Navigating A Cultural Trough

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Whitney Biennial, the show critics (and others) love to hate, is here again. Its significance as an event lies in the fact that it is still the only large survey of current American art regularly held by a U.S. museum, namely the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Hence, given the absurdly overcrowded art world of the late '80s, with thousands of artists, dealers and collectors jostling for visibility (the Whitney's curators guess at an American artist population of more than 200,000, but this figure may be low), the show excites much the same passions as the salon exhibitions of the late 19th century.

In the process, its power as a trend-setter is always overestimated. The 1985 Biennial was laden with East Village, post-graffiti kitsch by Kenny Scharf and others -- gaudy ephemerids who, instead of going on to further heights of success as a result of their inclusion, have shriveled in the hot wind of fashion that blew them into the Whitney in the first place. Undoubtedly, 1985 marked the nadir of the Biennial's reputation; it was the worst in memory.

The 1987 version is in some ways among the best. One contemplated its arrival with glumness and rancor, and one was wrong. It is still a show with marked ideological prejudices. Clearly, the Whitney curators resist realist painting, and their promotion of media-based conceptual imagery over more directly pictorial forms of intelligence verges on intellectual snobbery (for example, Richard Prince's boringly generic reflections on photo reproduction, or Bruce Nauman's neon pieces, or Barbara Kruger's snootily virtuous samplers bearing such commonplaces as I SHOP THEREFORE I AM). But no one could accuse it of the air-headedness that marked its immediate predecessor. This is a tighter, more conservative Biennial, attentive to the internal rhymes of current art and to the cross relations between artists. What we have is an Alexandrian fallback -- a sense of the basically academic nature of most "advanced" American art, its recoil from making big parodies of invention, its desire to navigate honorably in a cultural trough whose sides are lined with art fans.

The scene cools and contracts. The show records a long-due disenchantment with the lumpy rhetoric of neoexpressionism, the hot ticket of the early '80s. The American confusion between size and scale remains. There may be a lesson in the fact that Richard Tuttle's three tiny, delectable pieces made of painted cardboard, scraps of wood and bits of twisted wire "carry" every bit as sharply as Judy Pfaff's enormous mural, which looks like a vastly inflated Frank Stella made of patio furniture. But at least the stage props of Deep Authenticity are less wearisomely apparent in this show than they used to be. The sound of breaking plates is distant, like the hunter's horn in Giselle: though Julian Schnabel, on the evidence of a work like Mimi, 1986, is as wretched a draftsman as ever, at least he spares us more of those ugly crusts of pottery, paint and stickum.

Predictably, in view of the vast hype and flurry over it last fall, the "neo-geo" work of Peter Halley, Jeff Koons and Philip Taaffe is heavily represented. Yet it looks circumspect, almost prim, for all its polemical blatancy -- art that gets its theoretical ducks in a line but cannot come up with a genuinely engrossing idea or any feeling deeper than self-satisfaction. The one exception to this is Koons' Rabbit, 1986, a glittering stainless-steel cast of an inflatable dime-store bunny, indubitably awful in the mocking pedantry with which squishiness is transposed into hard, heavy metal. As a one-liner it is not bad at all, though it hardly deserves to be treated -- as Koons' sculpture seems to be in some quarters -- as the biggest subject for exegesis since Jasper Johns' bronze beer cans. His floating basketballs in tanks of water are just high school science projects and have no aesthetic dimension. Halley's abstracts, which look like simplified Picabias based on computer chips and bear tough pseudo engineering titles like Two Cells with Circulating Conduit, 1985, are coarse late minimalism, pictorially inert to the max. Maybe collectors get scared into submission by the post-structural art jargon in which they come wrapped.

The pleasures of the show, however, are very distinct. Though sculpture once more plays second fiddle to painting (it is a pity that, to take one name , almost at random, the beautifully intelligent work of Joel Fisher was not included), there are new and disquieting marble carvings by that admirable veteran Louise Bourgeois, and two fascinating pieces by Robert Lobe. Lobe's initial idea seems fairly dotty: to go out into the forest with aluminum sheets, look for a large rock and a tree, and then ball-peen and panel-beat the metal until it conforms in shape and texture to the natural objects beneath. The tarnished silvery-gray "presences" that result, such as Facial Structure, 1986, are huge and haunting, as though the immobile landscape had shed its skin like a molting snake.

Equally vivid and subtle reactions to nature in this Biennial's paintings are uncommon. One may as well pass in silence over the only painted nudes on view, in an archly pederastic illustration by David McDermott and Peter McGough titled Rub-a-Dub-Dub . . . Three Boys . . . and One Tub, 1937, 1986. Donald Sultan's laboriously processed streetscapes with smokestacks and burning buildings now look vacantly stylish, a mere shuffling of emblems. But Terry Winters, whose work provided one of the few moments of genuine aesthetic relief in the 1985 Biennial, is well represented again with his creamily painted images of spores and fossils; and there are some intriguing works by a relative newcomer from the state of Washington, Robert Helm, who conjoins a post-Magrittean sensibility to an extreme refinement of craft. One needs to look twice before realizing that the posts and bridge planks that support the sinister bullterrier in Helm's Night Window, 1986, are real inlaid wood and not trompe-l'oeil painting.

Best of all, there are two admirable pieces by Neil Jenney. Jenney's essential subject is the perilous balance and impending decay of the sense of "sublime" landscape that lies at the heart of American reactions to nature. He can give a rectangle of sky, as in Atmosphere, 1975-85, such purity and brilliance of light that you wonder if there are striplights concealed in the heavy black frame. (There are not.) In Venus from North America, 1979-87, he assembles a set of visual nouns for American landscape -- water, fallen tree, bulrushes, rocks, notch of hills, feathery slats of cloud -- that beautifully evoke the world of the American luminists while conveying an oracular sense of its vulnerability.

In sum, one could not call this a particularly controversial show. But that is a relief, and it is good to see the Biennial back on some kind of track.