous attempt at censorship by the National Endowment for the Arts; and the “AIDS Timeline,” by the artists’ collective Group Material, which pulls no punches in its multimedia indictment of government-sanctioned discrimination and ineptitude during the on-going health crisis.

(Incidentally, the films and videotapes of 30 artists selected by curator John G. Hanhardt were, as ever, impossible to preview. However, a statement by Hanhardt suggests they fit the larger program of the 1991 Biennial: “Many . . . focus on the construction of individual identities and how they are shaped by social and cultural forces and encoded in images.”)

Strength-in-diversity also guided an apparently unprecedented programming twist. Although the Biennial never boasts a strong contingent of artists from beyond New York, the curators this year have attempted to bolster the pretense of being a survey of American art by getting input from a formal advisory committee of seven colleagues from all over the map--Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, etc. Each was charged with identifying and arguing on behalf of certain artists from his or her region.

“This new structure,” writes the Whitney’s new director, David Ross, in the introduction to the show’s catalogue, “helped broaden considerably the exhibition’s scope.” Perhaps. For those keeping score, 50 of the Biennial’s 70 artists work in New York. Note well that it also cut in half the representation of artists who work in Los Angeles (only four of the 70, versus five of 42 in the ’89 Biennial). Maybe that’s because, curiously, none of the seven advisers is from L.A.

Despite the unfortunate statistical dip, I’ve decided the absence of an L.A. adviser is in fact a good thing. Provincial outposts have no trouble keeping up with art produced in major cultural centers, but the reverse is never true. Plainly, the curators felt no need for localized advice to keep them abreast of significant developments in art produced in Southern California. Because L.A.’s art scene is no longer obscure, a wilderness scout wasn’t needed to bring back word of the exotic natives to the province of Manhattan.

This signal of cosmopolitan prominence is clearly indirect--but then, compliments are always more believable when heard second-hand. Aside from the simple inclusion of photographs, sculptures and paintings by Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, Ed Moses and Jim Shaw--all of whom work in Los Angeles--the depth and resonance of the city’s cultural life is also implied by two other features of the Whitney’s show.

One is that the work of these four artists is dispersed on all three floors of the museum, a generational spread unmatched by participants from any other region outside New York. The other is that the Biennial was marked, for the first time in my experience, by deja vu : Fully one-third of all the work in the show had been seen in Los Angeles during the past two years. The city’s now a regular in art’s relatively new international circuit, the only such American city besides New York.

The joke around the Biennial this year is that the older generation of artists was given the second floor so they wouldn’t have so many stairs to climb--a nicely snide bit of irreverence in keeping with the traditions of both mocking one’s elders and complaining about every nuance of curatorial organization. As it turns out, the second floor is, if not exactly grim, not very lively, either.

Routine paintings by Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell, Ed Moses, Philip Pearlstein and Pat Steir will be found, causing one to wonder why these particular artists were singled out from among countless possibilities. Others, like Jasper Johns and Alex Katz, have recently been trying to move their work into hitherto uncharted directions--Johns into a simplified exploration indebted to Picasso, Katz into a more painterly abstraction--which is nice; still, it would have been more judicious to wait until they had gotten to within hailing distance of a resolved destination before including them here.

Johns’s schematic painted faces are especially vapid, which, given his stature, makes them doubly painful to see. And speaking of pain, Frank Stella’s huge, free-standing aluminum relief supported on a massive iron easel seems a grotesque parody of his work from the early 80s--work which itself is fading in significance with each passing season. Can Stella really imagine that this designer bombast matters?

The nicest juxtaposition here will be found in the big portraits by Chuck Close, made from cell-like patches of color, and the brutally intimate, black-and-white self-portrait photographs by John Coplans (although I confess I’ve seen many better examples of the latter than the polyptychs chosen for display). Still, no one among the artists is more flat-out on-line than Bruce Nauman, whose video installation of a spinning, desperately disoriented head is the single best work in the Biennial (it was shown at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Santa Monica a few months back). Much that is compelling on the next two floors would have been impossible without the precedent of Nauman’s art, which is itself plainly keeping pace.

The mid-generation artists on the third floor are led by Mike Kelley, with his portraits of deceased rag-dolls, and Cindy Sherman, with her photographic self-portraits as Old Master paintings. Sweetly funny and oddly lascivious, Vito Acconci’s giant, murmuring clam-shell is his strongest sculpture in many years. Ellen Phelan’s spectral landscapes of pale, brushy color are the simplest--and most convincing--of the paintings, among otherwise lackluster efforts by Eric Fischl, David Salle and Philip Taaffe, whose large reputations have gotten ahead of their current work.

Jennifer Bartlett’s large reputation has always been ahead of her work, and the achingly tired symbols of danger and collapse--dominoes, playing cards, skeletons, etc.--scattered through her “Earth, Air, Fire and Water” paintings rise to dizzying heights of pretentiousness. Back on Earth, Mark Tansey’s densely populated pictures have always been over-determined--you half expect the back of the canvas will feature a reading list--but his landscape view into the void of a deep valley, which is being chiseled from massive blocks of printer’s type by busy workers, is endearing. At the center, engineers lounge in a composition wittily recalling Raphael’s “School of Athens.”

Upstairs, on the “new kids” floor, pandemonium reigns. Jessica Stockholder’s big installation is epigrammatic: lots of 2x4s, some beat-up furniture and left-over paint jerry-built into a performance stage, which is resolutely empty. Here, the stage itself is the actor, and if its performance is not as compelling as one might like, it does make room for some others that are. As newcomers, Cady Noland, Kiki Smith and Jim Shaw pretty much walk away with the Biennial.

The adventures of Billy, Shaw’s archetypal suburban misfit from the 1960s, are chronicled in 107 identically sized drawings, paintings and assemblages, which pick through the vulgar detritus of pop culture in search of the spiritual transcendence traditionally ascribed to modernist art. It’s quite a trip--some of it psychedelic.

Nearby, Cady Noland’s installation is a kind of walk-in version of that sensibility, albeit darker, wilder. Hundreds of six-packs of beer are stacked into ruined walls abutting chain-link fence and scaffolding, as if an abandoned city lot. Cut-out photo-enlargements of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot, of Patty Hearst before and after her Symbionese Liberation Army episode, and of yellow-journalism magnate (and Patty ancestor) William Randolph Hearst are scattered about, together with wire bins filled with dime-store trash. Noland has used the sparest of means to create a film noir mise en scene with no narrative, but oozing inexplicably haunting power.

Kiki Smith’s sculptures are tender, if blunt, poems to the fragile mystery of human flesh. A pair of cadaverous, life-size figures, one male and one female, are sculpted from beeswax, painted with the bruised color of puddling blood and hung from stands like dead meat. Gazing down on them from a high shelf, a female bust puts you in mind of a Giacometti, albeit made from delicately crumpled paper rather than unyielding bronze. Despite the brittle aura of death and decay, these exquisitely crafted figures are, amazingly, not at all repulsive. Smith’s is an extraordinary new voice that resonates through the Biennial with the perfect pitch of a tuning fork.

Down in the inhospitable, outdoor sculpture well of the museum, another sound is heard--the crushing roar of Niagara Falls, in a terrific sound installation by Bill Fontana. The relentlessly pounding water actually drowns out the din of Madison Avenue above, save for an occasional police siren or honking horn that seems a far-away echo of a city lost.

If there’s a central problem with this Biennial, it’s the same one that always intrudes: The show is built on strict consensus, with every artist requiring unanimous agreement by all curators for inclusion. Inevitable compromise isn’t so bad for a survey like this, but surely there’s room for fiercely independent commitment--a curatorial curve ball thrown into the bureaucratic game to stir things up in unexpected ways. After all, that’s what you get from Nauman, Noland, Smith, Shaw, Fontana and the other stand-outs in the show. And that’s what you want from a museum, too.