Books, Arts & Manners - Achtung, Baby - Whitney Museum of American Art 2000 Biennial Exhibition

National Review, April 17, 2000 by Richard Brookhiser

WHEN you leave the industrial-sized elevator at the top floor of the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NewYork, you see on the wall in front of you these words: The Biennial, its sponsors declare, "will draw both praise and censure. Contemporary art rarely elicits an indifferent response, since it is an art about our time, a mirror of our foibles, fears and fantasies. It speaks to us, about us, and-to future viewers-for us."

Here we go again: the Salon des Refuses, Judge Woolsey's decision on Ulysses-all the bedtime stories of the avant-garde. This year the focal point is Sanitation, a piece by Hans Haacke, a German artist who lives in New York City, which attacks Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, assorted conservatives, and the Nazis. Sanitation is intended as a response to the recent fracas over the Brooklyn Museum's Sensation exhibit, which was headlined by Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary. The Haacke/Biennial fracas has already featured comments by the mayor, the withdrawal by a lesser Whitney heir of her patronage from the museum, and the circling of wagons by the other Whitneys, and the art world.

Since I do not regularly attend Whitney Biennials, I will not pass judgment on the rest of the show. There were movies, a few science projects, and a sad little pink roadster with doilies on its hubcaps. Some pieces worked as jokes. Yukinori Yanagi reproduced Jasper Johns's early Pop Art icon Three Flags (which the Whitney bought for $1 million in 1980) in the materials of an ant farm. The three Old Glories were made out of red, white, and blue sand, or whatever ant farms are made of, and the busy little inhabitants were already tunneling through them. Since that 20-year-old investment in Jasper Johns has probably appreciated handsomely, I hope they put the ants in the right piece.

The rest of the show is worth seeing if only to emphasize that the Haacke is a dog even in this manger. The piece is dull and stolid, and wordy as a Herblock cartoon. In a small, dark room sit twelve gray plastic garbage containers. A soft recording of marching feet plays. On the walls hang six quotations-three from Giuliani, one each from Pat Buchanan, Pat Robert son, and Sen. Jesse Helms. The typeface is a Gothic font called Fraktur, which you last saw in an old movie spelling "Achtung! Die Villains sind hier!" The fraktured right-wingers are commenting on the folly of spending public money on lousy art. "Civil ization," says Rudy, "has been about trying to find the right place to put excrement, not on the walls of museums." Helms says, "No tax fund shall be used for garbage just because some self- appointed 'experts' have been foolish enough to call it 'art.'" Pat B. calls the First Amendment "the last refuge of the modern scoundrel." On the floor lies a framed copy of the First Amendment in Ye Olde Script, with Congress spelled Congrefs. On the floor-get it?

Haacke, born in Cologne in 1936, is the third oldest artist in the Biennial. Most of the people in the show were born when Leave It to Beaver was in reruns. Maybe the dullness of Sanitation is due to the fact that Haacke is getting a little long in the tooth for this line of work. Around the corner from Sani tation were three paintings by Lisa Yuskavage, which were pretty awful, but at least had half-naked women in them.

Or perhaps Haacke is bad because he has gone too establishment. He lives in the East Village, but belongs to the faculty of Cooper Union, a design and technical college. The Village Voice reported that, thanks to the privatization policies of the Giuliani administration, Haacke is now part-owner, at bargain prices, of a formerly subsidized loft building in a happening neighborhood. Bohemia isn't what it used to be.

Outside Sanitation three TV camera crews were setting up. More passed through the lobby, and a truck with a pop-up broadcast antenna had parked on Madison Avenue. Scattered through the museum, anxious curators in black suits told reporters they hoped that the other artists in the show would not be overlooked. Sincerely? Haacke is like a come-on at a carnival; the bearded lady might not otherwise pull in the crowds.

The unmerited brouhaha over Sanitation is partly the result of taking Haacke too seriously, i.e. seriously. Mayor Giuliani and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League suggested that Haacke's invocation of Nazi imagery trivialized Nazism and its victims. But what doesn't Haacke trivialize? There is nothing lighter in weight than an earnest and stupid man. Haacke can't tell the difference between banning speech and withdrawing subsidies. He probably doesn't know the Holocaust from a hole in the ground. Real sacrilege requires some power of thought or expression. The routine F-words of soldiers or prisoners cannot be true obscenity. Thirty blocks from the Whitney, Jackie Mason routinely calls spectators who arrive late for his Broadway show "Nazi bastards." The only difference is that Mason is telling a joke; Haacke is one.