Many happy returns.

When the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2004 Biennial, organized by Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, opened in mid-March, Artforum asked four of its regular contributors--JACK BANKOWSKY, DAVID JOSELIT, PAMELA M. LEE, SCOTT ROTHKOPF--to take stock of American art's best-known survey, which remains on view through the end of the month.

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THIS IS TODAY

Jack Bankowsky

Writing on the heels of the show's opening, New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl proclaimed Elizabeth Peyton, court painter to the postgrunge imperium, the "moral center" of the current installment of the Whitney Biennial. At first I thought my favorite art-critical stylist daft: One had better be possessed of like gifts, I mulled, even to contemplate a counterintuitive flourish of such breathtaking magnitude. What could possibly land this celebrity-doting miniaturist at the center of anything, let alone a "moral" center? Then it hit me: The answer is everything!

I will confess up front that I heartily disagree with Schjeldahl's celebration both of Peyton's work and of painting in this Biennial more generally, which to me feels tepid across the board. (I'm excepting Richard Prince--I don't count him a painter here, though one just as easily might; and I reserve a word of praise for James Siena, whose manic inventiveness coupled with the modesty of his art makes him easy to love.) But back to Peyton and to my point: Like them or not, her pretty portraits can be seen to register a number of pressures central not only to the current moment in art but to painting's status in this show.

In her catalogue essay, cocurator Chrissie Iles (she is joined in the exhibition's organization by Debra Singer and Shamim M. Momin) means to place painting at the thick of things: Pointedly separating the painterly plenty she sees out there in the galleries and studios from, say, that earlier '80s return (a "reactionary assertion of bombastic image-making over conceptual/perceptual practices"), Iles wants us to consider painting--and its "center stage" status today--as a "rejoinder to the photographic homogeneity of mass media surface and image, and its impact on individual and collective identity."

I'm with her on fundamentals: Each efflorescence of painting needn't signal a reactionary rappel a l'ordre; if painting is to speak to us today, it will speak (if not always in immediately discernible ways) out of or against our condition under mass media; and (this last point is implicit) a part of telling the present to ourselves necessarily entails a retelling of the past. That said, I yearn to know two things: How does it all boil down to Robert Mangold and Alex Hay (on one end of the seniority spectrum), and how (on the other end)--you'll think me obsessed--does Elizabeth Peyton get to be more than a footnote to Karen Kilimnik (who is not included in this show)?

Iles makes a good case for Peyton, if a case is to be made: Exhibited in a gallery presided over by David Hockney (more on the senior moments in this show later), Peyton's au courant idols (including herself) take their place at the center of a "cross-generational dialogue," one of a handful meant to animate the exhibition. The torch is passed thus: "That Hockney is both the subject of fame and a participant in its subversion, and that he is one of Peyton's adored subjects, demonstrates another way in which ... the publicity machinery of mass culture has been internalized in painting." To cut to the chase, I go along with the "internalized" but not the "subversion." When it comes to our celebrity culture and its discontents, both painters remain gentle salonists. Kilimnik's savagely obsessive exhumations of bedroom-bunker fandom and its eventual transmutation in her loving but tellingly stunted painterly idylls may draw from the same mass-cultural substrate as Peyton's romantic makeovers, but Kilimnik turns the allure of the glossies inside out, whereas Peyton ties it up with a Kate Spade bow.

I guess it's clear that I'm unimpressed with the painting in this show. I am similarly disappointed, even exasperated, by the selection of late-career artists. It's not that I don't think there's a place for the old steadies in the do-everything Biennial ideal, but in this installment the curators seem to have made a decision: When it comes to all but the most recent art, they have opted to beg off attempting anything like a general survey of the best and most vital work done in the last two years. Rather, as with Hockney, they have cast a line back from the thematics governing their notion of what is afoot today and thus guided their senior selections. Fine in principle, but at least where the painting is concerned the backward nods seem, more often than not, either perplexing (Mangold), a little gratuitous (Hay), or willful (Mel Bochner). I get the feeling some of the choices here are driven by a determined set of expectations as to what art "should" be (studious, conceptual--academic) instead of simply made on the merits of work that by guts or will or happenstance some-how gets underneath our condition and delivers up its contingencies. In Bochner's case, young artists and scholars may have lately revisited the artist's photographic experiments of the '60s, but to single out his current work for this reason comes with an ahistorical undertow. Let's face it, Bochner is a critic's artist and as such a valuable minder of a certain learned flame within the art world, but the man is deep into a three-decade slow patch, and the paintings on offer here would not seem to point the way out.

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The Biennial looks up when it gets around to the business of surveying tendencies in the newest art. As I settled into the show and particularly the time-based work, glimmers of light (even heat!) began to issue, not just from individual works, but from the friction between works--which is to say that I respect the curators for venturing frames and syntheses in a show whose do-it-all nature can make such a prospect fraught, if not thankless.

I appreciated, especially, the nostalgia conceit, which lends a (timely) affective gloss to that contemporary cultural staple, sampling. Moving, in this light, was Mary Kelly's composite image based on several press shots of the student uprisings of '68 studiously reconstructed of dryer lint; so, too, were Sam Durant's penciled protests, their casual, hand-rendered quality slowing down our processing of these literally seen-to-death shots--including mass-media imagery of the student rebellion at Columbia University in 1968--so that we might pause to measure our thrall to these disembodied half memories and their role in the everyday processes of wresting present from past. Richard Prince offered a self-reflexive spin on the nostalgia problem, sampling himself in a new installation that reprises his '80s car hoods (based on '70s car designs). In his hyperclever conflation of auto styling and high-art finish fetish, Prince, who is not a painter, or not just a painter--or if, as he insists, he is a painter, then he's a meta-painter of a very particular sort--admits to those new hybrids the signs of painterly "process." Where the paint jobs of the '80s works were seamless, the new hoods are patchy and sanded, offering added "art" value but also recalling auto-body work in progress.

But the most topical "image" of pastness in the show was the nod back to the eclectic affect associated with the proto-Pop imaginings of the Independent Group in the '50s. In the ecstatic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sprawls by the likes of assume vivid astro focus and Christian Holstad, high- and mass-cult yearnings collapse: One feels the tug not only of British proto-Pop but also, at least in assume vivid astro focus's case, of that perennial magnet for decadist longing: Swinging London of the '60s. In their voracious embrace of all things Pop--as well as things high and in between--these artists plot a point at the opposite end of the post-Pop continuum from Peyton's tidy packages.

My own favorite moments of double voicing and determined nostalgia were both to be found in the basement bookstore: Two works, both documentaries, employ that most prosaic of forms to tap into something like the (political?) unconscious of the proceedings upstairs. Isaac Julien's BaadAsssss Cinema (2002) looks back on the '70s blaxploitation film. Taped interviews with film critics, social commentators, actors, producers, and directors, including Quentin Tarantino, who has often tapped this contradiction-rich mother lode, suggestively complicated the "exploitation" factor in the equation, by unpacking a dense network of cultural dependencies and contradictions. For Tarantino the genre affords a refreshing (and productive) dip into the subcultural well from which emerges a vital new art-house hybrid; for Melvin Van Peebles it would ultimately represent the vicious cycle of recuperation whereby a subversive new art is devoured in the maw of the movie industry; and yet for numerous actors, agents, and producers, it represented, more often than not, an empowering foot in the door, an opportunity to seize a piece of the pie and be counted. Key to Julien's take is this ambivalence--reflected in the views of those who played a firsthand part in the short life of the genre--which in this work lends the nostalgia a bittersweet cast: It reflects the tug of a culture on the verge, a vital efflorescence that, however fraught or compromised, remains a resonant episode in the larger narrative of empowerment. For me, BaadAsssss Cinema is one of the show's exhilarations.

Andrea Bowers's Vieja Gloria, 2003, knits together our two upstairs mainstays: the exigencies of the tabloid culture and the will to wrest (or at least to understand how such a process is mediated) from the accelerated flux and flow of mass-generated information an image of resistance. What began in this video as a sappy-seeming look at tree sitter John Quigley's seventy-one-day vigil aimed at saving an ancient oak from the encroaching suburban sprawl (poor tree!) quickly revealed itself to be a richly creepy meditation on the machinations of celebrity (defamilarized in this low-grade variety), as the news media tracked the protester's tribulations with the local authorities--and his concomitant assumption to public voice (yikes!). By turns hokey and puffed up, pathetic and self-congratulatory, and finally, alas, all too human, the protagonist occasions a disarmingly complex musing on self-determination (and political action) in our late-day spectacle culture. Quigley's distinctive speech patterns alone were worth the forty-five minutes of hard time at a video monitor.

No Biennial review would be complete without the honorable mentions that celebrate the ultimately happy impossibility of doing justice to the exhibition's unmasterable plenty. I thought Banks Violette's partially buried drum kit impossibly glamorous, and I rather fancied the notion of Kurt Cobain incarnated in the starry glints of stage light rendered here in shimmering graphite-heavy drawings. Mark Handforth's initially relaxed-looking installation reveals a fresh and disarmingly articulate command of materials and scale. From catalogue essayist Wayne Koestenbaum's "fag limbo," that sexual/sartorial/artistic terrain vague more prosaically described elsewhere as the "new gay art," I single out David Altmejd for an exemplary feat of double voicing. Altmejd's perfectly over-the-top room-size assemblage of hair and costume jewelry (presented on a mirrored medley of platforms recalling simultaneously boutique displays and Sol LeWitt "Open Cubes") makes of Surrealist style an absolute camp (not that it needs much help) but also, by redoubling the manner's shopworn lunacy, restores its subterranean uncanniness. Finally, Jeremy Blake's psychedelic portrait of a day in the life of '60s designer Ossie Clark as he moves through the fashion and music demimondes of Swinging London makes me eager to take another look at an artist I had been too quick to dismiss as a poster boy for digital art's seemingly forever-deferred promise of producing anything replete enough to make a difference. Clark's diaries, read to vivid effect by alltomorrow's-parties personification Clarissa Dalrymple, further the beautifully sustained curatorial riff. on self-styled art celebrities that ripples out from Hockney's Swinging London swells (Hockney muse Celia Birtwell married Clark) through Peyton's trite but true imaginings and crescendos on the psychedelic soundstage-cum-discotheque of assume vivid astro focus's glorious spectacle of cronyism. An homage to avaf compeers and fellow Biennial artists Los Super Elegantes, this mod, mad, room-size installation serves as both collagist tribute and literal performance set for the fabulous, forever-up-and-coming, Hollywood-via-south-of-the-border, global-popist, self-promotional machine.

If, as Iles proposes, today's art necessarily constitutes a "rejoinder" to the pop firmament, then the question isn't whether but how the artist negotiates our inevitable place at popdom's noisy vortex. In this respect, one can be grateful to the Whitney for a capacious view of the possibilities. It is my fondest hope--perhaps against hope?--that Peyton's stylish star turns won't come to stand for our times, but that doesn't mean I'm throwing in my lot with the voracious pop love of an assume vivid astro focus either. I do glimpse potential tomorrows in the happy return of the open-armed futurism I associate with Pop before it crossed the ocean and hardened into a great art movement--but also in those more purposeful pop archaeologies (Julien, Bowers) and in lifestyle acts that ironize and perform today (Los Super Elegantes).

Repeat after me: Just what is it that makes today's art so different, so appealing?

Jack Bankowsky is Artforum's editor at large.

APOCALYPSE NOT

David Joselit

If you're trying to sort out the tangled themes of a Whitney Biennial, consider which older or more eminent artists are included in the exhibition--they usually offer helpful clues, and this year's installment is no exception. I came to the Biennial hoping to gain some understanding of the recent resurgence of painting, particularly figurative painting (a phenomenon epitomized by the John Currin retrospective and one that is widespread in galleries and art schools across the country). Given this preoccupation, three touchstone figures stood out for me: Raymond Pettibon, David Hockney, and the late Stan Brakhage. The last of these was, of course, neither a painter nor exactly a practitioner of figuration, but his eleven-minute film Persian Series 13-18 (2001) is nonetheless exemplary of what seemed a widespread tactic among Biennial artists: exploring painterly issues through reference to film and the mass media. If Brakhage appears to be the exception in my group of three "father figures," Pettibon, a much younger artist (and, again, not a painter per se), is central to the exhibition's zeitgeist.

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Pettibon's assemblages of individual drawings, typically overlapping expressionistically and linked together conceptually by handwritten texts inscribed on the wall, embody three qualities that permeate the exhibition: an aesthetics of archival profusion as opposed to composition (or construction) of forms within a bounded expanse of canvas; citation of the rhetoric of cartoons; and an obsessiveness that has eschatological overtones very much in tune with this Biennial's much-noted goth sensibility and fascination with teen anomie. Not too many other artists in the exhibition pull off Pettibon's balancing act--typically, one or another of the three formal procedures he exemplifies takes precedence. In Zak Smith's Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, 2004, for instance, the archival principle, here indexed to Pynchon's great Ulysses of the '70s, domesticates the artist's obsessive impulse. Like its literary model, Smith's work adopts an episodic structure through its arrangement of 755 page-size drawings in a grid, but the connection to Pynchon is largely metaphorical. While adopting different visual idioms ranging from cartoons to modernist abstraction, Smith's subject is apparently his own private milieu. As the catalogue proclaims, "The juxtaposition of his disaffected persona against a painstakingly wrought mosaic background reflects the coexistence of a rebellious punk attitude with a meticulous attention to formalism." As must be clear by now, what fascinates me in this Biennial is the thoroughly paradoxical combination of "punk rebelliousness" and "meticulous formalism." The two are seamlessly paired in this catalogue entry, but their marriage shouldn't be quite so harmonious: Indeed, in Pettibon's work obsessive content is allowed to deform formal meticulousness.

Among other artists in the Biennial whom I might group under the sign (if not the direct influence) of Pettibon--Laylah Ali, Amy Cutler, and Robyn O'Neil--an attraction to cartoon idioms is the dominant link. Each has developed a distinctive set of figurative avatars engaged in bizarre actions. Again, the paradox that percolates through the Biennial painters is registered in a catalogue entry. O'Neil's contribution to the show is a mystifyingly charming drawing, Everything that stands will be at odds with its neighbor, and everything that falls will perish without grace, 2003, in which pairs and groups of men in sweat suits engage in various vaguely antagonistic activities in a snowy landscape while a formation of fighter planes approaches them undetected. In a staggering use of oxymoron, the catalogue describes O'Neil's works as instances of a "gentle apocalypse." Now there's a category worthy of the Orwellian era of George W. Bush: the gentle apocalypse! Though I find it difficult to allow the massive disavowal encoded in this phrase to slip by unnoticed, it does capture one of the distinctive themes of the exhibition: violence and horror prettied up, or even--as in Sue de Beer's installation Hans und Grete, 2002-2003--made positively cute. In Cutler's gouaches, for instance, women engaged in humiliating actions are represented in a formal vocabulary reminiscent of children's-book illustration, and Ali explores ethnic struggle through an equally engaging cast of imaginary characters.

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The perfume of facile, even camp figuration in conjunction with something akin to real bitterness leads me to my second "father figure," David Hockney. His canvases produce a world of surfaces so gorgeous that they virtually lift off their figurative pretext like an autonomous and glittering applique. What distinguishes Hockney from Abstract Expressionism, on the one hand, is that mimesis remains in play in his paintings; what distances him from Pop figures like Warhol, on the other, is his production of surfaces that are self-consciously showy and therefore not impoverished by their photographic genealogy. In short, I see Hockney as the exemplar of another kind of "gentle apocalypse": the engulfment of figure by surface (or, alternately, a celebratory version of the disaffected persona meeting meticulous formalism). Elizabeth Peyton's fey celebrity paintings (preciously small like Smith's pages and Ali's drawings) enact a fan's tribute of love through their lush revisionings of pop magazine sources. She is the obvious heir to Hockney, as her positioning next to him in the gallery attests, but there are other ways in which the intimacy of surface and figure may be conceived. Sam Durant's redrawing of news photographs representing '60s protests, for example, situates the nostalgic gesture of repainting or redrawing in a context of visual poverty (these are "bad" or pointless reproductions rather than excited tributes), so that, counter to the pieties of twentieth-century abstraction, Durant's work allows the surface to be an agent of distancing or alienation rather than phenomenological identification. In Virgil Marti's environment Grow Room, 2002, malignant surfaces are extravagantly realized by using Mylar as a ground for a meandering band of psychedelic Art Nouveau floral motifs. Like many works in the exhibition, Marti's makes explicit reference to drug culture, but here the uneven mirrored surfaces, which distort the viewer's image and nearly overwhelm his or her perception of the floral motifs they support, produce a kind of nausea, or bad trip, within its cloying atmosphere.

The most interesting kind of painting I've seen exhibited in the past several years has possessed the malignancy of Marti's work, combining the slick surfaces of glossy digital reproduction with a groundless space redolent of the Internet: It is an art in which biomorphism meets crystalline geometries. The curators' inclusion of Stan Brakhage's Persian Series 13-18 in the Biennial, with its constantly shifting hand-painted nonobjective forms, offers a model of what, in a nod to both Brakhage's legacy as an avant-garde filmmaker and Gene Youngblood's legendary 1970 book Expanded Cinema, might be called the "expanded surface" of painting. Such surfaces embrace real time on the one hand, through the cinematic succession of frames, and, on the other, they perform a layering of painterly gesture and cincmatic projection. A number of artists in the Biennial seem to be mining these possibilities, but two stand out: Fred Tomaselli and Julie Mehretu. Tomaselli's works, like Airborne Event, 2003, are mandalas of sorts, sometimes centered on figures or elements of figures from which emanate psychedelic whorls and lines of force. But while they thematize psychic dematerialization, the surfaces of Tomaselli's paintings have a real, if shallow, depth: They are produced from photographic collage and other elements (he has famously included pills in his paintings), which are embedded in layers of resin. Mehretu, too, in her spectacular compositions reminiscent of giant scrambled computer screens, lays down marks and forms in as many as six translucent layers, creating a compressed but spatial, or expanded, surface. These painters have found not just a formal gimmick but a way to compress their surfaces in a manner analogous to the compression of digital files, while allowing them to expand laterally (like information and/or consciousness in a network society). Without sacrificing the metaphorical and discursive shallowness that feels fundamental to our time, Tomaselli and Mehretu represent its density in a paradox consistent with the "gentle apocalypse" and the "disaffected persona" rendered with "meticulous formalism."

This Biennial is a good one in the sense that it renders the flavor of a moment, but that flavor leaves a funny taste in one's mouth. I would like to believe that teen rebellion and fantasy figuration with references ranging from horror movies to psychedelic ecstasy are effective tools for meeting the particular challenges of our time. I certainly believe they can be. But significant art must make the journey from private obsession to public discourse, and many of the artists in this year's Biennial seem to have gotten stuck along the way. It's not that obsession must inherently remain private--sometimes the problem is that a countercultural urge is not obsessive enough, not weird enough in all its eager posturing. It all comes down to a certain density that, formally, I noticed in Mehretu's paintings and conceptually in Pettibon's installations. In the end it's rather simple: Apocalypse cannot be gentle.

David Joselit is professor of art history at Yale University.

CRYSTAL LITE

Pamela M. Lee

In 1966, Robert Smithson took Donald Judd on one of his rock-hunting excursions to New Jersey, a trip recollected in his typically hallucinatory essay "The Crystal Land." Far from so much New Age hooey, Smithson's mania for all things crystalline was meant to counter humanistic writing about art. In essays such as "Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space," he opposed the glacial, multifaceted structure of these geological specimens to the organic histories and teleological endgames of contemporary art criticism. In ways not quite articulated by its curators, Smithson's ghost haunts this year's Whitney Biennial, which proves a different kind of Crystal Land. As Biennial curators Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer write, "A new generation of artists is distinguishing itself by its engagement with the politics, popular culture, and art of the late 1960s and early 1970s" and has "been powerfully influenced by important figures from the 1960s art world, such as Robert Smithson." No doubts there: His stamp is everywhere in the galleries, from the proliferation of crystalline structures and mirrored surfaces (Virgil Marti, Yayoi Kusama, Taylor Davis) to prismatic, kaleidoscopic painting (Fred Tomaselli, Kim Fisher) to the progressively degraded and entropic (Glenn Kaino, Dario Robleto). Beyond literal references to these forms, Smithson's notion of the "Time-Crystal"--a nonlinear, refracted view of history seen through a crystalline optic--finds its inadvertent expression with this exhibition. But whereas Smithson appropriated this model to shatter the seeming transparency of the present, the Biennial offers a weak image of the past to suggest a precarious vision of the future.

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The good news is that this is the most even-keeled Biennial in a long time, and that is no small thing. In contrast to the visual glut--indeed, circus atmosphere--of the exhibition's most recent incarnations, here the galleries are installed with a notable respect for the object, with works given ample breathing room and the implied connections between practices lucidly drawn. On this score, credit is due the curators for mounting such a brisk and well-paced exhibition. Relative to its precursors, this Biennial goes down easy.

But is that its very problem? The not-so-good news is that much contemporary art--certainly as presented in this context--seems caught up in a kind of transhistorical feedback loop little relieved by the organizers' theoretical apparatus. That may sound strange in light of the exhibition's backward glance at the '60s, but to insist, as the curators do, that artists "deal with that radical moment as a way to come to terms with the conditions and circumstances of current events, and to find alternatives for the future" is not the same thing as decisively arguing for any particular approach to that encounter or identifying what those alternatives might actually be. Lip service is paid to the "striking uncertainty" of our moment--and how current art embodies this uneasy sense of transition--yet one is struck by how utterly secure, bordering on conservative, much of the work appears. (Painting and figuration have returned with a vengeance, while Net-based art, architecture, and new media in general have dropped off considerably since the last go.) And in the more superficial nods to the '60s, the conceptual preoccupations of the period have hardened into a kind of mannerism or period style.

To be sure, the intergenerational dialogue proposed by the Biennial doesn't seem especially troubled by the relative case with which this conversation takes place or by the ugly reality of current politics, which motivates more than a few efforts to grapple with the past. (Compare the Whitney's seamless image of the '60s with the other biennial's most recent installment. Venice's "Utopia Station," cocurated by Molly Nesbit, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, was an appropriately sweaty and shambling affair that undertook the collective experiment of that decade's radicalism as its organizing principle--and openly courted the potential failure of such an endeavor in the process.) If the '60s serve as the master signified for much recent art, the resulting work, which ranges from the conceptually incisive to the merely cute, betrays a Smithsonian verdict. "The future is but the obsolete in reverse," he pronounced, but that future is growing more obsolete by the minute.

Take David Altmejd's Delicate Men in Positions of Power, 2003. In a gallery painted Prada green, a multiplatform structure showcases a bizarre assortment of props including desiccated werewolf heads; latticed cubes and mirror-lined cavities reminiscent of a Smithson or a Sol LeWitt; costume jewelry; and crystals and stalactites. Non sequiturs ranging from a Star of David to the word "high" are impressed onto the structure's various surfaces. The work's peculiar crossbreeding of Minimalist aesthetics with commercial display offers a refracted image of the '60s as both glittering spectacle and personal mythology. Altmejd's formal vocabulary is just loopy enough to compel us to stay with him; there's some pleasure in conjuring narratives about the work equal to its baroque elaborations. Still, the object's recourse to the historical forms of Minimalism--an art that explicitly engaged questions of the public in its reception--inverts those forms, creating a deeply private, even solipsistic visual language.

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Indeed, much of the art on display mimes the visual rhetoric of the '60s without any marked skepticism about such a return. The head-spinning installation by assume vivid astro focus, which dazzles in its mix of cigarettes, booze, undulating lights, and psychotropics, makes for great boutique or shopwindow display, suggesting its liability as a work of art. By contrast, Taylor Davis constructs elegant, minimalist pallets of pine and mirrors. Their architectural associations, however, are undercut by the audience's desire to chase its image in the polished glass. (If the Minimalist object was once observed to externalize the conditions of spectatorship onto the social field, here that process has been reduced to serving public displays of narcissism.)

A second group of '60s-inflected objects are far cannier about the historical stakes they raise relative to the present. Sam Durant's reimaginings of the decade take the form of drawings based on period photographs of political demonstrations, including several based on the student uprising at Columbia University in May 1968. In making drawings after documentary photographs, the works press us to think about the distance between the representation of such events and the role of the archive in the production of a historical imaginary. (Andrea Bowers's quiet renderings of activists follow a related conceit.) The Minimalism- and process-inspired turn of Tom Burr makes a different claim for the social. Blackout Bar, 2004, a Morris-like plinth reworked as a vinyl fetish, supports a mess of cigarette butts, trash, and empty glasses. Flaccid black shapes in the corner (Warholian flowers done up in the same inky vinyl) dramatize the psychosexual dynamics that attend these seemingly disinterested forms. And Mary Kelly's Circa 1968, 2004, her projection portrait of faceless soixante-huitards onto compressed lint, literalizes Walter Benjamin's dustbin of history to reflect on the relative materiality of the past and its image.

These works are at once theoretically engaged, grave, and witty; their appeal to present conditions tacit rather than explicit; and their suspicions about the representation of politics to the point. Yet whatever history lessons they may offer are outstripped by the uses and abuses of the past displayed in other galleries. Although framed by the social upheavals of the '60s, what counts as the treatment of aesthetics and politics at this Biennial is pretty toothless. Maybe it's just long in the tooth. You can't help but notice the stark contrast between this show, which flaunts its nostalgic turn, with numerous other large-scale exhibitions of the last few years in which the timeliness of recent geopolitics seemed especially urgent. Perhaps the absence of any global reflection here signals a desire to avoid didacticism or the repetition of such curatorial efforts (a worthy enough ambition), but it might also speak to a collective reluctance to confront the mess we're in head-on--or, even more frightening, to imagine what the future might look like. Note that when questions of the political are taken up, they generally occur at a safe distance from US shores (as in Emily Jacir's eloquent photo and text-based series on displaced Palestinians) or are ritualized as theater (Marina Abramovic's children's choir to the UN; Catherine Sullivan's compelling Eastern bloc choreography) or have been relegated to the Biennial's film program (Sam Green's The Weather Underground [2002]). Raymond Pettibon's drawings, which take to task our contemporary version of the "Peaceable Kingdom," are among the few works to register any blatant critique of our moment's "striking uncertainty."

Against this backdrop, the youth-culture sensibility (mostly goth) seen elsewhere in the Biennial accrues significance beyond flirtations with the monstrous or with disaffected teenagers. In fact, you could view this phenomenon as a decisive retreat from present realities, a return to a past that is atavistic rather than historical. I suspect that Smithson would have got a kick out of Aida Ruilova's short-format videos featuring drooling and goggleeyed psychotics. Recalling George Romero by way of John Bock, they tell their own version of a historical horror story. In a gallery in which the viewer is encircled by an orbit of flashing and glinting video monitors, Ruilova gives us an allegorical hall of mirrors, our "reflections" a vortex of regressive behavior. It's a refracted view of the present--a dark crystal of a kind--from which we can little afford not to escape.

Pamela M. Lee is assistant professor of art history at Stanford University.

SUBJECT MATTERS

Scott Rothkopf

This year's Whitney Biennial promised to be provincial--in the best possible sense of the word. Following expansive "we are the world" showcases from Kassel to Istanbul, the Whitney's American mandate relieved its curators (and, in turn, somewhat beleaguered art audiences) of having to cast their attention as far as the Yangtze delta in search of something new. And, in contrast to the Biennial's previous two installments, the current curatorial team of Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer seems even to have resisted the siren song of regionalism, skipping the suburbs of Albuquerque in favor of zip codes in and around Chelsea and LA. None of this is meant to diminish the tremendous importance of recent globalist tendencies, but rather to make a virtue of the Biennial's much-bemoaned vice: The show can--and at present does--offer a fairly accurate picture of the American art world, which, of course, is not the same thing as "American art."

Indeed, it was precisely this parochialism that somewhat unexpectedly turned the show critics love to hate into the one they wanted to love. The advance list of artists bristled with familiar names and recherche up-and-comers, so members of the art world may have secretly feared that if the Biennial were to disappoint, they'd have no one to blame but themselves. Accordingly, the postgame critical enthusiasm had an air of self-fulfilling prophecy and for the most part short-circuited the opportunity for serious reflection that the curators so cannily offered. Iles, Momin, and Singer can be credited with presenting a fairly tidy and representative view of where we are right now. But the question remains as to whether it's where we want to be.

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Judging from the show, there's a lot on young American artists' minds--but perhaps not what we'd expect, given roiling conditions at home and abroad. Although contributions by artists such as Marina Abramovic, Emily Jacir, and, most effectively, Raymond Pettibon self-consciously register current global circumstances, the majority of what's on view looks wholly unengaged when compared with the socially responsive art that remains prevalent on the international scene. Some might consider this stance an abdication of art's critical responsibilities. Others, the Biennial's curators included, have claimed that the show's intermittent moments of dark foreboding implicitly reflect a pervasive sense of anxiety post-9/11. Yet this spin feels somewhat hollow now that so much gothictinged work--whether by Banks Violette, David Altmejd, or Aida Ruilova--glistens with a heavy lacquer of chic allure. (The recent hype surrounding Anton Kern Gallery's admirably zeitgeisty show "Scream" only proved that "anxiety" has become the art world's latest cause for jubilation.) To my mind, by contrast, the apparent obliviousness of so much of the art on offer reflects a generation's unfortunate--but no less understandable--sense of the failed promise of political art, or for that matter politics. It is only against this backdrop of pessimistic futility that Sam Durant's busy pencil drawings of '60s protesters finally came alive for me with a true sense of pathos. Somewhat despite himself, Durant may have become our most accurate political barometer.

At the Whitney, heads seem filled not with headlines but with sprawling assortments of song lyrics, books, and movies, or rather, videos. More than any recent contemporaryart exhibition, the Biennial overwhelms its audience with an expansive compendium of curiosities, enthusiasms, and interests. The lion's share of work seems to announce for its makers, "I am interested in this"--with "this" preferably standing for some slightly outre yet hip cultural signifier like Super Mario Bros. or a disco ballad your parents once knew. There's Jeremy Blake's lush painting-cum-video meditation on the diaries of '60s British fashion designer Ossie Clark. Sue de Beer's hans und Grete, 2002-2003, takes up the cults of Baader-Meinhof and teen slasher flicks. There's Pynchon and Pevsner, biker bars and hot rods, Hamburger Hill and southern LA--each appearing to function not simply as the premise for an isolated work but as evidence of a larger project, propelled in equal measure by research and fascination.

The problem of subject matter is, of course, nothing new. But chosen subjects have taken on a rather distinct character, drawn, as they are, from a particular class and vintage of pop-cultural material. The Biennial suggests that many young American artists are staking out private parcels of the cultural landscape, choosing material that's personal enough to call their own but accessible enough to talk about with others. Along these lines, most artists at the Whitney seem not to be grappling with broad themes--of, say, black or queer "identity"--any more than they are spinning the grand hermetic fictions of a Matthew Ritchie or Barney. Even those works that do conjure mythic universes can appear freighted with stylistic and cultural allusions to the point of feeling less imagined than assembled, as in the case of ink drawings by Ernesto Caivano, a Durer for the Dungeons & Dragons set, or Altmejd's Joseph Cornell-meets-Dark Crystal conglomerations.

While popular culture in all its myriad forms serves as source material for much of the work on view, its present uses seem distinct from those of '60s Pop artists or of the Pictures generation. Chosen subjects are at once more culturally specific and esoteric than soup cans and comic strips. Similarly, the self-reflexive questioning of Pop and Pictures art seems unavailable to many young artists--or simply worn out after nearly a half century during which image sampling necessarily raised as many questions about medium as the media. And if Pop and Pictures evinced a dramatic "de-skilling," today a kind of "re-skilling," however modest, emerges as the norm. Presentation is not raw and deadpan but slightly showy and often highly worked. Evidence of craft--or, at the very least, manifest labor--bustles throughout the galleries, from the fussy pencil reveries of Amy Cutler and Robyn O'Neil, to the maniacal handiwork of Jim Hodges and Dario Robleto, to the painterly proficiency of Barnaby Furnas and Julie Mehretu. A signature style and evidence of effort seem to offer the perfect means for marking cultural territory as one's own.

Yet for all the craftiness on view, one is surprisingly less often tempted to marvel at how a work was made than why. Why the Civil War? Why Ossie Clark? Why the '60s or the '20s? Why dust from every bone in the human body in the shape of patent medicine jars? Is our cultural and historical purview really so broadly leveled that everything is as pressing--or trivial--as everything else? Such questions are not beside the point. Regrettably, the kind of subject matter that I have been describing seems to be putting many artists in something of a bind. On one hand, it automatically connects them to a whole universe of meaning (and an initiated audience of fellow cultural consumers). But its loaded specificity seems to make it all the more difficult to transcend, and often the resulting work isn't any more interesting than the initial source material (young artists beware: Melville is an awfully big fish to fry).

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The best works in the show, however, demonstrate a point of view and a sense of inner purpose that makes them more than exercises in pure fancy or fandom. And the current pan-everything approach to culture may even hold something of a key. This is certainly the case for T.J. Wilcox's "garlands," 2003, a series of short silent films shot on Super-8 stock, which gives them the lustrous patina of a well-worn memory. Each garland stitches together vignettes starring an unlikely cast of characters, whether Ann, the artist's stepmother, who died at forty-two, or Ortino, canine companion to the Romanovs, who himself met an untimely end, in 1918. Wilcox's disparate subjects, also including Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw and transsexual protester Ara Tripp, appear to have little in common apart from the artist's own wistful attention. But it is precisely this attention--the sensitive focus of Wilcox's lens--that draws together his diverse curiosities and passions, setting off unlikely sparks of connection among them.

Like Wilcox, Dave Muller makes unlikely bedfellows of far-flung personae, from Little Stevie Wonder to Isamu Noguchi. For more than a decade, Muller has staged "Three Day Weekend" exhibition/performance events and churned out drawings in the form of gallery announcements crossed with rock posters, chronicling the LA art scene. At the Whitney, Muller presents a standout installation,... That Hollywood Adage: be nice to the people on the way up, because they're the same people on the way down, 2004. The work centers on a hand-scrawled time line wryly charting the "evolution" of pop music as it develops from the '50s through the '70s before playing itself out in reverse over the next thirty years. That Hollywood Adage is peppered with winsome acrylic drawings of a well-stocked wardrobe and record collection, disco balls, and an iPod, among other requisite accoutrements of a music-loving hipster. A mock poster touts "Sam Durant's Noguchi Southern Rock," while in another, Calvin (sans Hobbes) takes a leak on a silver diptych announcing Warhol's "Oxidation Paintings" at Gagosian Gallery. Muller's jokey humor and breezy technical facility all but camouflage his Johnsian flair for scale shifts, internal reflections, and, above all, a sense of self-conscious pictorial discovery. These formal gambits underscore the complicated juggling of cultural registers and mythologies that are at the core of Muller's practice, and they make his time line as much a meditation on the life of art as on the life of music.

Muller's disciplinary border-crossing takes on an almost manic dimension in Andrea Zittel's Sufficient Self, 2004, a video "slide show" documenting her life in remote Joshua Tree, California. Since the fall of 2000, Zittel has lived part-time at A-Z West, a Bauhausmeets-Swiss Family Robinson compound where any hints of neo-hippiedom are held in check by the neurotic compulsions of a very resourceful hausfrau. Zittel's photo and textbased diary shows her designing custom outfits for hiking, while worrying over a shortage of drinking water and the perfect way to cook homemade Egg McMuffins (in sawed-off coffee cans, of course). No matter how remote her existence, her problems all hit close to home--what to wear, what to cook, tricks for cleaning house or balancing bowls at the side of the sink. At a time when the art-versus-design dialectic feels shopworn and many artists are bent on manufacturing pretexts for social engagement, Zittel's all-consuming artistic project reanimates these issues with a highly personal and gripping life(style) force.

In highlighting Zittel's and Muller's work, I don't mean to make a virtue out of the long-discredited values of "authenticity" or "engagement" simply for their own sake. Yet for both these artists, unlike many at the Whitney, various "interests" serve more as a point of departure than arrival. This is perhaps most eloquently true of Richard Prince, who presents a new group of wood-and-fiberglass paintings cast from the undulating hoods of muscle cars. For nearly a decade Prince has been producing canvases marked by an increased engagement with gestural abstraction, but it has been difficult to know precisely how to read them. Were we to see their zealous handling as an ironic spoof on painterliness (in keeping with the critical trajectory of Prince's early work), or were we to judge each picture in terms of its individual success as painting (a test his canvases didn't always pass)? And what, if any, connection could be drawn between their bravura brushwork and seductive pop references? In his "Hood Paintings," 2003, Prince puts these questions decisively to rest. With their readymade sculptural curves, the workmanlike joinery of their plywood supports, and the elegant painterly incident of their auto-primer gray surfaces, they are as hotwired to the big questions of formal abstraction as they are to the big engines of muscle cars. In these paintings Prince gives his compelling social interests equally compelling form, so that "subject matter" seems at once entirely the point and beside it. With so many young artists now playing the cultural field, his paintings offer a timely object lesson for us all.

Scott Rothkopf is a senior editor of Artforum.