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Widely expected to mark a return to traditional esthetics, this year's Whitney Biennial instead provides a carnival-like mix in which the contemplative competes with the distracting.

Before this year's Whitney Biennial opened, much attention was focused on its sole curator, Klaus Kertess. Founder of the legendary Bykert Gallery 29 years ago and now adjunct curator of drawing at the Whitney Kertess gave numerous interviews, wrote an article about curating the show for Vogue and precipitated endless speculation about what sort of exhibition he would choose. In the photo of him that The New York Times Magazine ran on its cover he seemed mournful and earnest, a modern man of sorrows who would return to art the soul it has exchanged for money and politics in recent years.

Kertess's announced theme--metaphor--was intriguing but too vague to tip his hand. Nevertheless, it was widely assumed that his show would steer the Biennial back into the mainstream of traditional esthetics (and to painting in particular), eschewing the social radicalism of Elizabeth Sussman's widely disliked version of the show two years ago. It was also assumed that Kertess would imbue the project with his own personal taste, so that it would stand out in welcome contrast to the committee-curated anonymity of Biennials past.

These assumptions have not, for the most part, been borne out by, this year's model. Kertess has placed his show's center of gravity closer to the esthetic middle ground than did Sussman, but he has not wholly excluded sociopolitically motivated art. And although there is more painting, anti-esthetic avant-gardism is also well represented. As a result, it is difficult to discern any distinctly personal point of view animating the selection. ft looks as though it was curated by committee. What the show affirms, more than any one direction, is New York-centric pluralism. Artists from Canada and Mexico (two each) are included for the first time, and such outlying art centers as Los Angeles, Chicago and Austin also contribute some of their own, but basically, for better as well as worse, this year's Biennial amounts to a cross section of what you would find in the hipper or more prestigious galleries of SoHo and 57th Street on a good day. (The 35 video--or filmmakers also included constitute a separate contingent, which will not be addressed here.)

Given the speculation aroused by Kerless's appointment, the lack of a more emphatic personal vision comes as a let-down. Metaphor seemed a promising premise for the show, certainly poetic symbolism is a much-favored element of artistic practice these days. But Kertess has interpreted his theme so broadly that it becomes practically meaningless. If Agnes Martin, Lari Pittman, Nan Goldin and Richard Serra can all be said to share a concern with metaphor, then it seems too coarse a sieve for sorting American art at mid-decade. In his catalogue essay, Kertess justifies the show's lack of thematic focus by claiming art's exemption from ideological categorization. "Art is a platform for experience, not a lesson," he writes.[1] Elsewhere in the essay, he defends the elasticity of his theme more explicitly.

If all art is metaphor, isn't it redundant to enlist metaphor as an underlying organizational principle of the exhibition? I hope not. Metaphor is being stressed, partially, as an antidote to the discipline imposed upon art by some of the scholars of Babel. In their striving to extrude sociopolitical content from art, they have too often extruded the needs, desires, and metaphorical ambiguities from art's body, causing a kind of hermeneutically induced anorexia.[2]

This desire to liberate art from the ideological agendas of administrators is certainly praiseworthy. But refusing to impose a program on art does not relieve one of the responsibility to present it in a way that allows it to be intelligible--metaphorically, formally or otherwise. The most immediately visible problem with this show is an overall installation that, rather than providing each art work with space to be itself, creates a competitive free-for-all and thereby diminishes the impact of individual works. This logistic dissonance may be blamed in part on specific decisions about placement, but ultimately it is the result of muddy thinking about broader issues. In the absence of any crystallizing vision, the show becomes a cacophonous chorus of contradictory voices, a microcosm of the confusion from which, one would have thought, it was the curator's job to deliver us.

The problem becomes disturbingly manifest on the fourth floor, where one leaves a room-filling installation by Jason Rhoades and enters a large gallery occupied by abstract paintings, including works by Brice Marden, Harriet Korman and Terry Winters. Rhoades's installation gathers together a vast assortment of store-bought objects, mostly of the sort that you'd find in a home handyman's workshop; a couple of doughnut-making machines are also included, with actual doughnuts scattered throughout. Hanging on the walls are framed photographic diptychs in each of which a picture of Brancusi's studio is joined to a picture of a seedy-looking suburban den. To leave this adolescently sardonic, albeit absorbing, clutter and enter the bright, airy gallery where the paintings hang feels liberating, but the psychological clash does not fade so easily. Viewing the paintings here is like trying to listen to a string quartet while a heavy-metal band plays in the next room. (A whole other order of distraction is provided by the placement of works by Winters and Maxden on a panel that bisects the room at an awkward diagonal.)