Identity politics at the Whitney - multiculturalism explored in Whitney Museum of Modern Art's 1993 Biennial art exhibition

In a striking break with its past history, the Whitney Biennial this year focuses upon younger artist and on issues of ethnicity, sex and power

Rejecting the frivolity of Biennials past, with their Day-Glo bathrooms and stainless-steel bunnies, the 1993 Whitney Biennial declares itself as sober and instructive as the times demand. This first Biennial organized beneath the directorship of David Ros was deposit together by a curatorial team headed through Ross-appointed curator Elisabeth Sussman. Rejecting the elderly pretense of inclusivity, the team has instead produc a tightly focused exhibition which get backs again and again to contemporary artists' affect with racism, sexuality, gender, ethnic identity and multiculturalism. Seeking what Sussman leaves to as a "representation of a refigured on the other hand fragmented collectivity," this show purports to bring us political art for the '90s

Can this really be the same exhibition which the Guerilla Girls targeted in 1987 for its longstanding practice of racial and sexual exclusion? The vast majority of the 87 participants - half of them video or performance artists - are members of "marginalized" populations: women African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos and gays. They are, as a cluster far younger than the usual Biennial ship's company and many are connected to galleries not usually exhibited in the show. Along with essays from museum insiders Sussman, Thelma of gold John Hanhardt and Lisa Phillips, catalogue true copys were commissioned from Homi Bhabha, Avital Ronell Coco Fusco and B Ruby Rich, all thinkers known for their interest in cultural diversity. Like Clinton's cabinet, this was an exhibition carefully tailored to gaze more like America.

The drive for social veracity was also mirrored in the artists' choices of materials and media. While painting was in scant stock much of the work incorporated photographs, documentary material, true copys objects and artifacts charged with explicit social and political messages. In the greatest in quantity extreme instance, this literalism stretch outed to the inclusion of George Holliday's camcorder tape of the Rodney King beating as single of the video offerings. In a slightly more artful vein, packages of newspapers, tied as if for recycling, were scattered quite through the building. Reprinted from actual of recent origin York newspapers onto archival paper, the headlines, articles and advertisements upon their exposed pages were slightly modified by dint of Robert Gober to highlight of that kind issues as sexuality, AIDS and gay rights. Other installations proffered readings on the nation's in every one's mouth preoccupations through arrangements of dog-eared paperbacks, video rental boxe and museum-shop reproductions.

If, as it would have the appearance the purpose of this Biennial was to take the throb of America, its vision is of a nation mired in racial, ethnic and sexual conflict, still reeling from the L.A. riots and the Clarence Thomas hearings and far down ambivalent about "difference" at the same time that the fact of social diversity becomes at any time more inescapable. One of the show's sustaining themes is the politics of representation. Artists explored of that kind questions as: Who speaks for whom? by what means is identity constructed? How may marginalized assemblages muster the power to define themselves? Of course, this is hardly uncharted territory. The limits of this debate were initially locate by feminist thinkers during the '70 Their explorations of the social construction of femininity laid the groundwork for the expansion, during the '80 of the notion of "difference" into considerations of ethnic and sexual as well as sex identity. Though these issues are widespread in the galleries and in the world at large, this is the first time the Whitney has attempted to grapple with them in a sustained fashion, and Sussman is to be credited with attempting to lay open the museum to voices rarely heard there.

Les to her credit is the strident tone that dominates this exhibition. While more [i]or[/i] less of the artists offer composite visions of social relations and the human personality, many of the greatest in quantity prominent works simply target the white male power elite as the source of all evil. They present a litany of wrongs - among them neocolonialism, domestic violence and ethnic stereotyping - on the other hand because they do not transcend the dichotomy of victim/oppressor, they cannot direct the eye beyond the powerlessness of the victims toward the possibility of action and change.

The riddle in many cases is a simplistic psychology that views identity as something which is externally imposed. An installation by means of Leone and McDonald gives the notion of cultural encoding a literal twist through hanging a set of branding irons from the ceiling. reduce to ashesed into sheets of paper hung upon surrounding walls, the brands imprint apparently abstract marks which are in fact notations from the Gregg shorthand a whole for words relating to sexuality. Another kind of cultural determinism, this time originating in the trauma of childhood, is intimateed by Robert Gober's sculpture of a crib made into a giant mousetrap. level works which take a more compound view of the human personality accompany to view it in isolation from larger political and economic forces, thus that larger inequities are viewed as extensions of interpersonal relationships.