1995 Biennial

Even if something more sedate and refined than a blitzkrieg was anticipated, this didn't preclude some serious noise and spectacle. While less boisterous than the preceding Biennial, Kertess' exhibition isn't exactly quiet. Its most aggressive feature: Rirkrit Tiravanija's installation - a plywood hut equipped with electric guitars that visitors are encouraged to play - resounded with experimental noise rock during the openings. Equally confrontationally, Nari Ward's humongous hearse covered in axle grease and nestled on a bed of discarded mufflers is parked right in front of the elevators, announcing a fairly raucous pageant that careens from Nancy Rubins' preposterous ceiling cloud of roped-together mattresses stuffed with cakes, to the psychedelic lunacy of Peter Saul and Alan Turner, to Nicole Eisenman's wall installation, which bumps and grinds into gear with a mind-boggling array of drawings and doodads and stuff. In close proximity are Catherine Opie's large chromogenic prints of tattooed and bedecked gender freaks; Nan Goldin's Cibachrome grid Tokyo Love, 1994-95, glowing with the lurid details of post-Modern teen sex; and Greer Lankton's sculptures of hideously glamorous figures - one entitled More morphine he mumbled (Jealous, sad, she shot herself up first), and another, Oh, Hi Hon (God what a mess), both 1995.

For all its upbeat exuberance and whacked-out visual pyrotechnics, Kertess' Biennial can easily he characterized as banal. What much of the art lacks in substance, however, is more than made up for by Kertess' curatorial moxie. There would be nothing especially remarkable about the inclusion of work by Helen Marden, Jane Freilicher, Catherine Murphy, Andrew Lord, Milton Resnick, Frank Moore, Joe Zucker, and countless other artists whose presence disappoints rather than excites, save the curator's lack of discrimination, but their contribution to the easy-viewing environment Kertess orchestrates is notable. Decorative, elegant, edifying, humorous, or cute, such art makes for mindless pleasure and lite fun. To paraphrase Robert Smithson lamenting the condition of art in the late '60s, it's like going from one happy lie to the next with a cheerful view of everything. It's from this perspective that Kertess' "vision thing" comes into focus. Banishing the hypercritical and overtly analytical, rounding off the sharp edges of institutional critique and moralizing narrative, Kertess makes what is particular to individual works of art secondary to the sweeping curatorial statement, pressing friend and foe alike into the service of a canned sense of well-being.

No matter what you think about much of the work, the curatorial unity Kertess offers (however inadvertently) is premised on art that above all looks good. This isn't to say that brains and beauty or brawn never come in the same package, but rather to observe that this Biennial reinstates the old "form versus content" dichotomy. Given Kertess' framework, there isn't one piece in the Biennial that angrily strives to make a marginalized voice heard, that confronts, implicates, defeats, or condemns. There's nothing that vows to reform one or another patronizing, offending, or exclusionary institution or social group. In the face of the plethora of factors feeding off fin-de-siecle paranoia and malaise that are currently ricocheting in and out of the art world, the 1995 Biennial muffles any rumbles of anxiety or dissent and trumpets the virtue of entertainment. It cajoles with whimsy, it amuses with cliche, it offers the perfect environment for carefree engagement. No burden of self-consciousness or sympathy is required; no onus to delve beneath the surface of things, or to dredge up subtext, or to slop about in the murky waters of theory. Kertess creates a carnivalesque theme park that affords visitors friendly encounters at every turn.

It's hardly a leap to reference Kertess' visionary conceit to the synthetic '70s. Remember bubblegum music and happy faces? They signaled no more Vietnam. No more cop riots. No more SDS-ers brandishing manifestoes and occupying college presidents' offices on the way to overthrowing the establishment. Sixties militancy became roadkill under the mainstream machine that slapped business suits on subversives, while failed utopian ideologies were appropriated in the form of designer clothes and Muzak. The left turned into a fashion statement. Everybody hoped everybody else would "Have a Nice Day." The generation gap was eliminated. We were all kids at heart. Closure was that easy.

Kertess' 1995 Biennial does more than borrow style and charisma from the '70s; it foregrounds the similarities between the cultural disposition of that decade and our own, and raises the question of whether goofy euphoria and ready-made denial is about to be locked into place as a coordinate for the mid '90s. If we, too, are poised to go down in history as another "in-between" decade, how fitting that both visually and ideologically - and, yes, metaphorically - the 1995 Biennial recognizes style over content, appearance over substance, and effectively collapses previously recognized categorical distinctions in art. That's why Carroll Dunham, Terry Winters, Saul, Turner, and Sue Williams - to single out one set of odd bedfellows among many - make visual sense and hang so well together. That's also why Cindy Sherman's close-up photograph of a smashed-to-pieces dummy face, Rubins' faceted mattress-and-cake fabrication, and Bessie Harvey's sculptural assemblage of folksy fragments, all look as though they'd come from the same formal school of fractured fairy tales - when in fact their works have nothing to do with one another. With "metaphor," Kertess not only gives us a cloudy organizing principle but achieves the very elimination of content - or at least of contents that in too many instances most would consider self-evidently central. (One has to give him credit for the audacity with which he exercises curatorial license!) Form alone carries the weight of meaning, and suffices for narrative adhesive. The forced affinities that animate this exhibition stand at a preventive distance from polemics and proselytizing. In this context, does Williams' painting have anything to do with violence against women? Or Moore's with environmentalism? Or Opie's photographs with empowering marginalized Others? Interestingly enough, those discursive structures are suddenly negligible to nonexistent. Work previously championed for its embrace of social causes is, under Kertess' control, rehabilitated solely for its retinal value. In this framework, identity politics surface as a freak show, and what might have resonated with theoretical import is recycled and marketed as frothy mainstream amusement.