Many happy returns

The problem of subject matter is, of course, nothing new. But chosen subjects have taken on a rather distinct character, drawn, as they are, from a particular class and vintage of pop-cultural material. The Biennial suggests that many young American artists are staking out private parcels of the cultural landscape, choosing material that's personal enough to call their own but accessible enough to talk about with others. Along these lines, most artists at the Whitney seem not to be grappling with broad themes--of, say, black or queer "identity"--any more than they are spinning the grand hermetic fictions of a Matthew Ritchie or Barney. Even those works that do conjure mythic universes can appear freighted with stylistic and cultural allusions to the point of feeling less imagined than assembled, as in the case of ink drawings by Ernesto Caivano, a Durer for the Dungeons & Dragons set, or Altmejd's Joseph Cornell-meets-Dark Crystal conglomerations.

While popular culture in all its myriad forms serves as source material for much of the work on view, its present uses seem distinct from those of '60s Pop artists or of the Pictures generation. Chosen subjects are at once more culturally specific and esoteric than soup cans and comic strips. Similarly, the self-reflexive questioning of Pop and Pictures art seems unavailable to many young artists--or simply worn out after nearly a half century during which image sampling necessarily raised as many questions about medium as the media. And if Pop and Pictures evinced a dramatic "de-skilling," today a kind of "re-skilling," however modest, emerges as the norm. Presentation is not raw and deadpan but slightly showy and often highly worked. Evidence of craft--or, at the very least, manifest labor--bustles throughout the galleries, from the fussy pencil reveries of Amy Cutler and Robyn O'Neil, to the maniacal handiwork of Jim Hodges and Dario Robleto, to the painterly proficiency of Barnaby Furnas and Julie Mehretu. A signature style and evidence of effort seem to offer the perfect means for marking cultural territory as one's own.

Yet for all the craftiness on view, one is surprisingly less often tempted to marvel at how a work was made than why. Why the Civil War? Why Ossie Clark? Why the '60s or the '20s? Why dust from every bone in the human body in the shape of patent medicine jars? Is our cultural and historical purview really so broadly leveled that everything is as pressing--or trivial--as everything else? Such questions are not beside the point. Regrettably, the kind of subject matter that I have been describing seems to be putting many artists in something of a bind. On one hand, it automatically connects them to a whole universe of meaning (and an initiated audience of fellow cultural consumers). But its loaded specificity seems to make it all the more difficult to transcend, and often the resulting work isn't any more interesting than the initial source material (young artists beware: Melville is an awfully big fish to fry).