Truth Seekers

Finally, a Whitney Biennial to save America's tarnished reputation. It has a title ("Day For Night"), and the curators are foreign (British and French). New Yorkers love seeing America though a foreign filter, and that's the pitch behind this year's Truffaut-referencing Whitney shebang.

We're the spoiled children of the globe and we're embarrassed, but (thankfully) this new crop of artists and big conceptual thinkers will win us back a few European friends.

I got my press pass, my packet of propaganda and began my trek though the poured-concrete halls of the mausoleum of American Contemporary Art. But walking though the multi-floored exhibition with this euro filter is like wearing someone else's bifocals: It creates more confusion than clarity. The weight bears down on the bridge of my nose as I read the dizzying dialectics accompanying each work on display.

"Sometimes this questioning or obfuscation manifests itself as an uncertain identity," reads a note from curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne. Huh? Should I really have to work this hard? All of this label reading feels like homework as I'm jostled by the other seekers as our herd moves from one Truth to the next, like 210 Stations of the Cross. Sure are lots of words in the show-several redundancies-and fewer revelations. But that's a pretty good score for the Whitney. (I think.)

TOP DOWN BY LAW

It's best to begin the exhibition a little pissed of, so I hike it to the fifth floor mezzanine and get my righteous indignation raging in the Wrong Gallery's installation, "Down by Law." The corral of 54 artists-from the 1930s onward-presents icons of badness from every class and culture. Study the U.S. Sodomy Law map hung on the same wall with everyone's favorite no-no, Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" (from '87 and still pissing people off).

It's hard not to have a good time in this rogues' gallery since it displays, in the most pointed way, how we continue to miss the message about criminal culture and suggests that it's something alien and beyond our ability to change.

Sometimes scary is sweet: I was impressed by the hand-woven elegance of a suspicious portrait head, "www.ezln.org," by Matthew Antezzo and the oddly soothing quality of Ed Ruscha's "Safety" drawn in gunpowder.

STICKS AND STONES

The fourth floor starts off well enough with Rudolf Stingel's "Untitled (After Sam)," a painting of an exhausted looking man seen through bashed openings in the sheetrock-a gift of Urs Fischer's entitled "The Intelligence of Flowers." Well, obviously! Also installed by Fischer are two low armatures, "Untitled (branches)," moving in a circle and dripping wax on the floor. This compliments the overall mood of the show-that of the slow, spent drip. Sticks and stones are everywhere: Big boulders are by Dan Colen, Lucas DeGiulio has delicate twig forms and "Can Barnacles." Lisa Lapinski's "Nightstand" rallies with a very high craft level, but who needs all those drawers?

PICK UP YOUR MESS

While many of the rooms and groupings achieve thematic coherence, some are just damn sloppy. According to the catalogue entry, Deva Graf's work "alludes to and confounds the history of modernist sculpture." That's her problem. The room's a mess, but she's bested by Gedi Sibony's installation a few spaces down, which (again from the catalogue) "are often audacious in their sparsity and evocative in their spatial composition" but it simply looks like a room where renovation was begun and then the contractor lost interest.

THE NEW CUTENESS

It's still here! Those uncertain, handmade, sentimental scribbles against the evils of modern man. Marcel Dzama ("Untitled" in the Wrong Gallery space) has sophistication reminiscent of Henry Darger or Amy Cutler, Todd Norsten shows homespun-folksy charm but Jennie Smith wins the Hello Kitty Award paws down for super-sweetness.

Some may ask, "What's wrong with The New Cuteness?" True, at least these artists are drawing. But where the practitioners of TNC hide behind doodles, lists and journaling, the bolder artists in the Biennial seem so overwhelmed by the problems in our culture that the physical reality of the work can't support their intellectually ambitious theses. Then again, that's why we have wall labels. Obfuscation for everybody!

BONEYARD

By this point, my head hurt. I wanted to lie down on Nari Ward's gorgeous sculpture, "Glory," made from oil barrels with the stars and stripes marked out on its tanning bed. Now that's American! Heck, I could strip down right here, burn our great flag onto my skin and no one would notice. The guards might object, but most of the visitors had their noses pressed up against the wall labels or stuck in the cumbersome catalogue (replete with fold-out posters) reading about "investigating the infrathin space between the thing and our idea of it."

Instead I watched Cameron Jaime's very entertaining "Kranky Klaus," where village folk get roughed up by goats gone wild. Don't read the accompanying copy. It turns a nice, violent romp into a theoretician's wet dream, which is to say dry (and salty). For more antler antics, try Hanna Liden's wild Scandinavian landscapes and obscure pagan rituals, then head straight for Hannah Greely's elegant "Last Stand" made from cow bones. Also, the five extraordinary photographs from Angela Strassheim's Left Behind series with an after-life-affirming creepiness are hard not to appreciate.

ART BY ASSOCIATION

Oh I wish Andy were here. Well, he is! Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp are well accounted for on every floor of this exhibition as they are referenced and replicated by the children of "Pop" and "Dada." (Get it?) Some clear voices, some examples of artists speaking from their souls can be found, but a lot of theory-mandering also abounds as well as an expectation that young artists should save the day before they've actually lived enough of them. The contrast in maturity is evident in Richard Serra's powerful and direct piece "Stop Bush." The image is enough.

It appears the curators and their scribes are sincere, hoping to turn self-consciousness into self-awareness. Almost half of the artists yearn for meaning and impact in a world where meaning has no impact-a tough job since the world in its wrecked state seems to demand some kind of intervention. Our policymakers are asleep at the wheel, so it might well be up to the artists (and those of us who love to write about their intent) to find a solution. But the desire to express with jargon is numbing; re-contextualization is the soup du jour, and it's served up with a fork. Careful-try not to put your eye out.