As American As Jambalaya

Whitney Biennial Displays the Variety That Defies National Stereotyping

NEW YORK -- The biennial exhibition that opens today at the Whitney Museum of American Art is the largest, most comprehensive roundup of this nation's art, as the biennial has been since its founding 70 years ago. For this latest edition, first-time organizer Lawrence Rinder asked his Whitney team to beat the country's bushes even harder than usual, to flush out all the best of what is being made within our borders.

They pulled in an impressive assortment of fascinating objects (a billboard-size dead artist, a 300-inch accordion, hermaphroditic Bible paintings) and experiences (seances with a different dead artist, tap-dancing Palm Pilots, fractured sonic poems) by 113 different artists and collectives from 20 states and Puerto Rico. And the curators also managed, apparently by accident, to make one single crucial point:

There is no such thing as American art. Maybe there never was.

Anthropologists, sociologists and other serious students of culture gave up years ago on the idea that there can be a single "spirit" that shapes a country's character and creativity. "Volksgeist" was the favored scholarly term, and it was much loved by the Nazis. Weirdly, however, many popular historians and critics, and some curators, still see no problem with it. Pick up any intro to our nation's art or culture, and you'll get not only an account of all the stuff that has gone on here, but some attempt to see in every bit of it the true expression of the "national identity."

Now that the United States of America has been attacked by terrorists, the dangerous idea that We the People need to conceive of ourselves as a single creature, with one overriding character, is stronger than ever. Rinder writes in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue about how "in the aftermath of the attack, the questions of what is American art, what is an American artist . . . have taken on a keen and tragic importance. Our uniqueness as a nation has suddenly been thrown into high relief. . . . It is imperative that we have the courage to look deeply, and critically, into our own national character." But if his excellent biennial demonstrates anything at all, it's that this critical looking can start by staring down the whole idea that such a single character exists.

It is, you could argue, only by resisting any idea of tribal identity that all the different peoples settled in this country have achieved the peace to go about their varied business, including that of making potent art of every kind. That resistance to the tribal doesn't come naturally to human beings, even when they live under the Stars and Stripes: It has to be taught and re-taught, and encouraged through events like this latest Whitney Biennial, with its vast variety of non-American, sometimes even un-American, artmaking.