"Speed.".

WHITECHAPEL ART GALLERY/PHOTOGRAPHERS' GALLERY, LONDON

"Acceleration is the one constant in our experience of modernity. . . . Speed is not so much a product of our culture as our culture is a product of speed," declares the catalogue for the joint show recently mounted by the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Photographers' Gallery, London, aptly entitled "Speed." Sharing both critical theory's penchant for disrupting conventional models of cause and effect and its enthusiasm for interdisciplinarity, this curatorial experiment draws together a diverse array of ideas and things: designed objects, wall-mounted texts and ephemera, works of art and photography, films and videos, literature and poetry.

At the Photographers' Gallery, the installation is weak. Even the best of the work on display there is ultimately disappointing; for example, Naoya Hatakeyama's photos of quarry explosions are, like fireworks, exhilarating - fur just a few moments. The Whitechapel's display works better. Here, well-judged juxtapositions propose loose, speculative themes. A wooden reconstruction of Le Corbusier's Automaxima car design of 1928, Charles and Ray Eames's '50s oak-and-fiberglass rocking chair (a feather-light cross between an old-fashioned rocker and a flying boat), and Chris Burden's 1977 C.B.T.V. to Einstein (a balsa wood and rubber-band toy that, by virtue of being flown up a Concorde's aisle while the jet reached Mach 2.05, actually traveled faster than the supersonic plane) come together as Utopian Modern prototypes. Cranky, Kleenex-and-spit improvisation and modernist elegance coexist implausibly side by side.

Further on, Siobhan Hapaska's recent piece Land, 1998 (a glistening, glamorous, lacquered fiberglass boulder with living plants and smooth, water-filled craters), Marcel Breuer's 1927-28 Wassily armchair, Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913, and John McCracken's wall-mounted sculpture Mach 2 (a luscious, liquid slice of brilliant scarlet gloss) demonstrate the affiliation of speed's visual codes with those of the (consumer) fetish: sleek, seamless, armored surfaces; tense balances; precarious suspensions. But R.A. Bertelli's utterly potty Continuous Profile of Mussolini, 1933, pulls this group to a screeching halt. Sublimity crashes into bathos; II Duce's exalted features go whizzing around faster than soup in a blender.

If the desire for acceleration engenders technological "progress," as the show argues, then to resist that desire might constitute a form of subversive cultural practice. Radical slowness is a clear preoccupation of postwar independent filmmaking, as Peter Wollen observes in the show's accompanying book. Accordingly, the Whitechapel has enterprisingly screened all 8 hours 5 minutes of Warhol's film Empire State (1964). In the gallery, videos of Smithson's Glue Pour, Concrete Pour, and Asphalt Rundown (all 1969) and drawings by Vija Celmins go toward an exploration of entropy. Next to Celmins's painstaking pencil drawing Untitled (Large Desert), 1974-75, an expanse of scattered pebbles, is the information that the total time taken to produce a 1926 Model T Ford, from the extraction of ore to the cat's emergence from the production line, was eighty-one hours. Celmins's painfully slow "entropic" drawing process, each pencil stroke leaving behind a minuscule dusting of graphite, suddenly becomes mind-boggling.

I would wager that Raiding the Icebox (1993), Wollen's revisionist view of modernity, has played something of a key role for Jeremy Millar, the curator of"Speed." With an enviable range of historical knowledge, Wollen wears his methodologies lightly, preferring to build up suggestive accretions of details and ideas. "Speed" echoes this approach. Following Wollen, the exhibition serves to refute the prevalent caricature of modernity as a monolithic, phallocentric, imperialistic force jackbooting its way through twentieth-century history. In the catalogue, Le Corbusier's car is captioned with a quote from his The City of Tomorrow (1924), celebrating "the simple and naive pleasure of being in the midst of power, of strength," but there's nothing authoritarian about the Automaxima itself, with its swinging, Jules-et-Jim seating provision: a three-seat banquette in front, space for the picnic basket behind (nuclear families not wanted en voyage).

Inescapably, one ends up listing omissions. How could a project drawn so broadly be anything but partial? The show is strong on the paradoxes of speed in relation to imaging technologies, but architecture, the environmental effects of accelerated building, and civil-engineering methods get better coverage in the catalogue than the exhibition. And what about the elevator, that vital ingredient of modernity's archetypal vertical city? Further exploration of ergonomics and of the modern era's faster human body (and one or two fewer cars) would have been welcome.

The last twenty-odd years have seen the humanities off on an orgy of productive hybridization while the museum establishment battles gamely with an inherited burden of politically disagreeable traditional taxonomies. Innovative, interdisciplinary curation is hardly a new idea, yet contemporary fine-art spaces are still notably reluctant to compromise the art object's precious autonomy with contextualizing materials or overarching nonart themes. Given this state of affairs, the curatorial experiment that "Speed" embodies is laudable. Its devisers should take the chorus of disgruntled chunterings they have elicited from the crustier elements of London's art establishment as a genuine compliment.

Rachel Withers is a London-based writer.