Art

...In one room, Izhar Patkin has created a massive environment whose four walls are hidden beneath sheets of rubber pursed like an accordion, and covered with iridescent, crudely drawn images of inner-city crime and violence...

...Because there are now three curators instead of five, the chaotic diversity of the last show has been suppressed...

...One gets the feeling, after becoming acquainted with these Biennials, that when great art does emerge, it will come from some quarter now unknown to the art world...

...The figure was taken on with a new energy because abstraction could not be as allusive, political, and programmatic as the most recent generation of artists wanted it to be...

...Their love of figuration rarely goes so far as to study the artistic rendering of forms in space, and they have not yet evolved an interestingly expressionistic compromise...

...The vernal landscapes of Robert Greene, however, have a willowiness like Gainsborough's, and the mythological figures that people them constitute a success of a minor sort...

...It is more pleasant to walk through, and the art works repay a closer inspection...

...Some recent artists who have appeared in previous Biennials are Julian Schnabel, who must be included by virtue of his being indisputably representative if not gifted, Judy Pfaff, whose pleasing sculptural fandangos lack their past energies, and Ed Ruscha, who seems never to change...

...If the quality and display of the show have improved, the general themes and contours of the world of contemporary art have remained essentially what they were...

...In the wake of the almost total dominion of abstraction through the sixties and the early seventies, the last decade had seen the increasing presence of four-square figurative art, almost to the exclusion of pure formalism...

...The figurative artists represented have little to recommend them...

...But this general reorientation reached its apogee two Biennials ago and, if abstraction is making a comeback, it is in the non-figurative form of "literary" art which often rejects completely the quest for aesthetic consequence...

...356 ART A PLEASANT WALK THROUGH THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL Compared with what it was only two years ago, the present Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney museum is a considerably chastened affair, a drastic curatorial recoil from the critical backlash that greeted the last exhibition, which was almost universally decried as the lowest point yet reached in the half-century in which the Whitney has staged its Biennials...

...Then there were gimmicky works of art with basketballs in water, metal sculptures made to look like balloons, massive blowups of manuscripts covered with neon lights, and disembodied talking-heads projected onto the granite walls of the museum...

...Nancy Dwyer also jumps on the verbal bandwagon, and in imitation of the snazzy graphics of television (a pervasive influence at the Whitney) she implants upon a varied field of blue the words "coming up next...

...But the larger question posed by the undeniable improvement of the Whitney's most recent Biennial is whether it has improved enough...

...The art, even at its best, does not at any point rise above the pleasing into the ranks of the memorable, let alone the great...

...In this show, as in the previous one, homo-erotic themes were present, with perverse blatancy in the photographs of Bruce Weber and the paintings of Mcdermott and Mcgough...

...The same could be said for David Bates, whose slightly more conventional portraits of fishermen and the like do not succeed in being either attractive or interesting...

...This change was hardly to be expected...

...One whole group of artists, for example, have incorporated words into their paintings and graphics...

...The 1987 Biennial is surely a better production than its predecessor...

...In addition, the smaller number of art objects frees the present Biennial of the bargain-basement clutter of its predecessor...

...The reasons for this sudden renaissance in figurative art had been a dissatisfaction with the Park Avenue smugness that artists began to sense in the followers of Pollock and de Kooning...

...The downplay of the most vanguardist elements has led to the elimination of most of the environmental art of the last show, and this is probably to be regretted...

...This year several modifications have changed things for the better...

...Probably the two most successful abstract painters this time round are Stephen Mueller and Louise Fishman who have an appetite for the physical properties of paint, that has not been expressed so aggressively since the acme of Action Painting in the early fifties...

...Here, as in so much recent figurative art, it is the idea, ratherthan the execution, that is the point of the exercise, and it is for this reason that Patkin's work is so unsatisfactory...

...As for the strictly abstract painters, they are more abundantly represented, and more successful than they were last time, and also less afraid to assert their commitment to pure form...

...Curiously, Willem de Kooning himself, is represented, and in comparison, his works appear little more than pleasant exercises, lacking robustness...

...But the majority of the works displayed at the Biennial are either a compromise between the figurative and the abstract, or else a third thing which is so far removed from any aspirations to aesthetic validity, as to call into question their status as art...

...One impressive change, however, has been the virtual elimination of figurative art, to the extent that almost no straightforward example of it remains at the Biennial...

...Barbara Krueger, who was present in the last Biennial, has a superb sense of graphic design, in which she features a massive monkey head or a hand holding out a credit card upon which she places challenging slogans, usually referring snidely to the politics of the art market...

...These exhibitions, held every two years, consistently receive careful scrutiny since they represent a major museum's attempt to sum up definitively the present state of the American art world...

...One work by Richard Prince consists of a series of non-descript photographs of clouds, on which are superimposed, for no apparent reason, one-liners from the Borscht circuit, which are funny, as far as that goes, but reflect no credit upon the artist...

...but such art offers no better substitute, and only rarely does it rise above the most puerile snideness...

...The point of this, and other such exertions, is a kind of knowing, disengaged, unarticulated rejection of popular culture...

...In three very successful paintings, Donald Sultan has created a rich interplay of massive black fields and bursts of lemon light, while Terry Winters, who was represented in the last exhibition, has repeated, a little less successfully, his podlike biomorphs of two years ago...

...JAMES GARDNER James Gardner writes on the arts for Commentary, New Criterion, and The New Leader...