COMMENTARY : Multiculturalism in Art....

Pepoon Osorio’s large installation in the 1993 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art is a raucous, exuberant, over-the-top extravaganza, in which the dining and living rooms of a Puerto Rican household are stuffed to the point of bursting with furniture, knickknacks, religious paraphernalia, TV sets and decorative gewgaws of every conceivable style, shape and color. The visual wildness of the installation has enormous appeal.

Almost unnoticed amid the energetic glut is the figure of a murdered corpse--a mannequin sprawled at the back. No villain is seen. Who committed this heinous crime?

Bracketing the cacophonous display, rather like quotation marks, are two corridors lined with shelves. Hundreds of boxed cassettes are displayed in rows, as if for rent in a neighborhood video store. The movies range from Latin melodramas and action pictures to Hollywood epics with Rita Moreno and Ricardo Montalban.

A wall text explains that the mass media are a fervid hothouse of Latino stereotypes. Osorio’s “The Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?)” is thus the site of a double murder. In framing the scene with the movies’ distorted imagery, it shows the brutal killing of an authentic culture. In critically condemning the practice, it also says, “Enough!” The death of Latino stereotypes is asserted.

And that’s where Osorio’s installation loses me. The anger underlying this vigorous display is easy to empathize with, because everyone knows that stereotypes are debilitating and cruel. But stereotypes, whether positive or negative, are the name of the game with mass media. They’re the intrinsic language with which movies, television and advertising speak. Identifying their perniciousness is redundant, while asserting their death is a brand of wishful thinking.

Artistically, Osorio’s installation is starkly conservative. I don’t mean that its pictorial style or technique of assemblage is antiquated or stale. I mean that Osorio has conceived of art in a conservative way: The installation is merely a seductive vehicle for the delivery of commonly held ideas. “The Scene of the Crime” preaches to the converted, in a playful, homiletic manner that would do Norman Rockwell proud.

The installation feels sharply at odds with itself. Its politics reach for the pointedly progressive, but the work is artistically conservative. In this, it’s emblematic of our cultural moment. For the surprising dichotomy it embodies--political progressiveness happily wedded to artistic conservatism--has lately emerged as a dominant, recurrent motif in multiculturalism.

The dichotomy is everywhere you look at the Whitney’s self-described “multicultural Biennial.” It’s the order of the day in many of the newly unveiled public art projects for L.A.’s Metro Rail Red Line and in those selected last fall for the controversial Union Station Gateway Plaza. In San Diego at the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art, the dichotomy is prominent in “La Frontera/The Border,” the current exhibition of art concerned with issues related to the boundary between Mexico and the United States.

Where did this seemingly odd couple come from? What does it signal?

It is no accident that the dramatic rise of multiculturalism in the 1980s was coincident with the Age of Reagan, which swept in on a rising tide of populist passion. For quite the same tide has borne multiculturalism aloft--with one critical difference.

An obvious but fundamental distinction between Reaganism and multiculturalism is that the latter has proceeded from a politically progressive, not conservative, stance. Nonetheless, they are simply different political sides to the same populist coin.

Populism, which promises hope and opportunity through a belief that “the people” are never wrong, is concerned with the instruction of the masses. It means to guide them from their traditional ways, in order to meet disruptively new challenges of modern life.

So, in order to be captivating, populism is always aesthetically conservative. Writing in 1986 of Reagan’s conception of a Second American Revolution, political analyst Sidney Blumenthal spoke of the President’s mission precisely in terms of mossback art. “In Reagan’s rendition of populism,” Blumenthal wrote, “conservatives would lead the righteous people, a crusading army of Norman Rockwell archetypes, in triumph over the corrupt and indolent cosmopolitans of the capital.”

By contrast, in a multicultural rendition of populism, it is progressives who will lead the righteous people. Unfortunately, progressives can as yet claim no name-brand equivalent to Rockwell, given America’s legacy of racism and sexism.

From whom might progressives rouse an army of archetypes? Georgia O’Keeffe comes close, and Frida Kahlo does too. Notably, it is women who almost fit the progressives’ bill. But, in the end, modern art does not have broadly popular appeal. O’Keeffe and Kahlo, as modernist rather than traditional artists, must forfeit the populist crown.

The aesthetic conservatism of the multicultural movement is manifesting itself in contemporary, progressive variations on Rockwell’s type of homiletic display. Stylistically, they certainly look different from one another. Structurally, however, this new art partakes of the same literary form of discursive illustration as a Rockwell graphic.

Pepoon Osorio’s “The Scene of the Crime” is one example among many at the Whitney. Gary Simmons’ “Lineup” is another.

“Lineup” is composed from eight pairs of gilded basketball shoes, displayed on a low platform. Behind the empty shoes is a white wall, horizontally marked with the black stripes that identify height in a police lineup. Visually and conceptually, you read the display’s meaning in an instant.

“Lineup” is the perfect illustration to a hypothetical magazine article that you know you’ve read. It describes the social plight of young African-American men, debilitatingly described by our society as having a choice between athletic superstardom and criminal ignominy.

Do black youth wear the gilded shoes, or do they steal them? Beyond this cleverly executed summation, the work has no resonance.

A similar emphasis on illustration marks the Whitney’s selection of photography. In a Biennial startlingly short on the medium, the standard-bearers are conventional: Nan Goldin is a documentarian, Miguel Gandert is a photojournalist.

Elsewhere, Robert Mapplethorpe’s highly aestheticized photographs of black men do make an appearance--not in their own right, but absorbed into a piece by Glenn Ligon. Framed pages from Mapplethorpe’s “Black Book” have been paired with printed texts that quote interviews with several of the models. Their observations are frequently disturbing and provocative. Yet, effectively, Mapplethorpe’s pictures have been transformed into illustrations for Ligon’s text.

In the dichotomy between progressive politics and conservative aesthetics, it isn’t the politics that require words and illustrations. Rather, if art is expected to function within a populist milieu, discursive text and descriptive pictures are simply necessary.

Illustrated text is everywhere in the Biennial. In its own way, much of this work is as diagrammatic as the charts and graphs that Ronald Reagan once used on TV, and that billionaire populist Ross Perot now uses to instruct the masses.

Sometimes it’s abundantly inscribed in the work itself: Reneee Green’s “library” installation (a related work was just installed at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art), the branding-iron paintings by the team of Leone and Macdonald, Daniel J. Martinez’s room built from Styrofoam words, Donald Moffett’s altered bookplates, Allan Sekula’s photos with endless captions, Sue Williams’ graffitied painting and sculpture, and many more.

Occasionally, explanatory text is printed on adjacent panels, rather like a caption to which the nearby art is illustration.

The art planned for Union Station’s Gateway Plaza in downtown L.A. is also marked by instructional texts. One team of artists plans to embed excerpts from the writings of numerous authors, living and dead, in sidewalk paving and on railings. In the design for an entrance landmark, another team has proposed a tiled patio with a spiral script; these words describe the demographics of the city’s original pueblo--statistics that will then be illustrated with faces representing diverse ethnicities.

Many of the important issues raised by the multicultural project--issues of class, race, gender and sexuality--readily lend themselves to inherently discursive mediums, such as film, video and performance art. That’s why these are among the most convincing works at the Whitney Biennial, where Mark Rappaport’s analysis of gay subtext in Hollywood cinema becomes a wonderfully loopy incursion into “Rock Hudson’s Home Movies,” and at San Diego’s “La Frontera/The Border” show, where Deborah Small and David Avalos perform lacerating video surgery on the “Ramona Pageant,” based on Helen Hunt Jackson’s Romantic tale of miscegenation in early California.

However, what works for film, video and performance does not necessarily work for static mediums. History shows how.

The marriage of political progressivism and aesthetic conservatism is not unprecedented in American art. In the first decade of this century, it characterized the paintings of “The Eight”Glackens, Henri, Luks, Shinn, Sloan, Davies, Lawson and Prendergast--and of other artists who were soon collectively dubbed the Ashcan School, for their unprecedented, Realist portrayals of urban life.

Strongly liberal in outlook, many also published illustrations in the great left-wing magazine the Masses. The Ashcan painters were united in their opposition to the narrow, restrictive monopoly on aesthetic taste exerted by the National Academy. Their uncomplimentary name had come at the hands of conservative critics, whose belief in art’s idealizing purpose clashed with their down-to-earth, socially conscious subject matter.

If their gritty subject matter was progressive, their aesthetic conceptions were old-fashioned, especially compared to the contemporaneous work of Picasso, Matisse, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and others. Dredging up Old Masters, from Frans Hals to Gustave Courbet, they blended traditions of painterly realism with popular styles of urban newspaper graphics.

Sloan, Shinn, Luks and Glackens had worked as newspaper illustrators. The early stirrings of mass media were thus instrumental to their art. Among artists, an escalated consciousness of the power of mass media to shape attitudes has long been pervasive.

The final, hardly surprising parallel between these two moments is their mutual underpinning of populism. The Eight and the Ashcan School came together in the wake of a late-19th-Century swell of populist fervor, which not only ushered in a formal Populist Party, but subsequently gave Teddy Roosevelt the presidency.

Populism surged because America’s rural, agrarian society was being painfully, scarily transformed into an urban, industrial civilization. Since the late 1970s it has been surging again, because the urban, industrial world is being similarly refashioned--this time into a suburban, postindustrial culture. As ever, populist flattery harnesses “the infallible wisdom of the people,” from electronic town meetings to listener call-in shows on radio and TV, in order to navigate the dangerous shoals.

The painters of the Ashcan School eventually attracted the attention and support of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Juliana Force, who went on to open the Whitney Studio Club, forerunner to the Whitney Museum of American Art. So, ironically, the 1993 Biennial is really a reprise of the museum’s original artistic conservatism.

This year’s Biennial is a fiasco, but perhaps it’s also a necessary one. Its singular achievement has been political: Cultural lip service, which for decades spoke glowingly of inclusion while practicing de facto segregation, has been demolished. Now, cumulative developments of the past many years have been made official: Multiculturalism in art has been declared the Establishment.

Importantly, this new Establishment status also signals the demolition of multicultural McCarthyism. Political conservatives have always blustered against the progressive politics of multiculturalism, while sneering unselectively at art produced under its banner. By contrast, political progressives faced a daunting dilemma: Critical disagreements with the aesthetic conservativism of so much of the art risked airy dismissal as racist, sexist or homophobic in their biases. With multiculturalism now the Establishment, such a charge would be at best naive.

Might an authentically cross-cultural critical discourse now publicly emerge, one that would strengthen and illuminate the diversity of art? Perhaps, but it won’t be easy.

Consider the teapot-tempest kicked up around “Unity,” the mural recently unveiled at the First Interstate World Center in downtown Los Angeles. Russian emigree artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid have fashioned a witty, laser-sharp critique of the way in which multiculturalism’s absorption into the Establishment has served principally to maintain the status quo. Their image of transcendent angels, which derives from a 13th-Century Italian chapel that gave L.A. its name, is luxuriously wrapped in diverse symbols of ethnicity, as it hovers happily in the lobby of a mammoth bank.

How has this brilliantly incisive work of art been greeted? With mind-numbing complaints that the faces of its three, moony-eyed angels are all white, and that Latinos, African-Americans and Asian-Americans should be represented among the celestial host. The complainers don’t realize--or else don’t care--that altering the ethnicity of the white angels would be like demanding equal ethnic representation in a mural critical of the Ku Klux Klan.

What the complainers want is an idealized, soporific symbol--a neo-Norman Rockwell fantasy of sentimental racial bliss, which covers up the harsh reality. They’re stuck in the Age of Reagan, where hollow symbolic fulfillment took the place of actual social equality. What they don’t want is art, which has a way of generating discomfort from the hard truths it confronts.

If any artist of the moment is emblematic of what’s at stake, perhaps it’s 28-year-old Gary Simmons. He’s got one foot firmly planted on either side of a great divide. “Lineup,” his dull political window display, we already know about. But he also makes drawings, some on an environmental scale, that can be extraordinarily beautiful and moving.

Using chalk, Simmons gracefully redraws racist cartoon characters on sheets of paper coated to look like blackboards, and then he furiously rubs them out. What’s left behind is an ambiguous, threatening cloud of pentimenti, through which the awful image relentlessly returns to view. The hateful history of racism is angrily resisted in these remarkable works, while its inescapable shaping of the present is utterly transformed in the hands of a gifted artist.

As was evident in a recent show at Otis Art Gallery, these drawings are politically trenchant because they are filled with a truth to private experience, and absent any trace of earnest exhortation. When he trades in populist sloganeering, which tends to guide his conservative-minded installation work, in favor of the aesthetic adventurousness of his drawings, Simmons’ art fairly shines.