Mild about Larry.

WHEN LAWRENCE RINDER WAS NAMED CURATOR OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE WHITNEY TWO YEARS AGO, HE INHERITED ONE OF THE TOUGHEST GIGS IN THE WORLD OF ART: THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL. BECAUSE THE BIENNIAL REMAINS CONTEMPORARY ART'S BEST-KNOWN SURVEY, HOSTED BY ONE OF THE ART WORLD'S MOST VISIBLE VENUES, IT'S THE SHOW CRITICS LOVE TO HATE. WE ASKED THREE ARTFORUM REGULARS, BOB NICKAS, BRUCE HAINLEY, AND GEORGE BAKER, FOR THEIR TAKES. (ARTFORUM.COM EDITOR SAUL ANTON ADDS A NEW-MEDIA FOOTNOTE.) THE ONLY CONSTANT: THE CARIPING, OF COURSE--AND ONE STRAY NOTE OF TRIPLE CONSENSUS.

BOB NICKAS MULTIPLE VOICE

"Where's the art? There's nothing to see." Thus spoke the well-dressed dowager as she teetered dangerously over the mutant sculptures of Luis Gispert. The artist, by way of a nearby wall label, refers to Remix (Extended Beats), 2001, as "a unique mix of ghetto style and Danish modem design." She wasn't having any of it. And Gispert's photos of cheerleaders seemed more taunting than cheering. She blinked in my direction, and though I shrugged sympathetically, she scowled--that grandmotherly look that says quite plainly, "You, mister, are this dose to being cut from the will!" The museum can only hope that she is not one of its benefactors.

Ladies from her tribe are everywhere in this part of town--just one of the reasons I so rarely venture north. Yet here I was, following her through the show, trying to listen in on her crankiness. But we were moving along too slowly and she didn't have much more to offer. Help arrived in the form of a junior high school group--two gangly boys in particular, who I railed back down to the second floor.

"Wow! This is so cool!" They were entranced by Ken Feingold's talking heads, disembodied but with moving eyes and lips (If/Then, 2001). The buzz of the crowd around the heads made their conversation hard to follow. Feingold's own name for the software that enables them to speak to each other is "artificial pseudo intelligence." But after shadowing the boys a while longer, I realized they were fitted with a similar program, and the "Oh wows" wore thin.

Now I was on my own, though it was hard to shake the feeling that I was still in junior high. Robert Lazzarini's anamorphically distorted pay phone (2002) and an installation by Forcefield, Third Annual Roggabogga, 2002, a terrific cavelike sideshow, were both being met by viewers with that same geeky, dumb wonder. So why was I turned on by one and not the other? The pay phone, given a room to itself, virtually basks in its own strangeness. And yet an everyday object made strange, and in the middle of a museum, is nothing more than a normal art object circa now. With Forcefield, the energy level is high and wild.

I was reminded that many expect the Biennial to function as a report on the state of art. Maybe that's why it's often criticized for not having a point of view. But moving from one floor of the Whitney to another, it's hard to miss the schizophrenic mood: all high-tech, gimmicky, and gadgety one minute then homemade, crafty, and funky the next. Uninteresting shows, like shortchanged humans, may have little or no personality, but this Biennial's personality is decidedly split.

On the way to Feingold's Al heads, you pass the wondrous realm of Trenton Doyle Hancock, whose works are among the few I would happily have spirited home. In the forest he pieces together on canvas, the trees are entwined with the phrase REMEMOR WITH MEMBRY, forming an endless stream of roots and vines. Nature, like memory, appears as a place that is very much alive and ultimately untamable. An equally fantastical landscape can be found in the drawings of the architect Lebbeus Woods, with cities envisioned as the rise and fall of the earth itself. While there are sections of sustained and heightened mood (Anne Wilson's black lace webbing as a prelude to Vija Celmins's gorgeous spiderwebs) and passages that flow hilariously (Christian Marclay's stretched-like-taffy musical instruments set the stage for Destroy All Monsters' Strange Fruit: Rock Apocrypha, 2000-2002, a Who's Who and a Who's That? of Detroit luminaries), gears abruptly shift even when proximity isn't an issue. Am I the only one who simply can't r econcile hand-stitched quilts with a hard drive? Or is the quilt the original version of the laptop? I started to wonder if Larry Rinder was on a mission to wed futures and pasts, whether that was possible, and whether I wanted to go along for the ride.

At that point, the show turned into something of an amusement park, and not exactly for the worse. The fourth floor radiates from Main Drag, 2001, a big fun house of a room given over to the late Margaret Kilgallen, a beautiful tribute. Nearby are Janine Gordon's kinetic photos of kids in mosh pits, Christian Jankowski's televangelist (The Holy Artwork, 2001), and Sanford Biggers and Jennifer Zackin's video a small world..., 1999. Their collaboration is built around Super-8 home movies from the artists' childhoods, one next to the other, and although they grew up in very different environments--in African American and Jewish families, respectively--the overlaps are at times seamless, as if you were seeing double. The footage from parallel vacations at Disneyland carries over through most of the rooms that follow; a theme park after all.

I was exhausted--no big surprise--not to mention dispirited, and I wasn't altogether sure why. The show has its sublime moments, but they are separated by only the thinnest of membranes from some real clinkers. (How impermeable are white walls?) In an art fair, one expects sudden, disturbing jolts at every turn, quality to rise and plummet, but in a museum? I thought about something I already knew: Big shows don't work.

Slowly the pleasures of the day came back to me. Trenton Doyle Hancock, Lebbeus Woods, Vija Celmins. And then there was Rachel Harrison's what-the-hell-is-that? sculpture, Collier Schorr's boy-take on Andrew Wyeth's "Helga" series, 1999-2002, Yun-Fei Ji's magical/sly panoramas, Lorna Simpson's Easy to Remember, 2001 (who doesn't love Rodgers and Hart?), Hirsch Perlman's creation-as-Pandora'sbox, and the Rural Studio in Alabama, now the legacy of the late Samuel Mockbee. Recycled/reclaimed architecture this exciting--a wall of car windshields!--makes the now tasteful vernacular look like an ad for I-Tome Depot. On my way out of the museum I thought about how you have to be inside architecture to have any real feeling for it. I say let's go down to Alabama and see for ourselves.

BRUCE HAINLEY TRUST BUSTER

Poor Joseph Cornell. Never the most gregarious guy when he was alive, he's now commanded to speak from the grave by the annoying collective Archive (Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh), who, by interviewing dead artists "through seances conducted by professional spirit mediums and psychics," put a necrophiliac spin on starfucking. I feel about Archive's lousy project, A Visit with Joseph Cornell, 2002, pretty much the way I feel about most of Lawrence Rinder's show: It's dead.

This would explain Rinder's veiling his curatorial objectives in the spiritual. Given his catalogue intro, which manages, sleazily, to screen his entire escapade through the events of 9/11 (despite almost all of the works' having been created before that date) and to invoke "truth" and "sincerity" while warning that "perhaps beauty and irony are luxuries of peacetime," I'd have hoped he could instill another of those much touted patriotic/spiritual values: trust. I'm not sure which is more depressing--that Rinder distrusts his own authority by including a bit of everything even possibly thought of as artsy establishment Biennial, (thereby rendering good work a statistical fluke); that he demonstrates a lack of trust in his audience's intellect, peddling the stridently kooky, the cute, and the home-styled (from quilts and stained glass to an embarrassing "performance artist" who paints open eyes on her closed eyelids); or that careless decisions about the presentation of even the strongest work derail the view er's trust in his curatorial capabilities.

Rinder attempts what I guess might be called an antiestablishment Biennial, "outside the New York-LA axis," which is, I gather, something like George W's axis of evil: "What are the assumptions that underlie the divisions and boundaries that we have come to take for granted and which stipulate that this, but not that, is suitable for museum display?" Fine, I suppose, but Rinder backpedals rapidly, writing that his Biennial "opens the door only hesitantly to the possible richness of a truly expanded view of artistic practice." Why so timid? Blow the door open so wide it flies off the hinges. If the task is to interrogate or display the pervasive infiltration of media deemed "culture," include the sadly canceled NBC high-school drama Freaks and Geeks, Steven Meisel's "Hollywood Wives" Versace ads, and, given Rinder's intro, raw footage of the 9/11 disasters. As with the inclusion of the Rodney King video in the 1993 Biennial, I'm not sure what I would make of such decisions in the context of art, but at least i t would show the curator's conviction to his stated vision.

I trusted that with 130-plus artists and a "truly expanded" view of artistic practice there'd be some exciting new work. The galleries are so chock-full that there is rarely an opportunity to consider anything without bumping into something or being subjected to highfalutin Muzak. Yet despite the sheer quantity of contributors to the show, there wasn't a single artist of whom I'd never heard (and I'd not heard of most of them) whose work matters--with one bright, saving exception. The miraculous thing about seeing great art is its palliative effect. Rinder's inclusion of the Rural Studio provides an oasis in the desert, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels grateful for the introduction. The late Samuel Mockbee and his students at the Auburn University School of Architecture in Hale County, Alabama, made structures that were bracingly innovative in form and in their use of salvaged materials (e.g., the amazing Mason's Bend Community Center with its wall and roof of Chevrolet Caprice windshields), and th ey revisited and reinvigorated the aesthetic, political, and economic concerns of such architectural predecessors as Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra, whose inexpensive materials and streamlined open-air designs weren't just a matter of affect but the upshot of decisions made in hopes of effecting change.

The paintings in this Biennial are (also with a single enthralling exception) dreadful. But--even though I can in a moment come up with radically dissimilar yet excellent painters at different points in their career (Maureen Gallace, John Tremblay, Brian Calvin, Lecia Dole-Recio), none of whom has ever been in a Biennial and all of whom demand something new of the medium while responding to its historical exigencies--whatever. And after seeing Vija Celmins's superb, heartbreaking yet sinister cobweb paintings--wonders in gossamer grisaille, meditations on the medium and its fusty history--juxtaposed with and dwarfed by one of Vera Lutter's large, god-awful X ray-ish black-and-white photos, any vestige of trust one might have had in the curation evaporates.

Similarly, I consider Vincent Fecteau one of the most important artists of his generation. Notice in Untitled, 2001, the punning wooden balls behind the latticing, the rope knots attaching them to the odd foldlike structure, the various surface textures painted black and blue: Fecteau is using modernism as a vernacular, fucking with it to explore vital sculptural issues not yet played-out by modernism (without falling into the traps of postmodernism's cool antiaesthetic critique), deranging the limits of craft and art, uselessness and waste--all while allowing open-ended referential fun and irony: the blue of "blue balls" displaced to the hue of the chamber that holds them; the scheme of black-and-blue suggesting s/m gaming as well as the bruising relations between artist and looker, roles constantly shifting. It's a relief to come upon his small but fierce sculptural provocations, but Rinder and his curatorial team put Fecteau's subtle works on pedestals of different sizes and--despite Rinder's proviso that art "perform some greater role than mere decoration"--decorated the pedestal tops with bevels instead of keeping them unadorned.

Rinder likes National Geographical, pseudo-anthropological, -museological exhibity stuff, but instead of getting a master--David Wilson of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, for example--we're stuck with the ersatz: John Leanos and Salon de Fleurus. The latter re-creates the "legendary Paris salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas" by presenting "sepia copies of works from Stein's famed art collection." Every Biennial curator selects a few more-established artists to suggest his aesthetic lineage--thus the great Celmins and the laughable Kiki Smith, neither ever exactly overlooked these days. Given Rinder's interest in the virtual and digital, given the standard use of appropriation as part of contemporary art practice, why not include (instead of the Salon de Fleurus and their quaint nostalgia-mongering and repetitions) Sturtevant, who's alive and well and an American in Paris still making her fucked-up, brain-bending work, none of which has been seen outside Europe? But theoretical acumen and memory (hi storical and critical intervention) are hardly Rinder's strong points. How else to explain that Collier Schorr's An Accounting of Jens F. (Notes from the Helga/Jens Project), 1999-2002--a weak, blatant rip-off of Richard Hawkins's great collages and books-- is in but Hawkins is not? Or that Rinder seems not to have considered that Sanford Biggers's and Jennifer Zackin's dual-projected home movies' similarities were as much the product of the Super-8 movie camera's technology and marketing as ethno-economic happenstance. How else to explain the inclusion of the harmless work of Chris Johanson (I think skateboarders are hot, and how delightful that they're making art, but it's just sad for the Whitney, which, after all, gave a retrospective to Red Grooms, to have someone pass this stuff off as new or innovative). Or that Rinder can get away with writing that "comics have become a major inspiration to artists of every generation" (emphasis mine). Perhaps Archive could channel Roy Lichtenstein and ask him what he thinks of this recent comics fad.

Despite all the snafus, I still had some fun. The perceptually warped and warping, psychotic/psychedelic sculpture of Evan Holloway looks killer as always. Rachel Harrison's photo-sculptural constructions continue to intrigue me. What are these weird and perplexing things anyway? Unplugged, 2000, looks like an Artschwager crate gone berserk In Bustle in Your Hedgerow, 1999, Elizabeth Taylor strolls through a green minimalist equivalent of a topiary maze. Referring as much to Liz's "gardening" (and ghost busting) in Night Watch--where '70s-fabulous, boozy, busty Liz dupes everyone out of life and fortune--as to Minimalism, Harrison, with her merging of sculptural form and tabloid sensibility, could almost be seen to be meditating on the uncanny consequence and confrontation of object, objecthood, and image in the continually astonishing oeuvre of Cady Noland.

I adore that Miltos Manetas discovered--despite the wizardly digital interests of Rinder's boss, Maxwell Anderson--that www.whitneybiennial.com wasn't a registered domain name and hijacked it to curate his own online biennial (I recommend John Tremblay's deliriously dopey contribution). I hope Manetas holds out for bucks equivalent to the Bucksbaum Award should the Whitney offer to buy him out.

The solution to this farrago: Dump curating by committee, dump the concept that any one person can provocatively and intelligently curate and install a show this large. Hire four curators of different backgrounds and ages. Give each a floor of the Whitney. They answer to no one, and if their lists overlap, well, darling, that only makes things interesting and produces a momentary quorum of aesthetic valence. It couldn't possibly produce anything more self-indulgent or irrelevant than what the Whitney has presented in the last few years.

GEORGE BAKER

FILM REBUFF

"Only through sickness can we know what true health is," Joe Gibbons states at one point in his video Confessions of a Sociopath, 2001. "That's why I've gone to such lengths to develop my neurosis." Wobbling between Super-8 films of past transgressions and video footage of present inaction, Gibbons's work refuses the suturing of its two contradictory media through its author's confrontation with the intractable disparity between his former and current selves--a kind of Krapp's Last Tape-inspired reverie. In its salutary pessimism, the work reads to me like a rejoinder by film and video curator Chrissie Iles to exhibition head Lawrence Rinder, whom I like to imagine speaking through the affirmations of the televangelist in Christian Jankowski's insipid The Holy Artwork, 2001 ("Thank you, Lord, for creating video...").

It is hard to know what to expect from an institution that, just months ago, nearly scrapped its most artistically vital limb, the unruly Independent Study Program (a crucial forum for the training of young artists, critics, and curators). But Gibbons's statement amounts to the most generous appraisal I could imagine of this year's Biennial, and it would be my rejoinder to anyone whose reaction to this exhibition is to mourn the state of contemporary art. Rather, mourn the sorry state of contemporary curation, which suffers from an all but complete disinterest in the historicity of artistic production and the crucial debates of art criticism.

The "sickness" of the 2002. Biennial, however, lies in a specific problem confronting museums today: the sudden fusion of the digital modes of much contemporary work with the (here exacerbated) logic of decontextualization long dear to museum and curator alike. We witness a growing tautological equivalence between technological and administrative procedures of recoding (the digital artist as mixer of formerly distinct media through the uber-archive of the database; the curator as a kind of hip-hop sampler of artistic "statements" through the labyrinthine narrative of the mega-exhibition--and it was no coincidence that there were so many DJs in the current show). It seems to me that it is in the grip of the amnesia peculiar to this techno-administrative fusion that this Biennial's massive appeal to mythic forms of experience erupts: in the Heideggerian, crypto-primitivist blather of Rinder's program of "Beings," "Spaces," and "Tribes"; and in our being force-fed a series of "artworks" focusing on a fringe Amer ican lineup of psychics, televangelists, sci-fi monsters, automatons, superheroes--the list goes on and on. Such is the regressive harvest of the techno-optimist, tourist-professional model of the curator.

Other harvests are imaginable, and in this exhibition they came mostly from the film and video program, evidently organized by Iles according to a different logic: the endangered scholar-amateur model of curation (amateur here taken in its etymological sense, that of a lover). It is only in light of the Biennial's investment in mythic experience that we can understand another of the film program's rejoinders: the magisterial work of Robert Beavers, functioning here as its centerpiece. There is no doubt that Beavers is a classicist; no doubt, too, that in stunning short films like Work Done, 1972-99, or The Ground, 2001 his vision operates through "correspondences," analogical connections between disparate objects--both natural and cultural--that often serve as the ground of mythic experience. And yet in Beavers's hands such archaism functions rather to allegorize the outdatedness of his medium; Work Done, for instance, seems to insist on film's embed-dedness in an episteme of manual labor (one sequence noses around a construction site, others compare camera movement to the work of a bookbinder or a European cook) as well as of perceptual defamiliarization (the impossibly slow fall of a chainsawed tree mirrored in the impossibly dilated rhythm of Beavers's montage). Even more important, Beavers s analogies often contest the fusion of myth, opting instead for the most poignant incompatibilities: The Ground compares the actions of a Greek stonemason and his chisel to the filmmaker's editorial cuts, only to underline the yawning gap between the three-dimensionality of architecture and the two-dimensionality of film in a repeated scene in which a man offers up his cupped, curved hand and then beats it flat against his chest in a resounding thud. This is a painful gesture, almost a sign of bereavement; Beavers s is a form of medium specificity that leaves you weakkneed. It was developed by the similarly backward glancing offerings of many of Iles's younger choices (I was particularly impressed by the Broodthaersian fil m by David Gatten, Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, 1999), and it utterly deflated any morphological echoes in Rinder's exhibition spaces--specifically Stephen Dean's Pulse, 2001, which turns both video and the Third World other into fodder for the revitalization of mythic aesthetic modes (e.g., painting, by which it was surrounded in Rinder's installation).

Only when the techno-administrative fusion is fissured, only when the curatorial recoding is ruptured, does a work in this context emerge as compelling. By which I do not mean to praise the large cohort of "do-it-yourself' aesthetics--the pinhole cameras, quilts, ancient-seeming expressionist canvases, comic-strip drawings--favored by Rinder as much as his technological gadgets; these are merely the impotent flailings proper to a world dominated by the amnesiac use of technology. Irit Batsry's medium-specific digital video These Are Not My Images (Neither There Nor Here), 2000, and Lorna Simpson's Easy to Remember, 2001, both offer up modes of recoding that run counter to the totalizing claims of the curation: Batsry in the insistence on the recalcitrant otherness of the images "taken" in her movie; Simpson in the concatenation of humming voices that remain individual, nongeneralizable, gridded but constantly wandering astray. Chemi Rosado Seijo's decrepit deletions of media objects surely form a more effecti ve archive than the seances of Archive (art's revenge against the falsehoods of mass culture versus art's masochistic embrace of mass culture's revenge against art). And Rachel Harrison emerges here as perhaps the most important sculptor of her generation (rivaled only, in my estimation, by Tom Burr, who is not included in the show). Turning on strict spatial oppositions of inside and outside, front and back, Harrison's selection presents a sculpture of gaps-- experienced literally in the spaces between the haphazard, often splintered planks used to create a form; or phenomenologically in the work's collision of planar photography and volumetric sculpture; or historically in her insistence on confronting the aporia between the legacies of Constructivism and the readymade. Harrison's tilting, jerry-built Unplugged, 2000, makes a laughingstock of Payphone, 2002, the slanted digital gimmick by Robert Lazzarini a room away (the catalogue informs us that his work is "astonishing," which is untrue sculpturally and would be unfortunate artistically). And her almost curatorial use of sculpture as a display surface for photographs qualifies as another critical--because self-reflexive--mode of recoding, just as it simultaneously splits the inter-media fusion offered up by the model of sculpture "advanced" in a work like Peter Sarkisian's Hover, 1999 (video displaces sculpture in their fusion; phenomenological exploration of space becomes a manipulated image of the same; and the regression entailed is embraced in the work's throwback to the mother-child dyad). Develop your neurosis indeed: Sarkisian's and Harrison's opposition announces a contemporary war between the false plenitude of the technological/curatorial Imaginary and the uneasy challenge of the artistic Real. The time has come to choose sides.

SAUL ANTON

FORMAL AFFAIR

Data visualization, hypertext narrative, software art, alternative browsers, and games--adjunct curator of new media art Christiane Paul's Biennial roundup casts the Net wide, despite its modest (ten-work) size. Though she presents a useful overview of the dominant genres in the field, Paul's survey suffers from some of the same touristic eclecticism that plagues the broader show, even as her selections favor heuristic demonstrations of technological possibilities and a certain data formalism--two common pitfalls for new-media art.

Some of the work in the show avoids these traps, for example, Riot, 1999 (all new-media artworks in the Biennial can be accessed through the museum's website, www.whitneymuseum.org), a browser designed by Mark Napier, creator of the popular Potatoland.org. Riot downloads logos and brand names from across the Web and pastes them into a single window resembling a Jacques Villegle decollage in reverse (instead of tearing away layers of posters--or, in this case, websites--it adds them), purportedly to disrupt the neat demarcations of the Web's corporate colonies. Yet this is finally no more than a symbolic gesture, and it feels curiously retrograde in a medium typically geared toward use-value. Far more effective is Josh On & Futurefarmers' They Rule, 2001, which adapts to the Internet the premise behind the late Mark Lombardi's six-degrees-of-separation maps of the international power elite. They Rule follows the money, tracking down the connections between high financiers and the transnational corporations the y control. The site's dynamic interactivity allows you to quickly apprehend the three degrees of Warren Buffett's corporate influence, the Enron feedback loop, or the reason Michael A. Miles is one of the seven most powerful people you've never heard of. You can make and save your own maps of our oligarchs and click through to glean such invaluable information as which politicians get money and from whom.

Works like Lisa Jevbratt's 1:1, 1999-2002, reveal a techie passion for the Web per se by visualizing what the Web "looks" like. Offering five ways to view portions of Web space as it existed in 1999 and 2001, 1:1 is indeed an interesting object lesson in the mutable nature of the interface. The most visually seductive work here, however, is Benjamin Fry's Valence, 1999, which displays correlations in large data sets--anything from a genome sequence to a novel to website traffic--and presents them as three-dimensional images resembling a solar system that you can zoom in on and circle around. This permits one to quickly grasp relationships one couldn't "see" before. One could, for example, study the frequency with which the word evil occurs in the Bible. A word that appears only once lies at the center of the screen; words that appear often are found at the outer edge. The catch is that you need to know what you're looking for. The data set on view when I visited the Biennial was a genome sequence, which I cou ldn't make head or tail of. Both works are engaging but in the end feel like exercises in the visual display of information, ultimately a new-media formalism.

The same holds true for the hypertext narratives: Yael Kanarek's World of Awe, 2000, and Margot Lovejoy's Turns, 2001. Both offer sophisticated, engrossing visual interfaces that draw you into the narratives (Kanarek's is pre-written, Lovejoy's interactive). The problem is that hypertext--still seen by many as the silver bullet that will finally shatter the inherent linearity of narrative--is, in fact, the most linear form of all, because it actualizes relationships between different moments of a text in the form of a link, essentially flattening its figural play into a spatial relation, turning it into visual design. Paul's implicit argument is, I suppose, that data--and the Internet--should be understood as spatial rather than linguistic objects. Altogether absent from the Biennial is the sort of alternative model of new media offered by French artist Claude Closky's Do You Want Love or Lust?, 1997 (on Dia Center for the Arts's website, www.diacenter.org), which relies neither on technological bravura nor f ormalist aesthetics. Here one link leads to another based on semantic relations, creating a work that, to quote Jean-Francois Lyotard, "presents the unpresentable."