Not Enough Reasons to Celebrate

I’ve always been a big fan of the Whitney Biennial. No, not because the periodic survey of contemporary American art is “the show you love to hate.” (A swell marketing slogan, but it’s always much more satisfying to love something fully than to hate it in the least.) I’ve been a fan because the Biennial was always a very useful show.

Every two years, the Whitney Museum of American Art would offer up “essence of New York,” an aromatic perfume with the power to make you swoon. Floridly labeled as a national survey of recent art, whatever had actually made a dent in the art consciousness of Manhattan in the prior two years would be brought together under one roof. In 1987 it was the down-and-dirty East Village. When the divide-and-conquer culture war was launched, we saw 1991’s E Pluribus Unum Biennial, marked by an expansive range of identity-based art. And so on.

Equating a Manhattan view with the entire United States was just part of the deal. The Biennial was a concentrated dose of a distinctly New York style of provincialism--the blinkered narrowness of any imperial city.

That’s what made it so useful--and worth traveling to see. Ironically, that’s also where the 2000 Biennial, which opened Thursday, went so dismally wrong. This show is built on a naive set of backwater principles.

They’re outlined in the catalog by new Whitney director Maxwell Anderson, a historian of classical Greek and Roman art who oversaw a selection committee of six outside curators from museums in different parts of the country. The principles aim “to champion what we believe is the best and strongest work produced in America” since the last Biennial. If the team actually believes such boilerplate, I’d suggest they might do well to find another line of work.

In fact, with just eight artists from Los Angeles--the same as from Chicago and fewer than the Bay Area, if you can imagine it--any claim to cogent survey status is ludicrous on its face.

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Anderson built a structural flaw into the selection process. Inexplicably wanting to minimize the dominance of New York and L.A. as production centers for new art--a simple fact of present art life--he chose curators who worked in neither city. But New York is also the consumption center for new art, in a way L.A. is not. So every curator across America has a handle on two American art scenes: their own regional one and New York’s. The result: L.A. was cut out from the start, while New York-based artists still dominate the show (42 of 97 artists).

The success of a Biennial exhibition is not a simple matter of toting up an acceptable ratio of good to bad art, either. Useful surveys are more than simple bean-counting. Think about it: In a nation of 275 million souls, how hard is it to find 80 or 100 worthwhile artists?

Certainly there are first-rate examples among the 175 or so works on view. (In addition to some 70 gallery artists, another two dozen video and film makers are represented by 20 hours of programming I mostly did not see.) They include Lisa Yuskavage’s fingernails-on-blackboard paintings of unnerving women and Kurt Kauper’s commanding fictional portraits of operatic divas. Paul Pfeiffer shows a tiny video-projection of a spectacular temper tantrum by a pro basketball player, and Sarah Sze unfurls a post-Judy-Pfaff-style tornado of trash, which swirls up into the gallery rafters from the big trapezoidal window on the fourth floor. John Currin makes the work Lucas Cranach would have painted had his subject been today’s upper-middle-class Americans rather than 16th century German Protestants.

My personal pantheon, though, leads off with Doug Aitken’s installation-size music video, a dreamy journey through an enervated American landscape of desolate motels, fluorescent Laundromats and empty parking lots. On multiple projection screens in a sequence of four rooms, “Electric Earth” pulls surprising visual and aural poetry from the unlikely terrain of our 7-Eleven culture. It reads as an operatic elaboration of one of the most haunting works from the last Biennial: David Hammons’ single-channel video, which showed a lone man kicking a bucket down a deserted nighttime Bowery street.

The curators tried for a few thematic groupings. The possibilities for paint-as-paint are clustered on the fourth floor: Ingrid Calame’s floor-to-ceiling painting of stains traced from Hollywood streets, Joseph Marioni’s dense monochromes, Linda Besemer’s draped sheets of acrylic stripes, Richard Tuttle’s slight colored-plywood panels, etc. Gender identity work is grouped on the third: Kim Dingle’s modified all-girl sports car, Kauper’s drag-like divas, Salomon Huerta’s indeterminate portraits of the backs of people’s heads, James Drake’s journalistic photos of transvestite prostitutes.

One accidental theme also emerges, orbiting around Jasper Johns’ classic American flag paintings. Three artists--Hans Haacke, Marcos Ramirez and Yukinori Yanagi--develop their own diverse work from Johns’ precedent. They handily demonstrate the big danger in such referential art, which is that the precedent sets such a high standard that the spinoff is almost bound to fail.

The show’s big clunker is Haacke’s ham-fisted installation, which got a rush of pre-show publicity two weeks ago when its pro-1st-Amendment contents were mysteriously leaked to the press. Likening today’s conservative ideologues (Rudy Giuliani, Jesse Helms) to Nazis in the 1930s, and prompted by Giuliani’s failed attempt to shut down the Brooklyn Museum during last fall’s notorious “Sensation” exhibition, Haacke’s caricature wants you to believe that the jackboots are on the march again.

Political rhetoric without scale or proportion is always embarrassing. The chilling Austrian electoral victory of Joerg Haider’s extreme-right Freedom Party is one thing, but Giuliani’s media grandstanding to court the conservative Catholic vote in his local Senate campaign hardly compares. The right to free speech also includes the right to speak inanity, which makes for a seamless right-left fit between Giuliani and Haacke.

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The Whitney is also making much of the first-ever inclusion of Net art in the Biennial (you can find Internet links at https://www.whitney.org). Mostly lackluster--remember the 1970s vogue for Xerox art?--they range from greeting-card graphics to corporate cultural critique that’s less enlightening than an average weekly episode of “The Simpsons.”

Still, this show deserves to be remembered as the Dot-Com Biennial. That’s because, like the World Wide Web, it’s a free-floating miasma without any sense of central authority or location. The arrangement might work for the Net, but a Whitney Biennial without the Whitney is a fiasco.

You have to wonder: Who is this show for? Certainly not an art public--not artists, collectors, critics, dealers and art enthusiasts. I used to be a fan of the Biennial because it made me feel privileged: It was organized specifically for me--a member of the democratic, thoroughly self-selected constituency of art, a social construct that may be America’s most distinctive contribution to world culture. But this show seems designed for tourists--”not exclusively for the art world,” as Anderson puts it as the catalog’s first (and most deadly) organizing principle, “but equally, if not more, for the benefit of the broader public.”

Like they care.

No wonder it’s the most useless Biennial I’ve seen (I started going as a student, in 1973). There’s been a widespread feeling for several years now that the Whitney has fallen off the radar screen as a leading museum for contemporary art. The Dot-Com Biennial confirms it.

* Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. (at 75th Street), New York. (212) 570-3676, https://www.whitney.org Through June 4. Closed Monday.