America, real and imagined: the Whitney Museum of American Art reaches outside its normal purview to see how the U.S. is viewed abroad - The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Eleanor Heartney

There are also a number of pieces that more explicitly chronicle America's sins. Filipino artist Alfredo Esquillo, Jr., takes on colonialism in MaMcKinley, a reproduction of a colonialera photograph of a matron and child, in which the woman's face has been replaced by a cutout of the features of President William McKinley, who led the battle to annex the Philippines. Furthering the sinister presence, the woman's hands have been transformed into the talons of an American eagle, and the tip of a gun barrel protrudes from her sleeve.

In a not very successful effort to make materials carry political weight, Colombian artist Miguel Angel Rojas attempts to connect America's drag habit with Colombia's drug trade in a set of works in which pointillist images of panthers, American cowboys and guns are created from dots cut from dollars bills and coca leaves. British artist Maria Marshall takes on America's hypocritical Puritanism in a video work in which her seven-year-old son reads the text of a paean to work from a speech by President Clinton. Offering a visual contradiction to the aural sentiments is a speeded-up depiction of two children frenetically unwrapping huge numbers of presents and cavorting through the cast-off boxes and paper.

What, if anything, do the multiple perspectives in "The American Effect" tell us about ourselves? The works here suggest that Americans are idealistic and self-absorbed, that we valorize many of the qualities (among them violence, greed, self-interest) that we claim to abhor, that we are both admired for our energy and despised for our ruthlessness. But, inevitably perhaps, the show has an empty center. America here is presented as a play of reflections, its image a crazy quilt of the accumulated slights, projections and unrealizable longings of those outside its borders.

Thus, the art in this show reveals the slippery nature of the idea of "America," explaining how it can be positioned to defend antithetical propositions. The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition takes up the political questions hinted at in the show more directly. Essays by commentators such as Luc Sante, Ian Buruma, Tariq All and Edward Said expand upon aspects of the questions implicit in Rinder's introductory essay: Have America's values and its policies become too divergent? Are the principles we espouse--among them democracy, freedom and equality--universal ideals or (at least in their currently available forms) Western impositions on alien cultures? Are our values inherently contradictory? Can we maintain wholehearted commitments to equality and freedom, for instance, or to capitalism and democracy?

These are useful issues to mull over, and "The American Effect" is to be commended for raising them. One hopes that such a fruitful line of inquiry will not disappear with the next turn of curatorial fashion.

"The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003" is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York [July 3-Oct. 12]. It is accompanied by a 216-page catalogue.