Show Time at Biennial: Send in the Big Crowds

People usually expect artists to be free of the audience considerations demanded of popular culture. As Lily Tomlin once wryly observed of her profession: “After all, they don’t call it ‘show art.’ ”

Well, they can now. Show art, as distinct from show business, has arrived.

It’s the name I would give to the ethos of the 1997 Biennial Exhibition that opened Thursday at the Whitney Museum of American Art here. Forget the alienated artist toiling in isolation in the studio, self-satisfied and critical of the indifferent crowds. Audience intensive, show art starts out being thoroughly enmeshed in established art world institutions. It’s art made with a self-conscious regard for the imminent arrival of an eager public, ready to engage it.

To steal a phrase, the audience is listening. And watching. This Biennial’s 72 painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, video and installation artists and collectives know that going in.

Curators Lisa Phillips, who’s been on the Whitney staff for 20 years, and Louise Neri, Australian-born American editor of the luxe Swiss art magazine Parkett (the first non-staffer to help choose a Biennial), have replaced the idea of a general survey with a loose theme. They say it’s artists’ cosmologies, or the intersection between private worlds and public realities. More frankly, I’d say the established, institutional life of art today is the true thematic thread.

So, what are some characteristics of show art, as put forth (if not named as such) by the ’97 Biennial? A few can be easily discerned.

One is a disavowal of privacy in the act of viewing. Looking is made into a public event.

Lots of this work is just plain big. Installation is still the name of the game, and the genre virtually depends on institutional space for its existence.

Cordially gobbling up space and demanding multiple, simultaneous viewers are Chris Burden’s “Pizza City,” a sprawling toy model of an oozing-metropolis, laid out atop 26 tables in a room; Kara Walker’s evocative narrative recalling racist minstrel shows, made from little cut-out silhouettes blown up to mural-size; Glen Seator’s full-scale re-creation of the Whitney director’s office, precariously tilted at a 90-degree angle; Michael Ashkin’s landscape sculpture of an oil pipeline in the desert, spread across the floor like a miniature movie set; the room-filling projected video and up-ended stage for Paul McCarthy’s scatological satire on Santa Claus, and more.

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One godfather of show art is Bruce Nauman, whose triple video-projection of musician Lloyd Maines coaxing the melancholic tune “End of the World” out of a slide guitar is among the strongest works on view. (Another is Edward Ruscha, here with new paintings.) Twenty-five years ago Nauman described his work as stuff he wouldn’t have made unless he already had a place to show it. The attitude is now ubiquitous.

Still, even Sue Williams’ gorgeous paintings, made from fragile webs of linear, all-over drawing that skitters between abstract-luscious and figurative-pornographic, make room for multiple viewers. They claim no privileged vantage point; jump in wherever you like.

Ditto Lari Pittman’s paintings of urban show-and-tell, in which the dense surface is also ground for display of smaller framed paintings. Modest in scale, they promiscuously solicit the passing crowd.

Audience participation is a show art staple. Sometimes it’s straightforward, sometimes surreptitious.

Russian emigre Ilya Kabakov has fashioned a grim suite of hospital rooms in which slide shows display patients’ ostensible memories. Or, are they yours?

Using a telephoto lens, John Schabel photographed individual passengers framed by airplane windows. Supposedly private activity is in fact public theater.

Diana Thater’s room-size video installation ponders the training of chimpanzees for apparent use in animal shows, movies or TV. Move through the space and the engulfing images are projected on your body, slyly making a monkey out of your presumed distance from such media-centered activities.

Headphones are everywhere, too, in installations with sound by Kabakov, Dan Graham, Charles Long and Stereolab and others. David Hammons’ magnificent seven-minute videotape is an urban song both poignant and inspiriting, composed simply from a guy kicking a metal bucket along the Bowery pavement. And the Whitney’s lobby has been wired for sound by Martin Kersels: Peruse a book in the shop, celestial music plays.

Show art is obviously savvy about pop culture, but its roots are more in Pop art: It comes from a direction opposite that of recent pop culture critiques.

In the 1980s many artists photographed fictionalized environments, like waxworks or natural history museums. Philip-Lorca diCorcia pulls a reversal, photographing global urban street-life so it resembles staged tableaux.

Show art doesn’t pretend to take a righteous stand outside the dully repetitive dominant culture, as critique pretty much requires. Instead, it tries to elaborate, complicate and enliven it from within.

While the ’97 Biennial is the best installment in many years, its status as thoroughly enmeshed in established art world institutions does ensure a certain lack of freshness. You’ll find a few first-rate artists whose work seems anomalous, or at least unexpected, such as Kerry James Marshall’s big canvas tarps painted with scenes of black children awkwardly fitted into idealized suburban (read: white) environments.

Some works, like Shahzia Sikander’s lovely updated Indian miniatures or Bruce Conner’s exquisite folded-paper ink drawings, are meant to be taken in slowly, one-on-one. But they’re the exception to the rule.

More common is the L.A. crowd, a largely excellent group of 15 artists (including three filmmakers, whose work I did not see) being touted as proof that Southern California now has parity with Manhattan as a production center for art (41 are New Yorkers). Note that nine of the 15 have ties to a single school--UCLA--either as faculty or former students, and that, while widely exhibited, more than half have not had a solo show of new work in L.A. in the two years since the ’95 Biennial.

The L.A. contingent could largely have been chosen by curators who never left New York or Europe. Show art, being an institutional creature, thrives in galleries in New York and Europe and museums internationally.

So, where else but at the Whitney would you expect show art to have its institutional apotheosis? This is a museum that still evaluates art made in L.A. by gauging its similarity to art made at home.

Here’s the kicker: I have the sneaking suspicion that the rise of show art actually means the rest of the world is starting to look like an offshoot of L.A.

* Whitney Museum, 945 Madison Ave., New York, (212) 570-3676, through June 1. Closed Mondays.