The 2003 Oregon Biennial
Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, 503-226-2811.

Through Sept 7.

A biennial is an argument, even when it is an argument about wishful thinking. I've never been to one that hasn't seemed, on some level, to be making a case for something: what the art world is, what it should be, which media are most appropriate to the times, which are unfairly neglected. So it is that every two years, a curator or group of curators gets to wrangle the unruly art world into a tidy little thesis.

The argument becomes somehow more elusive when it's a biennial that argues for art in a single state, rather than the whole grand expanse of the country. We don't have a Washington State Biennial, but Oregon does, and so I went down to Portland to see the state of art in a different state. The argument proposed by Bruce Guenther, the chief curator of the Portland Art Museum, is most clearly put at the end of his essay in the show's catalog, after he has described the process of choosing Biennial artists and provided a pert paragraph on each one. The works of all these artists, Guenther says, "manifest the primacy of form over the now-oblique and secondary place of content in contemporary art making."

Form over content is the modified rallying cry of such conservative critics as Clement Greenberg and Jed Perl and even of Tom Wolfe--critics for whom conceptual art raises the suspicion of chicanery, of having had the wool pulled over one's eyes by clever-boots artists who probably can't even draw. Guenther, to be fair, seems a lot less paranoid, but when he speculates about "the lack of innovation in the current moment in contemporary art," he tips his hand, because it simply isn't true.

This faulty summation must be partly due to this biennial's selection process: by submission instead of by curatorial legwork. Doubtless some very good artists come in over the transom, but if you want the innovative, you have to work for it--look for it at the margins, in the underground, where you find the people who aren't inclined to submit to big institutional cattle calls. This is where you find the new, the innovative forms which don't transmit their power via slides, forms which you haven't already digested.

I'm not deeply familiar with Oregon artists, but I know that there's a lot of excellent work in video, performance, and installation, and that there isn't even a single video work in the Biennial is partly about a kind of blinkering. Somehow it's painting that has become the Maginot Line of art: A curator who puts together a painting-heavy show can be seen as retrograde and stubborn. This show, although it includes a handful of photograph-based work and some sculpture (much of it quite good), is more of a referendum on the state of abstract painting than anything else.

Guenther is partly right about form over content, because in art, how something is conveyed is as important as what is conveyed (or else it might as well be anything else--a song, a skit, a page in your journal). On the other hand, all the formal properties in the world can't animate a painting that has no philosophical or conceptual backbone. Old-school abstraction, such as Jan Reaves' and G. Lewis Clevenger's, mine tired last-century ideas about at what point objects bloom into pure shape; and Scott Sonniksen's chains don't seem to be about much of anything at all. I quite liked James Boulton's explosive large-scale mash of competing patterns--doing exactly the opposite of what patterns are meant to do--and Liz Cheney's big, creepy charcoal drawings. Boulton's and Cheney's abstractions are also conceptual: created in relation to an overstimulating visual landscape, examining the unstable edge between knowledge and imagination.

Then there's James Lavadour, whose landscapes are at once photographic and drippy-abstract, and sometimes look like photographs of abstractions. I have logged many hours standing in front of Lavadour's landscapes, trying to figure out exactly why they're so thrilling. He works a middle place between representation and abstraction; a bit of fooling the eye, a bit of coaxing the eye, a bit of just plain confounding it. His work has such stature that I don't understand why we can't close the book on mediocre abstraction once and for all. And let biennials do what biennials ought to do.