The Greatest Show on Earth

NEW YORK--It may be impossible to finger the zeitgeist of contemporary art, but lucky for us the Whitney Museum would rather die than give up trying. Critics, however, would probably have killed the Whitney Biennial, the museum's signature showcase of contemporary art, years ago if it weren't for the fact that they would miss having a major exhibition to consistently complain about. The '93 Biennial, which featured the Rodney King video, was deemed too narrow and political, the '95 show too reactionary in its overemphasis on painting. Ironically, this year's exhibition has been labeled "tepid" and "boring" by critics who attack the broader curating that their past reviews would seem to have encouraged. Yet as far as I'm concerned, the '97 Biennial leaves little room for complaint.

Although the present Biennial avoids making a synthetic statement, the exhibition provides a great excuse to display an assortment of excellent new art. Given the diversity of contemporary visual practice and the widely accepted premise that all curating is somehow biased, it's no wonder that co-curators Lisa Phillips and Louise Neri staunchly resist labeling their exhibition a "survey." Even though the show feels more like a survey than any of the recent Biennials, in their catalog essay Phillips and Neri write that they tried to avoid making a "sampler" and instead looked for certain "millenial tendencies."

"Narrative" is one of the most convincing, even if broad, themes that Phillips and Neri trace in the show. Kara Walker's black silhouettes applied directly to the Whitney's white walls depict surreal scenes from slavery in the Old South. Demonstrating a keen sensitivity to the 19th century African-American literary tradition, Walker's imagery slips between history and fantasy, redemption and horror. Her striking installation monopolizes the historic connotations and graphic irony of the cutpaper silhouette, which despite its crisp, precise line shadows its subjects and prevents full narrative disclosure. In addition, both Zoe Leonard's archive of 82 distressed photographs from the life of the fictitious actress Fae Richards and Michael Ashkin's sculpture of two tiny trucks crossing an expansive landscape provide equally elliptical yet strangely engrossing narratives.

Many of the works less explicitly linked to narrative, like Jason Rhoades' dense installation, create spectacular mental images of their creators. These implied personas may or may not be contiguous with the artists themselves, just as we might recognize the space between the author and narrator of a novel or poem. Rhoades' Uno Momento, for example, calls to mind a funky urban hipster who empties out his over-filled garage to host a dance party complete with pulsing music and flashing lights. In Chris Burden's Pizza City, a room filled with tables supporting a bizarre urban sprawl suggests an overzealous collector of model train sets and holiday porcelain villages from mail-order catalogs. Likewise, Bryan Crockett's gigantic balloon explosion could only have been made by a slightly obsessive character, perhaps an eccentric clown bored with his mastery of simple balloon wiener dogs and poodles.

New technology is employed both as a medium and as a subject in the exhibition's well-chosen video art. Noteworthy videos include Kristin Lucas' frank, neurotic monologues on life in the technology age, Cable Xcess and Host. Both of Lucas' videos ironically demonstrate the double bind in her masterful use of a technology which she fears somehow controls her. Exhibited on the same monitor, Suicide Box, by a group of artists calling themselves Bureau of Inverse Technology, provides a wry panoptic proposal for installing suicide detection boxes on the Golden Gate Bridge. Ever friendly to death toll tabulators and those who follow their statistics, the boxes can even distinguish between an errant sea gull and a falling body.

Demonstrating his extremely inventive use of video, Tony Oursler's sculptures simultaneously fascinate and disturb. For the Biennial, he presents his most restrained and sophisticated work yet, three-dimensional glass ovals resting on metal poles or the floor, on to which he projects video images of talking heads. They stare at the viewer and blankly recite children's variations of songs commonly heard in school yards: "Joy to the world, the teacher's dead; we barbecued her head." Yet monotone delivery and eerie visual presentation transform these rhymes into disturbing alien utterances. We watch both mesmerized and repulsed, while the sculptures dare us to pull their plugs.

In contrast to these technology-obsessed works, Gabriel Orozco contributes a table cluttered with quiet, ephemeral models. His attention to materials and tiny scale transforms dried oranges, spotted seed pods, a papier mache mold of a sock, and a tower of Yardley soap boxes into intimate marvels. These laconic sculptures demand (and deserve) our thought and time, as do Orozco's elegant photographs which reveal his sensitivity to natural mysteries and visual puns, like a cluster of sleeping sheep in Common Dream, or a languid hose seeping water on the floor in Hose (Manguera Dormida). His small, subtle observations play beautifully off Vija Celmins' meticulous renderings of expansive night skies and the late Felix Gonzalez Torres' monumental billboard of transient footprints in the sand.

All of these works are handsomely installed in the most uncluttered of recent Biennials. Neri and Phillips have given most artists plenty of breathing room, often a whole gallery. Where artists share a space, as with Celmins and Orozco, the curators' pairings are almost always smart and appropriate. Only the pairing of Wendy Ewald's photographs of children's dreams with Sue Williams' painted entanglements of sexual organs and orifices seems heavy-handed and literal in its Freudian pop psychology.

Compared to the '95 Biennial, which featured such American greats as Richard Serra, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin and Cy Twombly, Phillips and Neri have placed more emphasis on newly emerging artists. This generational shift seems exceptionally welcome in light of the rather uncompelling contributions by the '97 Biennial's more well-known practitioners--including Bruce Nauman, Francesco Clemente and Dan Graham. A notable exception, Ilya Kabakov is one of the few older artists in the current exhibition whose seniority is reflected in the quality of his work. Perhaps overly ambitious for its context, his wistfull installation of a crumbling hospital ward is designed to treat his elderly patients with old family slides and tapes of memory narratives.

Installations like Kabakov's and Glen Seator's full-scale model of the museum director's office tilted at 45 degrees, are some of the most striking pieces in the show. Charles Long and Stereolab create a terrifically funny and participatory "lounge," the Amorphous Body Study Center. Here visitors can stop, listen to music and have a drink from a water cooler sprouting headphones, or join the throngs of amateur sculptors clustered around a giant mound of pink modeling putty. Like the exhibition's curators, Long and Stereolab understand the importance of putting on a good, crowd-pleasing show. Their work may not be as edgy or focused as some of the exhibition's other contributors, but like the '97 Biennial it's smart, stylish and remarkably engaging.