Another Weak Whitney Biennial

The continuing irrelevance of the Whitney Biennial can be conveyed for the 2002 installment in just a few words: five artists from Los Angeles.

Eight, if you count the exhibition’s media component (which, because of the time-bound nature of film and video, can only be seen in its entirety by a dedicated local audience). That’s out of a total of 113 artists, making this the largest biennial in decades.

It’s also the same raw number of L.A. artists as in the 2000 biennial. That ludicrous show featured 97 artists overall. Relatively speaking, L.A.’s art shrinks to near invisibility this year. The claim that the biennial surveys significant new American art can’t be made with a straight face.

Of course, none of that would matter if the 2002 biennial were a knockout display, with plenty of terrific work to keep you occupied. It’s not. About four things stayed with me when I left the museum.

Vija Celmins’ luminous gray paintings of fragile spider webs trap your wandering gaze as if it were an errant fly. Evan Holloway’s sculptures productively weave natural forms into cultural processes, as when he cubes the organic form of a tree branch according to a mathematical system.

Hirsch Perlman creates an extended document of private, internalized fantasy, in four dozen pinhole-camera photographs that show the menagerie he repeatedly made, demolished, remade and demolished again in his flotsam-filled studio. And Stephen Dean’s “Pulse” is a delirious, beautifully edited short video of the annual festival of Holi in Uttar Pradesh, India, where the return of spring is celebrated by throngs throwing clouds of pure pigment, glittery mica and tinted water. Like them, you get intoxicated on swirling color.

Mostly, though, this biennial is banal. Whitney curator Lawrence R. Rinder has assembled a dreary array of photographs, video and Web-based work, some installations, drawings, comics and a couple of crafts, with few sculptures and paintings anywhere in sight.

Typical is “a small world ...,” a 1999 installation by the team of Sanford Biggers and Jennifer Zackin. Sitting in a stage set designed to look like a middle-class suburban den from the 1970s, you watch a pair of short, Super-8 home movies projected side-by-side. Sociologically, it’s interesting: Two actual birthday parties, one for a black child and one for a Jewish child, are represented almost identically in the amateur films; class now says at least as much as race in how American society is constructed. Artistically, though, it’s wafer-thin. Once seen and grasped, there’s not much reason to look at “a small world ... “ again. The piece is an elaborate one-liner. What makes it typical for this biennial is the elevation of visual culture over art, the general over the specific.

In the catalog, Rinder writes that he went after work mostly made by the “younger generation” that seeks to “reclaim the individual’s expressive capacity from the corporate monolith of mass-media entertainment” and that avoids “the market-dominated trends of the mainstream art world.” What he apparently wanted--and certainly got--was a show worthy of an alternative space, circa 1977. In what must be the most expensive alternative space show ever organized, it suffers a serious case of venue dysfunction.

We’ve seen a lot of self-righteous art in recent decades that critiques the Media Industrial Complex of Global Capital (eek!), and to his credit, Rinder leaves most of that out. But the bugbear still guides this vacuous show, if only through genteel avoidance.

Given the multibillion-dollar culture industry that, for art, has headquarters at places like, oh, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the show seems naive, if not irresponsible. Especially when the curator then panders to the hometown crowd by including 64 New Yorkers because, as he also writes, the city is “the economic center of the art world and, for better or worse, the place where countless ambitious artists come to make their mark.”

The Whitney Biennial has been extraneous for at least a decade now. Trying to have it both ways is a pretty sure bet for continuing the triviality.

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Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., New York. (212) 570-3600 or online at www.whitney.org, through May 26. Closed Mondays.