Whither the Whitney Biennial? The restoration of a primary curator, a thematic framework and public art in Central Park were among the distinctive features of the cyclical show's latest edition - Report from New York - also includes sound art

Art in America, June, 2002 by Nancy Princenthal

Effort was made to include disciplines scanted in Biennials past, including those made possible by recent technological developments: along with Web art and digitally produced photographs and video, there were Ken Feingold's animatronic talking heads, programmed to engage in infinitely varied conversations of unremitting tedium; Robert Lazzarini's phone booth, a magically skewed simulacrum that hovers between two dimensions and three; and Tim Hawkinson's mechanical-digital wonders, including a shape-shifting face called Emoter.

For the first time, too, there was a substantial amount of sound art, ably chosen by Singer. Notable in this category are Tracie Morris's stuttering aural collages and Stephen Vitiello's heartbreaking recordings, taken in 1999 after a hurricane, of a World Trade Center tower creaking like a ship on high seas. In another departure from recent practice, this Biennial included a smattering of architecture, most conspicuously in the work of Rural Studio, led by the late Samuel Mockbee. These community-oriented projects for Hale County, Ala., are altogether laudable in social program, environmental awareness and formal economy, though they looked a little out of place (the only working definition of art in this Biennial seemed to be that which lacks practical use). Lebbeus Woods, whose inclusion actually made more sense--he is a dyspeptic visionary and masterful draftsman whose most influential work, on paper, imagines postapocalyptic metropolises--seemed oddly antiquarian in this company.

Of course, some old-fashioned formalist painting must be included in any show meant to be broadly representative, and so it was, but here Rinder virtually stepped out of the wings to address the audience directly: in its most prominent appearance, abstract painting was presented as a blank screen, a TV with the juice turned off. John Zurier's brushy fields of pastel paint, like Lauretta Vinciarelli's luminous geometric watercolors (they look a little like trompe l'oeil Turrells) might under other circumstances have compelled belief, but as grouped here, they seemed meant to defeat attention, an effect that Vija Celmins's frail-to-the-point-of-vanishing spiderwebs could do nothing to offset.

The stifling of abstract painting is cause dismay, but it is not as disturbing as this exhibition's tendency--admittedly, it is widespread in the culture at large--to treat spirituality as artifice, history as fiction, politics as spectacle and all of them, sometimes, as rollicking jokes. Forcefield's bleeping totems were a first indicator of this inclination; it was quickly reinforced by Jose Alvarez's video-taped "channelings" of the fake ancient spirit Carlos and Christian Jankowski's video of a Baptist televangelist, sermonizing in chilling deadpan on modern art. Less jocular was Stephen Dean's projection of the pigment-tossing participants in India's Holi festival. The spiritual and artistic practices of the subcontinent also figured in a film by Mark LaPore and a video by Irit Batsry, who received this year's Bucksbaum Award for her entry.