Red, White and Bleak

Californian Cameron Jamie, now based in Paris, provides us with documentary footage of a long-standing Christmas tradition said to be peculiar to one part of rural Austria. It shows a man dressed as a generous Saint Nicholas distributing gifts, followed by four horned and hairy devils, with clanging cowbells on their belts, who terrorize and rough up any revelers they find. On what ought to be a happy yuletide night, little girls dissolve into tears and young men are left groaning in the snow.

This may sound like trivial pranksterism, but watching Jamie's 26-minute video -- which is accompanied by the most raucous of heavy metal soundtracks -- is as harrowing as any art you've seen. Because it's taken straight from life, it makes Picasso's work on "Guernica" seem like pretty-picture making. If Freud's id were to take human form, this might be its flesh.

Such a grim view is the norm at this biennial. Zoe Strauss gives us a straight-ahead slide show of Philadelphia's ghettos and of Hurricane Katrina's wake. Monica Majoli provides wall-size figurative watercolors -- blurred in appealing shades of gray -- that in fact depict extremes of sadomasochistic bondage, with rubber-wrapped figures suspended from ropes and chains.

Photographer Florian Maier-Aichen shoots an attractive landscape vista, then reworks it in Photoshop so that every trace of foliage becomes a deep blood red. Even what ought to be a tender family moment, in which an all-American dad tidies up his son for church, takes on sinister, oppressive tones when it's photographed by Angela Strassheim. (Strassheim first trained as a forensic photographer; she still manages to make everything she shoots feel like the prequel to a crime.)

And even all of that is not as gloomy as it gets. A good bit of this show's work seems to imply that feeling strong emotions -- or any emotions at all -- about our fallen planet is only for naive Pollyannas. In his remarks at the biennial's press preview, Whitney Director Adam Weinberg spoke of "the promise of artists, the promise of art, art's capacity to change us." But it's not clear that many of his artists would buy into such a cheery view.

One of the best but also bleakest works is a 2 1/2 -minute film loop by Jordan Wolfson, at 27 one of the youngest artists in the biennial yet already one of its most cynical. It shows the torso of a tuxedoed man using American Sign Language to convey -- in eerie silence -- the final, impassioned speech from Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator," which was the brilliant comic's first talkie and last great movie.

The film was made in 1940 as war engulfed Europe and the Americans continued to stay home, and its closing words were meant as a hymn to brotherhood and a call to arms against hatred. And yet in Wolfson's version, the message and passion of the speech are turned into futile gestures, unintelligible to all but a few viewers who might understand the figure's signs -- and even their emotions must grow cool when faced with so much monkey-suited, heavy-handed neutrality.

The art of Josephine Meckseper, a New Yorker, deliberately confuses and conflates the worlds of marketing and radicalism, as though there's no telling their stylish products apart. She builds sparkling store vitrines that house a deluxe perfume bottle labeled "Ne Travaillez Jamais" ("Never Work") as well as a glamorous jewelry ad onto which she has collaged an image of political graffiti that reads, "AMERICA 1492 IRAQ 2003."

In somewhat the same vein, Kelley Walker, born in Georgia, takes Andy Warhol's stylish riffs on civil rights riots and makes them his own by smearing yummy chocolate on top. When you've outdone Warhol for a distanced, cynical view of things, you've gone pretty far.

Then there's veteran rebel artist Taylor Mead. At his long-standing Friday night performances in a downtown New York space, Mead likes to tell a little fairy tale, which he illustrates with the hand-drawn childlike scrawls now on show at the Whitney. A dragon living in a castle hears that there's a knight in shining armor terrorizing villagers, so he sets out to slay him. Knight and dragon fight; both die; the castle's up for rent.

Did I mention that some of this art is cynical?

And that's only when it's at its most heartfelt. A good bit of it prefers an almost affect-free nihilism. It's not even the I-hate-everything nihilism of punk -- a healthy kind that clears the air -- or the sarcastic cackle of dada, shell-shocked after World War I. It's a nihilism that's so world-weary that any serious acting out -- including any art -- is almost too much for it.