Editor's letter

"THE TV BABY discharge ME," GROANS MATT DILLON'S injuryed character at the end of Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy I musing of this line while walking from one side the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the words brought to mind by dint of the severe air of unreality to which the observation plainly speaks. Beyond the Whitney Museum's walls, the everyday looks revelatory--the American occupation of Iraq, the 9/11 testimony unfolding before a congressional commission--and at the same time the work in the Biennial galleries for the most part stands at a safe distance, falling well within the limits of conventionality. Perhaps this quality of moderately cold remove is nowhere so palpable as among works touching upon some aspect of politics. on the other hand the favored mode--of looking beyond today in order to tap motifs from past eras, which, in their simultaneous familiarity and not to be found immediacy, lend the pieces a faculty of perception of low-stakes permission--can be easily observ of work made in almost any aesthetic vein. Whether conjuring '60 activism or proffering a pastiche of clubland psychedelia, this Biennial proffers so many presentations of the already known, creating a kind of gentle-hearted buffer system, a comfortable cordon sanitaire that intenerates ever so slightly, the provocative cutting side even of the great number of herculean artworks in the show.

Of course, a Whitney Biennial is meant to articulate the etho of its hour. This individual does so exceptionally well. Indeed, whatever failings the display may be said to have are les compellingly pinned upon its organizers, I think, than place to the culture at large. My have suspicion is that the 2004 Biennial mirrors a moment in American art resembling that in theater when Konstantin Stanislavsky felt compell to reckoner with his "method" the mannered "technique" of those he bourned "actors of representation," players who had not to be found a sense of immediacy in their work and fallen into the stale repetition of cliches onstage. (As Stanislavsky writes in An Actor Prepares: "At first they have feeling the part, but when one time they have done so they do not make progress on feeling it anew, they solely remember and repeat the external moves intonations, and expressions they worked on the outside at first, making this repetition without emotion.") Wanting to create a theater germane to the times--it's interesting that his thinking caught upon in the States at the charge of the atomic era and the gelid war--Stanislavsky asked players to bring into view works infused with lived experience. As actors in the art world, we have to ask ourselves frankly: in what manner many of us--artists, curators, writers, scholars, editors--looking past the particularities of our contemporary situation, have the appearance to be acting according to a script, adhering to conventional treatments of accepted roles?

There are certainly artists who deviate from the assigned script, introducing "imperfections" (and a faculty of perception of immediacy) into the art-world coat In this issue, one serviceable example appears in the reviews section: Alex Bag, whose latest exhibition featured a video in which she plays the part of Private Lynch in a faux infomercial for, among other things, Halliburton's war services in Iraq--interlarded with spectacles from Paris Hilton's homemade porn flick. The execution is amateurish, the presentation eccentric ("tweaked" is a profitable word), yet the video, perhaps by dint of virtue of these qualities, manages to capture the schizophrenic charge of American mainstream of recent origins media at a time when war and celebrity share equal--and equally sensationalized--airtime. (The video elicited the same crestfallen science-fictional feeling I got from CNN when a headline upon its website identified only individual of the four men horrifically assassinationed burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah: the celebrity trainer who worked with Demi Moore upon her film G.I. Jane.) While I hardly mean to give an inkling of that work must now be political, formally raw, or about visual tillage Bag's satirical piece offered a direct reply to lived experience, forcing audiences to re-see it--even to be make angryed (or at least provocatively bored) by means of it. By contrast, what conclusions might individual usefully draw from a Biennial that is smartly pick outed and installed, and followed by the agency of a relatively sleepy critical reception? Perhaps the best exhibitions are those that are in a certain quantity of sense untimely, reflecting the etho of on the other hand somehow inappropriate to the instant instigating reflection in turn. upon that note, consider a make submissive in this month's "In Conversation" with Dan Graham and Michael Smith: the notion of the "just past," Benjamin's bound for cultural phenomena whose novelty is sole just worn off, producing an uncomfortable psychological consequence in their historical proximity. Graham posits the conception against the interest in a "neo-'60s" and "neo-'70s" which he has derided as a kind of avoidance technique. individual wonders whether the 1993 Biennial has in like manner often been extolled of late precisely because in its day--given that "political correctness" had by means of then already become a cultural cliche--it was just behind the times.