Whitney watch.

THE ARTISTS: Doug Aitken Roman Anikushin and Bob Paris Michael Ashkin Robert Attanasio Butt Barr Zoe Beloff Douglas Blau Chris Burden Charles Burnett Louise Bourgeois Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT) Vija Celmins Abigail Child Francesco Clements Bruce Conner Bryan Crockett Cultural Alchemy Philip-Lores diCorcia Sam Easterson Wendy Ewald William Forsythe Leah Gilliam Michael Gitlin Felix Gonzalez-Torres Dan Graham David Hammons Ken Jacobs Ilya Kabakov Martin Kersels Annette Lawrence Iara Lee Zoe Leonard Sharon Lockhart Charles Long Kristin Lucas Kerry James Marshall Antonio Martorell Paul McCarthy Amanda Miller Paul D. Miller Christopher Munch Bruce Nauman Gabriel Orozco Tony Oursler Laura Parnes Jennifer Pastor Raymond Pettibon Richard Phillips Lari Pittman Richard Prince Charles Ray Matthew Ritchie Jason Rhoades Aaron Rose Edward Ruscha John Schabel Katy Schimert Glen Seator Paul Shambroom David Sherman Shahzia Sikander Shashwati Talukdar Diana Thater Cecilia Vicuna Kara Walker T. J. Wilcox Sue Williams Robert Wilson The Wooster Group

Before the venerable accounting firm of Price Waterhouse had even finished tabulating the carefully guarded ballots of the 1997 Whitney Blennial's two-women jury, the art press had whipped itself Into a teacup tizzy of speculation and second guessing. While the curators - Whitney veteran Lisa Phillips opted to share equal billing with Parkett US editor and Harper's Bazaar contributing editor Louise Neri - maintain they simply wished to avoid the hype that preceded the '95 version (I believe them; after all, many feel it was the preshow fanfare that earned curator Klaus Kertess the backlash of a critical press), their reticence has became a cause celebre in its own right. Publications from this one to The New York Times resorted to sleuthing end rushed to publish progressively more complete lists of Biennial nominees, amidst general grumbling about state secrets and ante-upping mystification. Why all the gnashIng of teeth? Two reasons. First: no major survey lends so high stakes en imprimatur to as many young artists (the list published here confirms what, given the youngish curators, had promised to be en especially large youth quotient). The second reason Is simply the venue. Despite the Increasingly decentralized nature of the art world, New York remains, for better or worse, the place people come to see art. Documents and Venice may be both bigger and more international, but it is precisely a certain provincialism (written right Into the museum's name) that makes the Whitney Biennial count as much as it does. The Blennial is ultimately a show in which the New York art world talks to itself, about itself. This doesn't mean the reit of the country doesn't count, just that the show is all about processing through Manhattan. While it's heartening, amidst the enervating buzz, to remember that "artist" is not only, or even foremost, a career designation, it is nevertheless equally a truism that very few artists make careers of International note without their work pasting through New York. With all this in mind, I sat down with Phillips and Neri to try to look behind, beyond, and Into the hype as we approach the March 20 opening. But first, with all due respect, the envelope please.

JACK BANKOWSKY: How would you describe your mandate as curators, and how are you approaching the show? Do you have a central theme or premise, or are you trying for a more objective overview of tendencies that have been in discussion over the last two years?

LISA PHILLIPS: First of all, it's a departure for a Whitney curator to invite someone outside the museum to work in an equal capacity. Louise and I have worked together to form the concept of this exhibition, and we agreed from the outset that we didn't want to make a sampler of every tendency in American art. It wouldn't have been possible in the space we have, and we really questioned whether it would've even been productive to try. Anyway, I don't think there's a single, preferred style of working among artists now. It's such an open field.

LOUISE NERI: The dichotomy that Lisa set up when she invited me to be cocurator - her being inside the institution and American and my being outside the museum and a foreigner with no real, national roots - fueled a lively dialogue out of which we developed a matrix of motivations rather than an illustrative theme. This matrix drew on our observations - both our own and those we share - about what it is to be an artist in the US today.

JB: When you talk about being an artist in the US today, I'm wondering how you are dealing with the "American" issue. The 1995 Biennial, for example, included two Mexican artists and two Canadians.

LN: For the 1997 Biennial, "American" artists are those who primarily live and work in the US, whose work reflects something of their experience of and response to the cultural conditions and influences we identify as being American, from Cecilia Vicuna, who has divided her time between New York and Chile for over twenty years, to Ilya Kabakov, who recently made New York his principal base.

JB: What about the range of artists included, in terms of generations?

LP: For the most part, there aren't as many established figures as in previous Biennials, because we felt it was better to give an opportunity to those who haven't had as much exposure.

JB: When I interviewed Klaus Kertess before the 1995 Biennial, he mentioned three artists of a slightly older generation - Bruce Nauman, Cy Twombly, and Brice Marden - who he thought were pivotal to the moment he was dealing with. Do you have artists, either more established or younger, who you think exemplify something particular to your show, or to your take on the field of possibilities before you?

LN: Paradoxically, some of the more established figures in the show - David Hammons, Louise Bourgeois, The Wooster Group, Ed Ruscha, Chris Burden, William Forsythe, Bruce Nauman, Raymond Pettibon - are exemplary for their icon-oclasm. But in the end, it was important that everything in the show embody the same level of complexity and intensity, whether it was produced by a very young artist or an experienced and established one. That was what we were looking for.

JB: At the same time, there must be pressure points from the last couple of years that you think are decisive in contemporary art. Or do your selections just boil down to individual sensibilities or aesthetics?

LP: There are decisive pressure points. In a general way, we could say that we're interested in how an artist constructs a world that is the product of the intersection of a private cosmology and some kind of shared, public reality.

LN: You could tie the material and conceptual complexity that the show reflects to a widespread obsession with complexity theory in contemporary culture. Many artists have slowed down their output by gaining more control over their production or, in the case of many younger artists, by starting out with extremely ambitious projects that contain so many contingencies that they might seem almost impossible to realize, like Jennifer Pastor's ambiguous sculptural tableaux that involve enormous research and forays into new techniques and materials. Some of these projects take years to accomplish because of the preliminary research required and then the execution, whether it involves making a fantasy real or drawing attention to the surreal theatricality of the everyday.

JB: Well, it sounds like one thing that you're talking about is simply the formal or technical adequacy of a vision or a project.

LP: Yes. At other moments, an offhand approach was more prevalent, but I think that art practice in general has evolved in another direction.

LN: All the artists we're dealing with are conversant with previous ideas and practices, whether it's to do with a critique of formalism or of institutional practice. But they're also insistent on the primacy and intensity of the experience, whether visual, aural, or both.

LP: And though a lot of the artists in the show use technologically advanced media, they're also resistant to the idea of a technological utopia - or at least, they have a healthy skepticism toward it. JB: It's interesting that you sense a reaction against technology, because one could probably also have documented the involvement of recent art with cyberspace or various digital technologies - especially in photography - during this period.

LN: With a few exceptions, the more interesting work to date on the Web is being done by users who really understand the medium - like hackers, musicians, cult groups, youth 'zines, and so on. JB: But does this activity figure into the show?

LP: Yes, in a very selective way, such as the Quicktime films of Zoe Beloff or Matthew Ritchie's analogue to his ever-expanding universe of characters and events.

JB: In past Biennials, the film and video section has been organized by curators different from those in charge of the rest of the exhibition. How are you handling that portion of the show?

LP: We wanted it to be a more integrated part of the exhibition rather than a separate, self-contained program. As with the rest of the project, we consulted with a broad range of professionals in the field, including in-house advisers, but we selected everything firsthand, with the show as a whole in mind. We hope to establish some close links through installations and viewing areas throughout the exhibition itself.

JB: Are there any other changes in the way you're curating film and video this year?

LN: We are including slightly fewer works so that we can give film and video something closer to the weight and exposure of plastic art in the show. The presence of video and film will be very strong, both floor by floor and in terms of programming. Each work will be played every day of the show, or as close as we can come to doing that, given the contingencies in dealing with this medium.

JB: One of the pivotal points of conversation in the art world over the last couple of years could be shorthanded as the interface between art and fashion. Does that figure at all in the show?

LP: Only inasmuch as artists respond to many things in the world. Obviously, the art/fashion exchange is something that's touched on occasionally in the exhibition, but it certainly isn't central. Fashion as a construction of a fictional identity is probably about as far as it goes here.

LN: I think the current so-called interface between art and fashion is largely a one-way street perpetrated by a fashion world hungry for ideas. That probably explains why we didn't give it much thought.

LP: In the work in the exhibition, there's a constant looping between reality and fiction going on. You're often not quite sure where it stands.

LN: It's often a distillation and theatricalization of reality. It might start from the same premise as much didactic, deconstructive work but, rather than simplifying or explicating its content, it takes things much further by looping back to a more complex meditation on the original source; it becomes some kind of mysterious model of reality, recognizable yet perplexing.

JB: On the one hand you seem to want to emphasize work that crosses boundaries between traditional media. And you also call for a kind of visual or sensual plenitude that you've opposed to what's been called a "factographic" approach. Given these two notions, what does that mean in terms of painting and photography?

LP: It means they'll both be present. We've tended to focus on work that clearly embodies narrative, such as Sue Williams' recent paintings and Zoe Leonard's photo archive. That emphasis is evident in the show across all media.

LN: Generally the work is far less concerned with the closed circuit of aesthetic ideology than with the desire to communicate experience through representational images.

LP: There are a lot of younger artists in the show and mature but completely unknown ones like Aaron Rose, Another surprise will be the number of large-scale pieces that have gone directly from the studio to Europe, particularly from Los Angeles, without ever having been seen in the US, such as those by Jason Rhoades and Diana Thater. We miss a lot in New York. Right now, Los Angeles is just as important a center of production as New York, and that's something that will be represented in the exhibition.

JB: Did you spend much time going around the country to see what was there?

LP: We traveled extensively in the US and found that many regional cities have developed their own thriving, culturally diverse art communities. We were surprised, for example, by the work of young Texas-based artists, such as Annette Lawrence's blood calendars and Shahzia Sikander's reformulated Indian miniature painting. N: And we spent time in Europe and Brazil to view projects by US artists.

JB: Louise, what was your background before Parkett?

LN: Law dropout and art history. (Laughs)

JB: Really? In the United States or in Europe?

LN: In Melbourne, Australia. I worked in a commercial gallery, then directed a new center for emerging artists that combined exhibition galleries and events programs with a subsidized studio program. You could call that my formativeexperience. Then, in 1988 I left Australia for an internship program in Grenoble, France. I went to work in 1990 with Rene Block on the Sydney Blennale and, when that was over, I moved to New York to be the US editor of Parkett. Through Parkett and other projects, I maintain active International links,

JB: Lisa, when did you come to the Whitney?

LP: In 1977, while I was in the doctoral program in art history at CUNY.

JB: How are you dealing with the Biennial catalogue?

LP: It will be primarily visual. We have organized the artists' images in a nonalphabetical flow that echoes how we have built the show.

LN: And the text is structured in the form of a dialogue between us to reflect our working process. LP: In a collaboration, you have to articulate and test your ideas against the other person's constantly; you also have to keep a more open mind to hear the other's point of view. It's different from working alone or with a big team of people.

JB: Are there other unusual auxiliary parts of the show?

LN: Off-site events are being planned in response to the specific working requirements of certain artists. Among these are the "illbient" experiences of Cultural Alchemy's nomadic SoundLab and a dance and performance program, including solo work by expatriates William Forsythe and Amanda Miller, which will take place downtown.

LP: The project has been a real revelation. Whether it's dance and performance or more traditional media, it's a very productive time and there is tremendous cultural vitality all over the country. The most difficult thing for us has been the editing process.

Jack Bankowsky is the editor of Artforum.