Red, White and Bleak
At the Whitney Biennial, Grim Reflections on the Dispirit of the Times

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 2, 2006

NEW YORK -- Members of Congress, honored guests, fellow Americans: The state of our nation's artists is grim. As perhaps it should be, given their views on the state of the nation and on the world at large.

That, at least, is the perspective served up by the country's most prestigious and comprehensive roundup of contemporary art, which opens today at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It's hard to think of any group show as big as this 2006 Whitney Biennial that has offered such a consistent, coherent vision.

It isn't a pretty picture, by a long shot, or even an inspiring one -- it's hard to imagine what influence most of this work could have on the next generation of artists. But for better or worse, it gives a true picture of where contemporary art is.

Curators Chrissie Iles, of the Whitney, and Philippe Vergne, of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, have done an excellent job channeling the spirit of these times. It's hardly their fault if they've come along at a tough moment for art, and for us all.

Among the hundreds of pieces in this massive biennial, in every medium from paint to video to melted chocolate, there's hardly one you might take home to Mom and Dad. Mostly they're full of despair and hopelessness, not only at the state of the world or at the weakened state of art, but sometimes also at the chances that such weakened art could help our fractured world.

New Yorker Richard Serra, grand old man of impressive abstract sculpture, has contributed a figurative picture to the biennial: a messy crayon image of the most famous victim of Abu Ghraib, up there on his crate with hood and electrodes. The words "STOP BUSH" are scrawled above him, and viewers are invited to take a photocopy of the work. Even Serra, as wedded to elegant good looks as anyone, is pushed by politics to make work with as direct a social punch as he can muster -- he refuses to call his picture a work of art. He wants it to be unsullied activism.

This biennial shows blue-staters feeling so blue they're close to tearing out their hair.

Liz Larner of Los Angeles is another leading abstractionist, known for making lighthearted, almost wispy sculptures. At the Whitney, however, she almost follows Serra's lead. A head-high tangle of bent aluminum tubes might be a classic abstract work of hers, except that each stick of metal is sheathed in a scrap of red, white and blue bunting -- the piece is titled "RWBs" -- so that the overall effect is of some Fourth of July cataclysm. It's not even as elegiac as that: It comes closer to suggesting that the very notion of American patriotism has become hopelessly tangled and torn -- or maybe always was.

Actually, Serra and Larner represent the cheery side of this show, along with some good, old-fashioned "agit-art" of the venerable "corporations-are-evil-servants-of-the-hegemonic-military-state" variety. At least all these seem to believe that change is possible, that the ills of the world are worth pointing out in the hopes that they'll be fixed. They trust that a homemade tanning bed that burns the Stars and Stripes onto its naked user's skin -- as in a work by New Yorker Nari Ward -- might be effective, practical satire. Other artists simply present a picture of a world gone altogether bad and leave it pretty much at that.

Francesco Vezzoli gives us a five-minute trailer for an imaginary Hollywood blockbuster to be called "Caligula." Vezzoli's imitative craft is immaculate -- as fine, on its own terms, as any Old Master's. He gets every tiny detail of such trailers right: the plummy voice-over, the frantic editing, the impressive sword-and-sandals costuming, the Technicolor glow and cast of shining stars -- Benicio del Toro, Courtney Love and Karen Black are among the familiar faces Vezzoli got for his trailer.

It just so happens that the movie being pitched is clearly as corrupt as the Roman decadence it shows: It's Hollywood with all the stops pulled out and then some, happy to win us over with a menu of orgies, torture and assassination. Could our world get any worse?

Sorry I asked.

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.

In the installations of Gedi Sibony and Yuri Masnyj, for instance, this new nihilism takes the majestic abstraction of a Barnett Newman or a Mark Rothko, with all its high ideals, and replaces it with agglomerations of almost haphazard objects -- carpet pads, scraps of wood and raw drywall. They look fine, in their own weird, abject way, but only wanly, accidentally, as a pile of driftwood might.

"The visual culture my generation has inherited," Masnyj says, "is a kind of flotsam and jetsam -- the product of an exponential deconstruction that took a mortar and pestle to the avant-garde but left art and design in splintered fragments." Ouch.

Urs Fischer's contribution is an impressive pair of ragged holes, maybe 15 by 30 feet, cut through a big gallery's drywall, with the excised ovals left leaning among the art nearby -- an image of the hollowness of grand artistic ambitions if ever there was one. It suggests a new model for artmaking's "holistic" aims.

You wouldn't want to condemn such a dour view of the world, or of art. When it comes to the world, it's easy to imagine a much improved version, but it's depressingly hard to know how or if we'll ever get there. In the case of art, things may look even worse: You can believe in the exhaustion of most of what is going on right now and still not have a single clue as to what a better future might be like.

But that something strong and fresh will come along seems almost certain. For 500 years, through troughs at least as deep as ours, art has always come through. And there are hints, at least, in some works in this biennial and others beyond it, that it's still got the strength to renew itself.

For now, we may want to make like Hannah Greely's lifelike rubber toddler, who hides her head under a coat in the middle of the Whitney show. Next time we look out -- if not in two years, then in 12 -- things should be different, maybe even better, than they are today.

The 2006 Whitney Biennial is the first to bear a title: "Day for Night," after the Hollywood trick for shooting night scenes in daytime, as well as for the famous Francois Truffaut movie of the same name -- whose original French title was "La Nuit Americaine" ("American Night").

The show is at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, through May 28. Call 1-800-WHITNEY or visit http://www.whitney.org/ .