At The Whitney Biennial, The Artists Are Angry - But Does Anger Equal Art?

NEW YORK - The 1993 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, which opened this month, lives up to all the advance rumbles. Its message is "up against the wall, mutha . . ." Its 82 artists - transplanted from the outer reaches of El Museo del Barrio, Exit Art and Los Angeles - are all mad about something, and THEY'RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!

And after two days of close encounters with all that rancor and discontent at New York City's Whitney Museum, I'm feeling battered enough to demand combat pay. Still, call it abused-audience syndrome, call it soft-core optimism - I have to admit I don't hate this show. Sorry.

The Whitney is clearly inviting outrage by permitting artist Daniel J. Martinez - whose banners in downtown Seattle about poverty and homelessness for the 1991 In Public exhibition caused a stir - to design the admission buttons for the show: "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white," they say.

The biennial is a well-meaning - even noble - if bumbled attempt to transplant from the margins of society to the art world's equivalent of Broadway a kind of socially engaged, in-your-face art that has been increasingly visible in recent years.

Mine will undoubtedly be a minority opinion; a lot of the 99.9 percent white, middle-class colleagues who attended the press preview were erupting in ridicule and affront. I'm just depressed that so much free-floating angst and anger goes by the name of art, and disappointed that the Whitney missed the opportunity to engage the central issue of what it is that makes a work art in our disoriented, dysfunctional world.

It sounded just fine when Whitney curator Elizabeth Sussman said she was as interested in what had happened in the world during the two years since the last biennial as she was in what had been happening in the world of art. In those two years, as the economy staggered, Los Angeles burned and the art market collapsed, much attention has been paid to artists - particularly artists on the racial, ethnic, sexual margins - who have been engaging the same tough issues that have focused the attention of politicians and talk-show hosts.

A minimum criteria for a work of art has got to be that it tells us something we haven't already heard on Oprah Winfrey.

And we've heard everything Sue Williams tells us about abused women in this exhibit with her life-size, naked rubber woman curled fetally in self-protection, on which she's scrawled the usual repertoire of wife-beating excuses.

On the other hand, Cindy Sherman's luridly blown-up photographs also focus on perceptions of women's bodies, roles and sexuality. But her complex, highly visual idea has been to photograph sculptures she has assembled by mismatching body parts from anatomically correct medical-supply-house dolls. The art part is that those lushly executed photos can only be summed up in sensations - of fascination, disgust, bewilderment, revelation - never in mere talk-show words.

Jimmie Durham, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco are exploring the ludicrous and tragic plight of populations caught between a tribal identity that the mainstream wants to romanticize and a problematic future. But Charlton Heston in the cage scene of "Planet of the Apes" pretty much took the edge off the elaborate performance by Gomez-Pena and Fusco. Entertaining, yes. But.

Durham's sculptures simply imply more, question more on a far more metaphorical level and add much more than the obvious to the dialogue (not to mention that so many of them are beautiful as objects). Durham is a Cherokee essayist and political activist who once was American Indian ambassador to the United Nations. He's wily and erudite, and in the wall label that artists have been invited to supply this year (with sometimes helpful, often laughable results), he states that ". . . because there is such an authoritative version of history, it's great fun to pull out other things that are hidden and left out."

Back to the banal, Shu Lea Cheang's red phones on which you can dial soft-porn phone sex never get beyond so-what knee-jerk feminism. And Janine Antoni manages to debase Joseph Beuys' innovative and metaphorical uses of fat to create fat and chocolate sculptures by gnawing at them.

In this kind of show, much of the best work demands a lot of time for an audience unfamiliar with the work and the artists. It is hardly sound-bite art, although a lot of it is pretty loud. There are video installations to stand still and watch, a lot of text to read, some compelling concepts that take time to sink in. But there is no time. There are more than 150 works, many of them with sound tracks yelling at one another, demanding attention.