Art! - Art! - at the Whitney.

IF THE latest Whitney Biennial does nothing else, it signals the revival of certain artistic ambitions that were dormant if not dead through most of the Eighties and early Nineties. It has restored to us the obligation of looking at the art of our contemporaries as if there were at least the potential, if not yet the reality, of true artistic achievement. And it has restored to us the possibility of once again applying certain critical yardsticks which, as recently as two years ago, would have seemed ludicrously beside the point. The curator of this exhibition, Klaus Kertess, has taste. Surely it is neither infallible nor exempt from several of the toxic pseudodoxies of the day. What is important is that he should have any taste at all, since this commodity has not been highly regarded around the Whitney in recent years and was entirely absent from the last Biennial. That exhibition, under curator Elisabeth Sussman, was the most political in the history of the institution. Of over eighty artists included, the number of straightforward painters and sculptors could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In choosing Kertess for the present exhibition, the Whitney seems to have recoiled from the rampant extremism in which it was so recently complicit.

As always, part of this Biennial is devoted to established masters. The painters Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman continue to ring their changes on a severely circumscribed set of minimalist terms. Brice Marden, who took a turn for the worse when he substituted expressionistic spindles for pure blocks, is in the unenviable position of being upstaged by the splashy abstractions of his little-known wife, Helen. And whereas Milton Resnick, with his thickly impasted Art Brut figures, is the grand old man of the present proceedings, Cindy Sherman, by now too old to be an enfant terrible, might want to rethink her affection for photographing prosthetic body parts.

More interesting, however, is the evolution one can detect among less familiar artists. Terry Winters has gone from mediocre to bad, from pleasantly innocuous biomorphic abstractions to pseudo- cubistic lobby art faintly resembling four-day-old lasagna. And yet, is there not something refreshing and even important about these bad paintings? What is startling, at least in a contemporary context, is that their ambitions are entirely old-fashioned. Though Winters may or may not wish to attribute to them new-fangled doctrines, what he is essentially making is art that invokes, though it does not satisfy, all the criteria of Greenbergian formalism. His paintings look exactly like the sort of bad art that showed up in Whitney exhibitions forty years ago. Philip Taaffe, by contrast, has gone from being bad to meriting serious consideration. As of this moment, he is a rare, if not unique, example of an artist who has outgrown his fealty to postmodernism in order to create abstract images that are increasingly resonant and beautiful. He is still interested in the pattern and design images associated with what is called his Neo-Geo phase, but if the terms of his art are largely the same as they were, the results are much more satisfying, much more pulled together. A similar resurgence of ambitiousness is detectable (and who would have thought it?) in the paintings of Sue Williams. This artist's puddle of plastic vomit, supposedly representing a bulimic discharge, typified everything bad about the last Whitney Biennial: bad taste allied to the absolute ascendancy of politics (in this case feminism) over art. The painted part of her earlier installation was replete with feministic scribbles and ineptly painted images of liposuction and other forms of female self- mutilation at the behest of the patriarchy. Such preoccupations continue in her latest work but have been reduced to ornament in a predominantly abstract design. What is important here is not that the artist has abandoned politics, but that her subordination of it to picture-making may bespeak a massive shift in the world of contemporary art. A very similar process can be seen in Lari Pittman's paintings, which are as meretricious as ever, with their Visa and American Express cards, corporate logos, and phrases like ``Cum n' git it,'' but which strain mightily to be as popular and attractive and buyable as anything by Roy Lichtenstein. As the examples of Sue Williams and Lari Pittman suggest, a good deal of political posturing remains in the present Biennial, but there is considerably less of it and it is somehow less anarchic than in the past. Frank Moore attacks family values by remaking a famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving dinner scene in which a family, now interracial, is at table, and in which the aproned mother serves, instead of turkey, a stack of pills and syringes. There is as well a good deal of homoerotic art, which is not of necessity bad, but which, as the art world needs constantly to be reminded, is not necessarily good either. Nan Goldin and David Armstrong have mounted stylized and elegiac images of lesbians and gays respectively which do not rise above mediocrity. There is also a great deal of militant anti-Catholic sentiment, thus proving the late Dr. Healy's contention that hating Catholics is the only form of prejudice that remains acceptable. Thus Peter Saul portrays God the Father as a bearded cyclops and as a piece of cake, and the infant Jesus as a surly fetus. The subjects of the photomontages of John O'Reilly, presumably a lapsed Catholic, are, however, too disgusting to go into.

The good news is that political art of this sort seems less important, less original, and less disconcerting than only two years ago. One feels increasingly that it represents the stale remains of an older, dying convention. Though we are light-years away from a Renaissance, and though recidivism is always a danger, we are seeing perhaps the first stray swallows of springtime, after an interminable winter.