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No sodden cant, no cliche of therapeutic culture goes unused. If we are at the point where any attempt at aesthetic discrimination can be read as blaming the victim, is there any use in choosing anything over anything else -- or in holding a Biennial at all?
Much of the art on view conforms to the recipe for postmodernist political utterance set out, with lapidary accuracy, by the art critic Adam Gopnik a couple of years ago. That is, you take an obvious proposition that few would disagree with -- "Racism is wrong" or "One should not persecute gays" -- and encode it so obliquely that by the time the viewer has figured it out, he or she feels, as the saying goes, included in the discourse.
An example is the collaborative piece by Hillary Leone and Jennifer Macdonald, which fills a whole room. It consists of a few canvases (actually bed frames covered with muslin) adorned with elegant arabesques burned into them with hot irons. The branding irons, 55 of them, hang from the ceiling. The squiggles they produce, one learns from the wall label, are in fact Gregg shorthand symbols, by which means the artists have filled the canvas with replications of multiple-choice answers from a survey on sexual behavior -- "More than once a week. Once a week. Two-three times a month . . ." Rarely has such a prolonged setup been followed by such a dim punch line.
Some work, but not much, gets above this level. Kiki Smith's sculpture Mother -- a pair of ghostly, transparent feet, before which lie scattered dozens of glass drops, large and small, which might be tears or babies -- has an unforced and melancholy poetry. Charles Ray specializes in weird dislocations of scale; his 45-ft.-long red toy fire truck parked outside the museum is an arresting street presence, while his naked nuclear family inside -- father, mother, daughter and son, all exactly the same size -- is distinctly spooky in a way that derives from Magritte. Byron Kim's Belly Paintings, 1992, representing six different hues of skin, each a gracefully swollen sac of solid color, are beautiful metaphors of the human body.
The found-object assemblages by the Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham -- parodic weapons made out of rusty gun parts, salvaged wood, plastic pipe -- deal with race and cultural resistance, but do so by imaginative, not merely rhetorical, means. Even Janine Antoni's sculptures -- a big cube of chocolate gnawed by the artist and a fairly repulsive mound of lard chewed up by her, flanked by a vitrine or mock reliquary displaying chocolate cases and lipsticks made from the residue of both (link between bulimia and beauty cult, get it?) -- have a sort of Monty Pythonish looniness that makes them almost endearing as traces of obsessive effort.