An Anthology of the Execrable

...This event is of such magnitude that the catalogue burbles of "an irony fused with the currency of identity politics...

...Mine reads "EVER WANTING," ideal for T-shirts or bumper stickers...

...Another video, by Shu Lea Cheang, stars the hairy, galvanically twitching buttocks of an unidentified man—at least I hope it was a man—under the title Those Fluttering Objects of Desire...

...there is so much more to see...

...Upon purchasing a ticket, each visitor is handed a metal badge with a legend imprinted on it...

...The book is called The Catalogue of the Whitney 1993 Biennial Exhibition...

...At last my wish has been granted...

...A human-sized bite has been taken out of it, demonstrating womankind's many eating disorders—bulimia, anorexia and the like...

...How about it, Simon & Schuster...

...his oblique display of Hispanic kitsch reminded me of John Leguizamo's one-man shows about a culture in mid-crisis, Mambo Mouth and Spic-O-Rama...

...As sophisticated as Moffett is, we cannot linger over his oeuvre forever...

...This big show?0,000 attendees per week—is not really about art at all...

...Allan Sekula's Fish Story, a photographic essay about various seaports, has the aura of a National Geographic travelogue...

...For a long while all three attributes were discernible...

...This is obviously meant to make the Whitney's overwhelmingly Caucasian audience cringe with guilt...

...Not a murmur of criticism is heard...

...Should we miss the point, Antonio also presents a larger block of chewed lard...

...And Ida Applebroog's "Jack F.," a representation of Hansel and Gretel and the witch, seems to have fallen out of a New York Times spread celebrating the Outstanding Children's Books of 1932...

...The crudity remained...

...Not at the Whitney...

...And to hear...

...Nearby is Land of Projection, an installation by Bruce and Norman Yone-moto and Timothy Martin...

...Oddly enough, despite the shouts of political correctness and the fractious pose of so many artists, the 1993 Biennial Exhibition is surprisingly tame...

...Homi K. Bhabha offers a collector's item: "The complementarity of language as communication must be understood as emerging from the constant state of contestation and flux caused by the differential systems of social and cultural signification...

...For in this Post-Talent Show, paintings and drawings make up less than half of the fare...

...In addition to these satiric engravings, he has "worked with it in his bowling ball pieces, in his sheet works, and in his new flower works...

...Until June 13, when the Biennial closes, all who enter the Whitney—regardless of gender, color or creed—can consider themselves victims...

...Ordinarily, George Holliday's tape of the Rodney King beating would be placed in the category of documentary news or home movies...

...In order to retain its credentials as America's most avant-garde institution, the Whitney had to outdo itself, welcoming every sort of pretender and every kind of excess...

...It would serve as a companion volume to Wyndham Lewis' classic collection of seriously bad verse, The Stuffed Owl...

...His argument—that the pillars of Western culture were stolen from forgotten black nations—is the substandard Leonard Jeffries harangue, but at least Wilson's message is not shrill and his designer's eye is sharp...

...The art world can suck my proverbial dick,' screams one piece...

...Careful not to step in Janine Antoni's plastic vomit, we push on to some other achievements...

...Their body language spells out the message: No one is going to call me a philistine...

...As promised, the graffiti of Sue Williams are on display...

...today there is a search for origins and identities that is motivated, in part, by the collapse of old categories (menopause, the Soviet Union, the canon...

...While we're waiting for their decision, we can spend the afternoon gazing at the work defended by Rich and Co...

...If Los Angeles has become the capital of rage, New York, thanks to the Whitney, retains its title as the epicenter of kvetch...

...The collagist has doctored some pages in the manner of a nine-year-old with library paste and a scissors...

...She wanted a place that would celebrate American art, with all its energy, passion and, yes, crudity...

...Marginality, in effect, becomes the norm while the center is increasingly undefinable and perhaps irrelevant...

...Not to be outdone, Barbara Hammer's Nitrate Kisses, according to the catalogue, "is a potent expression of the hidden realities of relations and affections" among women of a certain age and inclination, "and of the neglected history of lesbian cinema...

...In the '80s this made a welcome change from the highpowered art market, where a few slick gallery owners misshaped the taste of Wall Street arrivistes...

...It is about theater, its more than 80-odd performers booming out the three shibboleths of the '90s: (1) Being gay, of color, of the Third World, automatically confers significance...

...Here is Lisa Phillips, praising "a woman with a probing, scathing wit": "Sue Williams wrenches painting away from its white male domain to comment on that society—its dogma and its exclusion of women...

...has come under new ownership and these days Anita Hill earns $ 10,000 per lecture...

...Then moma, the galleries of SoHo, and the museums of a dozen other cities began to display all sorts of lunatic fringework (even the curators of the Cincinnati Museum eventually showed the notorious homoerotic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe...

...A knife across her throat...

...Pepon Osario's glittery interiors are both tasteless and touching...

...Here it is pure Art, recycling as endlessly in the museum as it does on CNN...

...Mark Rappaport's film, Rock Hudson's Home Movies, boldly outs the actor five years after his death from aids...

...Thelma Golden offers a sociological overview: "Artists in the nineties have begun to fully deconstruct the margin-ality-centrality paradigm...

...Instead I wince with embarrassment, partly for the museum's new director, David Ross, and his curator Susan Sussman, but mostly for my fellow attendees...

...Kiki Smith, who is usually very big on female body parts, the bloodier the better, is represented by a piece entitled Mother...

...It offers indecipherable movies shown on a huge fiberglass Easter Island statue (the corruption of the West superimposed on the colonialized peoples, get it...

...Parked in front of the Whitney, Charles Ray's 45-foot hook and ladder fire truck is not the real thing...

...it is a big overgrown plastic toy, done with authentic verve and humor...

...Its principal component is an array of glass tears littering the ground...

...Tantrums have taken the place of accomplishments...

...Similarly, Gary Simmons' Everlast Champion, a series of gilded sneakers, might be dangling from the cab of a sentimental trucker recalling his teenage kids...

...I was reminded of Bette Davis' three-handkerchief films...

...The institution was too stuffy and safe, she felt, too salon-like, too inclined toward the French Impressionists and the German Expressionists...

...Not far away are Robert Gober's bundles of New York newspapers...

...But wait: Those words, it turns out, are merely a part of the Biennial's larger slogan, "I CAN'T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE...

...This must be displayed when entering the museum...

...All three are demonstrably untrue, but the last is the falsest of all...

...her canvases take up huge amounts of space to show the painter's inability to draw or spell ("defendent" is typical of her orthography...

...3) Everyone except straight white males has been victimized...

...Throw in some more complementarity of language from novels by people like Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldon, a couple of chapters from Rush Limbaugh's bestseller, The Way Things Ought to Be, a few diatribes from Alexander Cockburn and Louis Farrakhan, and a publisher could produce a very profitable Stuffed Owl II...

...2) The more strident the work, the higher its quality...

...But in 1993 the crudity, too, has grown state...

...And the nonpareil Julia Moore, dubbed "The Sweet Singer of Michigan": And now, kind friends, what I have wrote, I hope you will pass o'er And not criticize as some have done Hitherto herebefore...

...First the passion drained away, then the energy...

...Among its stars were that master of the anticlimax, the Earl of Lytton: She sat with her guitar on her knee, But she was not singing a note, For someone had drawn (ah, who could it be...

...Francesc Torres has lifted pictures from Newsweek, enlarged them to the size of posters, then clipped and smeared them...

...I also liked Fred Wilson's installation of ancient Egyptian statuary, decorated with African beads...

...This work is a large block of confection (about 3,000 Hershey bars, would be my rough guess), melted down and made into a cube fit for Godzilla...

...Likenesses of various European officers are given a new title, Gays in the Military, and neatly furnished with such captions as "Poo Poo Platter" and "La Treen...

...Here is the essayist B Ruby Rich and her unforgettable trio: "In the U.S...

...These few scraps, however, are hardly enough to redeem the most uninspired Biennial in modern memory...

...It cannot, of course, equal the fatuous work it celebrates, but a mighty effort has been made...

...For one advertisement entitled Having It All, Gober glues his own portrait over the face of a bride...

...This is not to say that the Biennial is entirely without its rewards...

...Catalogue: "Moffett has been intrigued by the possibilities offered by the subject of the glory hole...

...Antoni's Chocolate Gnaw returns us to the realm of the three-dimensional...

...Fearful of being lumped with those who hooted at Marcel Duchamp's Urinal at the 1919 Armory Show, they meekly wander the halls...

...fact, the idea of a Biennial was hatched that very year, when Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney got miffed at the Museum of Modern Art...

...Granted, the vehicle is better suited to the curbside of FAO Schwarz, but who's complaining...

...One triptych shows a line of soldiers, broken by an ad for the interior of a new car...

...Video is the expression of choice this year...

...If that isn't bold and insightful enough for you, there are Donald Moffett's vandalized steel engravings from the 19th century...

...A herd of independent minds lumbers across three floors, furious at the straights, the white males, the establishment, even though Washington, D.C...