Report from New York

The main attraction at this year's Whitney Biennial is a black curtain or, more accurately, what is hidden behind it. To this day, a uniformed guard is stationed outside Hans Haacke's "Sanitation" in anticipation of a mob. Story has it that during the early days of the Biennial, the guard did indeed earn his keep, but today, as disinterested museum-goers walk briskly by, he looks superfluous, if not ornamental.

A gathering crowd is no indication of artistic achievement. The critical consensus at the 2000 Biennial, though, has closely mirrored popular opinion. This was the year of the video: Douglas Aitken's installation "Electric Earth," which chronicles the nocturnal wanderings of a young black man through the streets of Los Angeles, was widely praised, along with Shirin Neshat's "Fervor." The Biennial is in an unusual position: it has to function as a two-year retrospective of contemporary American art while still keeping up with shows like P.S.1's. Aitken's piece, which was featured on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, embodies this trend. Yet the media buzz prior to the opening of the Biennial was not about Aitken or other noteworthy Biennial participants, but about "Sanitation." Haacke's piece has caused a virtual spectacle that has grown to involve New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the Whitney Museum and the artist himself. Late last year, Giuliani cut the Brooklyn Museum's funding because it decided to show, as part of an exhibit called Sensation, Chris Ofili's controversial painting of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung and speckled with pornography. "Sanitation" champions artistic expression in the face of political interference, but it is no more and indeed far less than the sum of its parts-twelve Rubbermaid garbage cans surround a framed version of the First Amendment, while an altered version of Jasper Johns's interlocking "Three Flags" painting, with one flag's corner drooping limply, hangs in the background, next to six quotes by Giuliani and perennial anti-National Endowment for the Arts stalwarts Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson. The sound of soldiers marching can be heard emanating from the open trash bins.

Never mind that Sensation had been shown two years ago in England to no controversy and that this kind of discourse on the First Amendment should have been resolved before the turn of the last century. The main source of the fuss is that "Sanitation" displays the quotations from Giuliani and company in Gothic Fraktur font, a typeface often associated with the Nazis. The mayor has therefore accused Haacke of portraying him as a Nazi and concurrently trivializing the Holocaust. Objectively, Gothic Fraktur is more of a nationalistic font than a Nazi one. It is based on medieval German designs, and was certainly not the creation of the Nazis, though they propagated variations of it until 1941 when Hitler halted its official use. Yet Haacke's previous works, like 1994's "Ernst Junger," make it hard to fully absolve the artist from Giuliani's accusations. In that installation, done also in Fraktur, the artist directly associates the typeface with Hitler. Given that this motif was also used in 1988's "Und Ihr habt doch gesiegt" (And You Were Victorious after All), it might be more accurate to accuse Haacke of being overly self-derivative than of trivializing the Holocaust.

We should keep in mind that "Sanitation" was probably a rushed creation, most likely developed after the Sensation spectacle of last December. But this does not excuse "Sanitation" as a work of art. Unlike Haacke's earlier works, there is no consideration for ecology; every object in "Sanitation" seems unjustifiably placed, like Darwin without niche theory. Never do the rectilinear and exclusionary lines formulate a cohesive composition. All in all, the composition is balanced to the point of fragmentation, making it difficult to view the exhibit as a whole. The only exception to the excess of orthogonality is Haacke's diagonal placement of a framed copy of the First Amendment across the floor of the installation space. Had this object been better tied to Jasper Johns's down-turned flag, an interesting crucifixion motif might have been seen, with the twelve Rubbermaids as disciples, but as such this connection was barely noticeable.

The exhibit also seems all but unconcerned with what Haacke does best-what Walter Grasskamp called "the avoidance of the notoriously German theme of carping at the unworthiness of the masses in front of the lonesome triumphs of art." "Sanitation," which signals Haacke's incarnation as the king of cut-and-paste, has neither an aesthetic nor a political leg to stand on. The ideas contained in the exhibit are too focused and yet too disparate to evoke any response, anger or otherwise. No doubt it makes one pine for Haacke's kinetic sculptures, such as 1963-65's "Condensation Cube," which leaves the viewer with visions of Yves Klein trapping dampened air.

"Sanitation" probably would have been more effective as a street flyer or brochure, but in any case was theatrical enough to provoke considerable response. As Haacke himself puts it, "There's been a tremendous increase in the number of museum visitors, but that has to do with entertainment value. I don't think it has to do with a deeper interest in art." And this year at the Whitney, how could it?

Biennial 2000 will be at the Whitney Museum in New York through June 4.