September 24, 1999
ART REVIEW; When Context Outshines Content

By ROBERTA SMITH
''AMERICA TAKES COMMAND.'' These jarring, jingoistic words, redolent of a Marshall Plan approach to cultural influence, appear on a large sign in the first gallery of ''The American Century: Art and Culture, 1950-2000'' at the Whitney Museum of American Art. They float above paintings by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and sculptures by David Smith, and they refer, of course, to what is often called the triumph of American art, specifically of Abstract Expressionism, after World War II.

Today the phrase seems quaint. Since the 1960's, curators, art historians and critics have progressively dismantled or at least de-emphasized the notion of a national esthetic and cultural dominance. Recent exhibitions have strongly suggested that Abstract Expressionism was only one strand of gestural painting that emerged around the globe in the late 1940's and early 50's in Japan, France, Austria and Italy.

Luckily, these words aren't the whole story of this complicated and conflicted show, which has been organized by Lisa Phillips, a former Whitney curator who is now director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo, and designed by the architect Christian Hubert. Like its tamer, less historically freighted predecessor, this second part sums up 50 years of American art and culture, the century's better half this time, and fills the entire museum. Over the range of six floors and five decades and hundreds of artworks in dozens of media, it alternately dazzles and frustrates, illuminates and disappoints, demonstrates terrific imagination and the yawning lack of it and ultimately confirms that an exclusive focus on American art has outlived whatever usefulness it once had.

The show, which opens on Sunday, is best and most surprising around the edges. In keeping with the current fashion for context, it surrounds the art with a tremendous amount of engaging supporting material. Even more than the first part, this installment is festooned with so many expertly organized bits of popular culture and historical background that a kind of centrifugal force builds. One's attention is constantly pulled outward toward the show's flickering margins -- toward landmark events, famous personalities, banned or controversial books, emblematic snippets of film, song and television and even occasionally the wild and crazy carrying on of the artistic avant-garde.

Every square foot of the museum has been used to convey some nodule of information or activity. In the garden-level ladies' room, for example, well-known authors like Frank McCourt and Kathryn Harrison read excerpts from their books on tape. The museum's stairwell has audio works by John Cage, Yoko Ono and Terry Fox and a segment of ''The Simpsons'' playing on a tiny television set. And just as you reach the lobby, home free you think, there are three Gap commercials on an even tinier set.

Upstairs, in the show itself, there are constant tugs of war between high and low and between art and history. On the fifth floor, while looking at Jasper Johns's ''White Target'' or Ray Johnson's burnished collages of Elvis Presley, both from the late 1950's, you may hear Presley singing ''Jailhouse Rock'' or equally famous songs by Ray Charles, Little Richard and Patsy Cline.

These emanate from one of the show's six ''cultural sites,'' which provide historical context with a minimum of disruption and a refreshing lack of text panels. At other sites you can sit in a beanbag chair beneath a giant peace symbol while listening to Jimi Hendrix's ''All Along the Watchtower'' in front of a wall-size image of the 1963 March on Washington. And toward the end of the show you can read a chronology tracing the National Endowment for the Arts' near-death experience in the early 1990's beside two of the most notorious artworks, by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, that started the uproar.

Some of the show's interstices evoke the ephemeral fringe of artistic practice that tends to be edited out of official histories. A gantlet of video monitors after the gallery devoted to Minimalism includes dance and performance pieces by Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton and Carolee Schneemann, emphasizing that there was more to the late 1960's and early 70's than industrially fabricated geometry. You can also watch films of happenings; signal works by experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith and Jonas Mekas; early videos of Joan Jonas and Meredith Monk, and performances of Robert Wilson's ''Einstein on the Beach'' and Laurie Anderson's ''O Superman.''

The problem with the addition of so much context is that when art is pitted against life, life tends to win. In the exhibition context, souvenirs of the outside world function as a form of visual comfort food: immediately comprehensible and easier to digest.

One responds to them with warm nostalgia (duck-and-cover air raid drills! Sonny and Cher!), or when the details concern figures like Senators Joseph R. McCarthy or Jesse Helms, with a knee-jerk sense of indignation and superiority.

But once past the feel-good moments, the contextualizing can't disguise the show's conventional core, the predictable, severely truncated story told by the art objects on view. As smooth as the periphery is textured and as shallow as the edges are deep, the central narrative moves with the efficiency of a Monarch Notes time line from Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, Mr. Johns's flags and targets and Andy Warhol's big double-double Elvis to ''Drawing Restraint 7,'' a Matthew Barney video installation featuring bare-chested satyrs. In between, brief note is taken of Color Field painting, Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism, Photo Realism, Conceptual Art, Process Art, Earthworks, Pictures Art, Neo-Geo and looser categories the Whitney calls ''A Resurgence of Painting'' and ''The Return of the Subject.''

On the whole, this show once again underscores the difficulty of mounting broad-scope, inclusively titled historical surveys unlimited by a discernible point of view that might provide a modicum of shape or logic. Mainly, one has the sense that a large, familiar list of artists was drawn up, all of whom appear in the show's textbooklike catalogue. After that it was simply a matter of shoe-horning as many of the uppermost layer as possible into the available gallery space.

Thus, there was room for Ellsworth Kelly and Alex Katz but not for Myron Stout or Al Held, for Jay DeFeo but not Joan Brown, for Ed Ruscha but not Peter Saul, for Jim Nutt but not Roger Brown, for Donald Judd but not Larry Bell, for Susan Rothenberg but not Jennifer Bartlett. Other artists present in the catalogue but not in the galleries include Robert Longo, Douglas Huebler, Judy Chicago, Kerry James Marshall, Zoe Leonard and Ann Hamilton. Artists who don't even qualify for the book include Dorothea Rockburne, James Welling and James Casebere.

The overall effect has the ''one artist, one work'' briskness and superficiality of a Whitney Biennial. Like the museum's signature overviews, it mixes usual suspects and fashionable unusual suspects, and it seems aimed primarily at a general audience with only a passing knowledge of art. But it will initiate many into the incalculable range of form and subject that characterizes the postwar art not just of the United States but also of most Western countries.

One glimpses the opening of the art world to women and artists of different races that Conceptual Art made possible and the acceptance of different forms of craft initiated by Process Art and Pattern and Decoration. The main drama, though, is the widespread, polymorphous infiltration of popular culture and everyday life signaled by Pop Art but instigated by a broad swath of artists, including the composer John Cage, the Fluxus group and Californians like Wallace Berman and Jess.

The movement of art toward accessibility and beyond, toward entertainment, is everywhere apparent. It is symbolic that at the beginning of the show rock-and-roll music is present in the cultural sites; by the end it has segued into the art, providing accompaniment, for example, to ''The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,'' Nan Goldin's slide presentation of photographs of the East Village demimonde.

Equally telling is a comparison of the show's two walk-in corridor installation pieces. In ''Live/Taped Video Corridor,'' Bruce Nauman's early 1970's work, one arrives at a tiny black and white monitor on which one can see only a live image of the back of one's own head. In Bill Viola's 1997 ''Tree of Knowledge,'' the viewer's movement down the corridor triggers an entire life cycle in splendid color, from green sapling to a life-size tree going through the four seasons.

But old habits persist. Count on the Whitney to work Edward Hopper into the exhibition; more pertinent would have been Stuart Davis, whose work underwent tremendous growth between 1950 and his death in 1964. And you would never know about folk artists from this show; even the achievements of two of the country's greatest, Martin Ramirez and Henry Darger, both active well past 1950, are missing.

After 1970 it is not the absence of individual artists that plagues the show so much as the sense that the American ''command'' phase, if you want to call it that, was over, that the action was increasingly elsewhere, or more accurately, everywhere, in South America, Europe and beyond. In the end, one senses a very quick rise and fall. Not only was there no ''American Century'' of fine art; there wasn't even an American half-century. What there was were two decades, the 1950's and 60's, during which American Art seen in isolation held its ground.

''The American Century: Art and Culture, 1950-2000'' opens on Sunday and will remain at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, through Feb. 13. It is presented by the Intel Corporation.

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