Room with a view.

B.D.O by Glen Seator ("1997 Biennial Exhibition," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City)

While this year's Whitney Biennial reflects a world in which artists' work is more important than their identities, it's ironic that the show's most popular piece is by a gay man. Glen Seator's room-size sculpture. B.D.O. is a full-scale 12.000-pound re-creation of Whitney Museum director David Ross's office--tilted at a 30-degree angle, which generates an unnerving sense of vertigo to those who peer inside.

In a less than a decade, the 37-year-old Brooklyn, N.Y.-based artist has built an international reputation with a series of such altered architectural clones. In January. Seator reproduced a sizable section of the street outside San Francisco's Capp Street Project gallery--complete with telephone poles and oil stains on the asphalt. The effect, as with the Whitney piece, is to turn a mundane subject into a disorienting spectacle.

Though he has made artwork with gay subtexts. Seator is more concerned with the universal ways we project ideas into physical space. Architecture provides the perfect vehicle for his playful perceptual ideas. By aiming straight for the boss's quarters at the Whitney, Seator once again shows the brashness that makes him one of the most exciting American artists working today.