Of chocolate, lard, and politics - 1993 Biennial exhibit, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

The one bright spot about the 1993 biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art comes as one is traveling up Madison Avenue toward the museum. For a brief moment, as one approaches the building, hope flutters: there in front of the main entrance is a fire truck! Perhaps the ultimate act of performance art has just occurred and the Whitney is even now being gutted by flames. But no. The fire truck, a 45-foot-long fiberglass and aluminum toy courtesy of the "artist" Charles Ray, is as phony as everything on view inside. This discovery is a bitter disillusionment. Here at last was an example of environmental art that one could have wholeheartedly applauded.

There are over 150 items by eightyodd hands in the 1993 Biennial, which opened in early March and is on until mid June. None, not one, is a work of art except in the technical sense that it has appeared exhibited as such in a gallery or museum. There is nothing of beauty or craftsmanship or formal excellence here: no delicacy, no joy, no pleasure, no recognition that artistic accomplishment requires more than political rage.

Instead, there are images of "artists" covering themselves in blood and mannequins wearing dildos and other sexual hardware; there is a large puddle of simulated vomit; there are pictures of transvestites and cartoons about incest and the oppression of women; there are endless banners, slogans, films, wall texts, and installations proclaiming the evils of patriarchy, the United States, capitalism, racism, elitism, Western civilization, "homophobia." George Holliday's video tape of the Rodney King beating is one of many home-made films that play continuously. Visitors are requested to wear one of several pins on which various words are printed: "I can't," "white," "imagine." The pins themselves, by one Daniel J. Martinez, turn out to be part of the exhibition. A few lucky individuals get pins displaying the whole sentence: "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white." "Performance art" - that ubiquitous euphemism for politicized psycho-drama - is everywhere. Typical is Gnaw, by Janine Antoni, which Elisabeth Sussman, chief curator for the Biennial, praises and explains in her essay for the exhibition catalogue:

Antoni critiques a patriarchal community where eating is transgressive and the fat woman is an obvious taboo. Antoni's performative gesture is to bite away, chew up, and spit out chocolate and lard from large, modernist-looking geometric cubes, the sculpture of the Minimalists. The masticated lard is then remixed with pigment and remolded into lipsticks which are placed in packages, resembling large candy boxes, fabricated from the recycled chocolate. These "cosmetics" are displayed in a mirrored cube that in this context reads as something between corporate architecture and modernist sculpture.

There is also lunch from Sarabeth's available in the basement.

What has happened to us? How is it that this semi-literate display of psychopathology and radical sloganeering can be held up as "a survey of the most outstanding and challenging American art produced during the past two years"? It is true that, for as long as anyone can remember, the periodic surveys of contemporary art sponsored by the Whitney have been the object of critical opprobrium. "This year's Whitney Annual," Clement Greenberg wrote in 1944, "is more disheartening than ever": "a new low," he observed the following year. He discerned "enormous improvement" in the 1947 Annual, but by the next year the exhibition had fallen back into its "old mediocrity."

But it is important to realize that all such strictures and discriminations are irrelevant to today's Whitney. When Clement Greenberg complained about the poor quality of the exhibitions in the 1940s, he was criticizing art that aimed at a certain level of aesthetic distinction and that failed to achieve it. Today, the whole idea of "aesthetic distinction" is something that is attacked as elitist, sexist, and Eurocentric by the curators of the Whitney and the "artists" they have enlisted to represent American art.

In this sense, the Whitney must be seen as yet another casualty of the Culture Wars. Like so many other institutions entrusted with preserving and transmitting culture, the Whitney has responded to the tide of cultural radicalism by total surrender. It has come to function less as a link with tradition than as a symptom of cultural degradation. The resulting spectacle is sometimes rebarbative, sometimes simply pathetic. "We will also be respectful of each others [sic] ideas and try at all time [sic] to listen to each other," we read in one "manifesto" accompanying this Biennial.

Nor are the ironies surrounding the Whitney confined to flagrant illiteracies. David A. Ross, the Whitney's director since 1991, has done little to conceal his ambition of completing the museum's transformation into an engine of political agitation. Of course, he doesn't put it quite like that to the public or to his trustees and donors. Instead, he speaks of art that is "challenging," "transgressive," etc., safe in the knowledge that many people are desperate to be seen supporting what is considered new, trendy, avantgarde. In his preface to the catalogue for the Biennial, Mr. Ross solemnly tells us that a museum should function not only as a "sanctuary" but also as "a site for the contest of values and ideas essential to a peaceful society." Exactly why a museum should have anything to do with a "contest of values" Mr. Ross neglects to explain; nor does he explain what any of the "ideas" espoused at the Whitney have to do with a "peaceful society." But never mind.