C105 review

New York: The American effect at Whitney

The exhibition creates a picture of a hypothetical American national identity that is divided, full of hope and fraught with problems. The decisions of the show's American curator, Lawrence Rinder, inevitably shape this picture, and he doesn't make any selections that will shock liberal New Yorkers. By design, the strongest criticism in the show is aimed at the imperialist implications of Bush-era policy, and by extension the conservative block of America that elected him.

This has two symbolic effects in relation to how Americans carefully construct an identity that balances the egalitarian premise of capitalism with the reality of the global imbalance of wealth and power. It's a national cognitive dissonance. At the risk of gross generalization, liberal Americans criticize foreign and domestic policies, creating human chains on Fifth Avenue, to balance this hypocrisy. Several works make reference to the mythical liberalism of Kennedy and Clinton. Conservative middle Americans rally around nationalism and invoke capitalism to explain away gross global inequity. This portion of the country lacks the self-awareness to even offer the liberal impression of righteous indignation at America's gross consumption of world resources. Bjorn Melhus's deeply embarrassing video, America sells, is perhaps the only video that captures this American identity.

This is important to Rinder's overall picture, because his selections largely reflect the self-criticism found in most American art. The show plays to New Yorkers, whose identities are built around a sense of self-criticality and dissatisfaction with social injustice. None of the artists in the show present anything that liberals don't already hypocritically accept. It will only upset the conservative hegemony that will view many of the works as anti-American, but this is the audience Rinder is lecturing to.

The best work in the show explicitly captures the blurring of cultural or national identities through our common, globally mediated experiences. The vast majority of the artists live in major cities, with dual residencies. They share Western artistic practices, often combined with traditional techniques to convey their layered cultural experience. The major works are plainly good and don't need to be propped up by the curatorial theme.

French artist Gilles Barbier's Nursing home is a collection of hyperreal sculptures of aging American superheroes. The paunchy and saggy forms of icons like Captain America and Wonder Woman reverberate with meaning: the weakening of NATO, aging baby-boomers, America's fascination with youth culture, or its failing abilities as a superpower. The flawlessly crafted sculptures match the realism of Ron Mueck and Patricia Higgins, while exploring mortality with wit.

Simeon Allen's Newspapers cuts through the self-gratifying tone of the exhibition with his wall of white-washed pages of the Washington Post and Times. Allen covers each page with tissue paper, clipping only the areas mentioning South Africa. The articles range from tiny obituaries to front-page headlines. Formally, the effect is stunning, and the myriad of passive voices create a complex picture of a troubled state that mirrors aspects of America's troubled past, its indigenous population and slavery. Post-Apartheid South Africa comes across as a wounded nation after the Cold War politics that allowed apartheid to continue for far too long. It is a difficult piece, and despite the intended comparison between the two papers, it is the absolute focus on South Africa that is compelling.

Gerard Byrne's unassuming video installation why its time for imperial, again mourns the mundane reality that lies below the surface of the spectacle of globalization, art, and politics. The installation consists of a series of photos and a video recreation of an interview between Lee Iaccoca and Frank Sinatra in a 1980s auto ad. The absurd interview sounds completely canned. Byrne, a sharp satirist, re-enacts the interview with two actors, but places them far away from the luxury they describe. The exchange occurs in a depressed urban environment, perhaps a section of Detroit or Dublin, a withering contrast between desire and reality. Although some of the dialogue is humorous, its tinge of melancholy and thinly veiled indictment of American foreign policy cuts.

Andrea Geyer's Interim is composed of enormous stacks of a free newspapers. While the premise of the free multiples calls to mind Felix González-Torres, the paper itself is an oddly beautiful, nonlinear narrative of marginalized experience. The feeling of alienation found in the vignettes may be the experience of a recent immigrant to the city - but as observed by a narrator familiar with the customs and laws. The detached narrator observes the anonymous female protagonist as she moves through the city. Geyer's analog montage is a baleful expression, every aspect delineating the experience - from the imposing volume of identical multiples to the formal qualities of the spare layout of text and desolate photography.

Two videos by German artist Bjorn Melhus embody the attraction and repulsion that characterizes America's internal and external relationships. The near-perfect 1990 video America sells is the prize of the show. Melhus maniacally edits his footage of a teenage song-and-dance routine. The color-coordinated ensemble insanely sings and dances, while selling T-shirts to stupefied Germans. Melhus manages to formally match the absurd spectacle of the zealous Americans through brilliant editing. This America is mercifully ignorant of its own appearance, and dangerously unaware of its own power.

The painful video digs deep into the 'Walmart' mentality of American consumerism: bigger, cheaper, and branded. Melhus's view of Americans echoes an observation of the zombies at the end of the re-make of Night of the Living Dead: "They are us."

His second video, Far far away, re-casts The Wizard of Oz as a fable of globalization and a longing-for-television version of America. The thirty-nine minute video is done a huge disservice by being presented on a small monitor with two stools and two sets of headphones. The 1995 video features Melhus playing dual roles - a sad, German Dorothy, and her media-savvy American twin. The stinging criticism of America sells is paired with his own fascination with American culture and its media-driven myths.

The rest of the show offers less developed works, alternately critical or nearly adulatory. Saira Wasim and Hisashi Tenmyouya stand out with their equally intelligent and deeply critical paintings. Wasim borrows from a variety of practices from Mughal Dynasty technique to Renaissance religious paintings. Her exquisite paintings in the Bush series critique the heavy U.S. involvement in Pakistani politics, while the Western religious compositions and imagery reference Bush's thinly veiled Christian, imperialist doctrine. Tenmyouya's paintings mix the language of traditional Japanese prints with contemporary graffiti art, drawing imagery from both eras to critique America's difficult and aggressive relationship with Japan. His painting, Black ships atomic bombs, and the Greenville, depicting a mutant sea-dragon belching an atomic cloud, is far more effective than all of the text combined.

The salutary works that portray America in a positive light employ both pop culture and enduring American myths like the Old West. Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries presents a strobe-like video of flashing text, synched to a drum solo in Dakota. The digital hybrid of beat and concrete poetry concerns an imagined road trip that plays on America's escapist myths. The myth of the West and its promise of reinvention in America figures prominently in Miwa Yanagi's Yuka, a photographic enactment of a young Japanese girl's imagined old-age fantasy, as a free-spirited, motorcycle-riding granny living in San Francisco. The humorous image perfectly captures an American dream.

Canadian artist Mark Lewis cheerily makes the most out of America's fascination with beauty with his steadycam film, Jay's garden, Malibu, which depicts a modern Eden where porn stars stroll about. The camera gliding silently through flora and fauna never focuses on them, content to drift voyeuristically along the surface of things. It's a beautiful foil to Heavy Industries' frenzy, while puritanical guilt and feminist critique hover around the fringes of this guilty pleasure.

The rest of the show is characterized by works that fail to resonate beyond the easy categorization found in the catalogue. Terms like 'freedom' and 'abundance' sincerely and ironically represent one-dimensional works like Danwen Xing's large-format photographs documenting U.S. computer waste that has created poisonous smog over Southern China. It's a well-documented problem, but Xing's images don't humanize the issue.

A feature-length documentary film series spread out over an imposing weekly schedule, and the catalogue essays, add to a deadening academic weight which makes the show feel more anthropological than artistic. It only adds to the portrait of a flawed, but concerned nation that masks a deeply felt dissonance between its political lobes that affect the white majority, minorities, and the immigrant population alike. Ultimately, the show reaffirms the hypocritical liberal identity that valued complacency during the prosperous Clinton era and scolds the conservative national identity for imperialist tendencies. It remains, sadly, about maintaining a contrite world appearance through the arts.

William Powhida is a writer based in New York.

The American Effect, curated by Lawrence Rinder, Whitney Museum of American Art, July - October 2003