Last winter the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City presented a pair of exhibitions that together suggest the pluralistic state of the current art scene in the United States.

One consisted of a series of large dramatic video installations by the artist Bill Viola. The viewer could watch transfixed as figures projected on large screens were consumed by fire and water, or they could peer into the peephole of an enclosed room where a monastic cell was periodically overwhelmed by dramatic flashes of lightning, waves and raging storms. The exhibition reflected Viola's interest in spiritual traditions ranging from Zen to Sufism to Christianity.

The other exhibition was a retrospective devoted to the work of Arthur Dove, a lesser-known U.S. abstract painter of the 1930s and 1940s. Dove's small, understated abstract compositions represent the artist's effort to synthesize music, movement and the visual experience of nature.

Dove's work is in the collections of major museums around the United States. However, until recently he was often dismissed as a provincial figure whose exploration of abstraction was overshadowed by the more celebrated accomplishments of Picasso, Matisse and other members of the French avant garde. In recent years, however, art historians have begun to rewrite the standard history of modern art. According to this retelling, American art became interesting only after the arrival of migr artists in New York City at the end of the World War II. Dove s re-emergence signals a new willingness among scholars and critics to evaluate the genuine accomplishments of an earlier generation of American artistic pioneers.

Side by side, the two exhibitions were a study in contrasts. One was very theatrical, relying on the latest in video and digital technology and drawing viewers into a physical relationship with pulsing video imagery. The other was quiet and contemplative, exploring an undervalued history and offering a celebration of that most accepted of art forms, painting. Yet more than one viewer noted how surprisingly compatible the two shows were in their ability to meld different kinds of sensory experiences.

The pairing of these shows reveals an important reality about the current U.S. art scene. This is a time of flux in which contrasting and even contradictory developments can coexist and cross-fertilize. The comfortable old picture of art history as a story that unfolds in an evolutionary manner, with one movement leading logically and inexorably to the next, no longer seems to have any relevance to the so-called postmodern era in which we find ourselves. Instead, artists draw for inspiration on every period of the distant and recent past, speak to subjects as diverse as post-colonial politics, artificial intelligence and psychoanalysis, and direct their work at audiences that range from hard-core art aficionados to intrepid Web surfers to the harried traveler rushing through a train station or airport.

The Globalization of Art

The disorder in the contemporary art world is actually a mirror of the larger upheavals being experienced by society at large. The end of the Cold War, the rise of global markets and the emergence of radically new forms of electronic communication have transformed contemporary life in the United States in ways that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago. It should be no surprise that the art world reflects this state of radical transition.

In fact, one of the most striking developments in contemporary art can be tied directly to these larger social, political and economic currents. Just as the collapse of the Cold War has focused attention on parts of the globe that were overshadowed by the monumental battle between superpowers, so also, the art world has begun to widen its geographic focus. Art professionals can no longer limit their attention to developments in the United States and Europe. Now any serious study of contemporary art must embrace artists from all over the globe. Artists, curators, critics and collectors have begun to resemble cultural nomads, constantly on the move in search of new developments.

As one consequence of the widened field of view, museums today cast a much wider geographic net than they used to. As I write this essay in New York City, an exhibition of Chinese historical and contemporary art is on view at the Guggenheim Museum. The New Museum just took down a show by a Palestinian artist based in England and put up an exhibition of the work of an artist based in Spain. The Museum of Modern Art has a show of drawings from Latin America.

Meanwhile, in San Antonio, Texas, a new art foundation called ArtPace provides residencies for young artists from all over the world.

What Is An American Artist?

In this climate, questions of national identity become more and more nebulous.

An issue that arises with increasing frequency is the question: What exactly is an American artist (or for that matter an Italian or Nigerian or Filipino artist)? Is an American artist someone who was born in the United States? Is it someone with U.S. citizenship? Is it someone currently residing in the United States? What about expatriate Americans do they still qualify?

Similar questions arise about definitions of American art. Is it a style? Or is it an attitude, a kind of training or a choice of subject matter? These issues still matter because often funding for such exhibitions is determined by one's national origin. Government agencies provide money to support the inclusion of their artists in such international exhibitions. While some still take a strict view, others take a more liberal stance. The United States Information Agency, for example, which funds many international biennales, simply requires that artists be based in the United States.

The Impact of Electronic Media

The emergence of new electronic media reinforces these changes. This article, which you are reading in an online publication, demonstrates how the electronic highway negates national borders and connects people from opposite parts of the globe. In a similar vein, artists have begun exploring the ways that new technology can radically alter our concept of self and art. Artist web pages help artists bypass the institutions of the art world in order to introduce their work to a new virtual audience. Many are putting their work on CD-ROMs in order to explore a new order of interactivity. Using newly available technology, they can design art works that allow viewers to follow their own paths and create their own connections and narratives. Meanwhile, museums and galleries are finding that personalized web sites allow them to make art exhibitions available to those who cannot come to them.

As might be expected, these new developments have inspired a spirited debate within the art world as to the value and function of new technology and new media art. Some argue that the virtual presentation of art devalues the viewer's direct contact with the object which has heretofore been the essential aspect of an art experience. Others say that it is a mistake to think of these new digital techniques as new art forms that they simply expand our means for conveying the kinds of ideas that art has always conveyed. Yet others are dubious about the promise of new audiences. They ask, what is the depth of the web art experience? Does art on the web encourage a greater sense of democracy and participation, or does it merely create a new class divide, separating those with access to technology from those without in a far more decisive way than the old, so-called elitist art museums? Does web art require a completely new understanding of aesthetics?

The Changing Nature of Public Art

Questions of audience also lie behind another development in contemporary art, namely the growing interest in public art. While the web promises to create a vast new virtual audience for art, public artists are interested in bringing art to real, localized communities. There has been a definitive change in thinking about public art from the days when it was seen primarily as a decoration or monument plopped in a public space. Contemporary public artists work in a variety of ways. Some create projects as part of "percent for art" programs, in which a percentage of the construction budget for a public or private building is set aside for art. Others are more engaged in temporary projects that take such diverse forms as billboards, artist-designed magazine sections and community projects in which artists work with members of particular communities. These neighborhood projects can range from the creation of a community garden to an art education program that gives disadvantaged children access to art and photography equipment to a joint exploration of local history.

Again there are questions and controversies. What is the nature of the public artist's responsibility to the community in which his or her work is placed? Is a garden or a set of signs really art? Is art beginning to converge too closely with social work?

As might be expected, such radical upheavals in the definition and distribution of art are having an effect on the institutions that present it to the public. One striking recent development is the emergence of the international biennale as a primary mechanism by which artists become known internationally. Biennales are international exhibitions organized every two years in art capitals around the world on some topical theme. For people in the art world, these exhibitions are important meeting grounds where ideas are exchanged, new work is discovered and reputations consolidated.

Until recently, biennales were largely limited to locations in Europe or the United States. In the last decade, however, that has begun to change. Art organizers in far-flung art centers are organizing their own shows, luring the important curators and critics to their cities and putting themselves on the map. Often they place special emphasis on artists from the region in which the biennale takes place.

The themes adopted by such exhibitions suggest a new agenda. With titles like "Beyond Borders, "Transculture" and "Esperanto, they tend to stress the idea that art today transcends nationalism and national borders. And their locations suggest how truly global the art world is becoming. In 1997 alone, there were biennales in Kassel and Meunster, Germany; Venice, Italy; Lyon, France; Kwangju, South Korea; Johannesburg, South Africa; Istanbul, Turkey; Ljubljana, Slovenia; Havana, Cuba; Sofia, Bulgaria; and Montenegro and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The Expanded Role of the Museum

The new focus on globalism is also having its effect on museum organization. The global model is most strikingly articulated by the Guggenheim Museum which has expanded beyond its base in New York City with branches in Venice, Berlin and Bilbao, Spain. Conceiving of the museum less as a library or archive and more as a network, Guggenheim Museum director Thomas Krens moves art and exhibitions between these international branches. He argues that too many museums keep the bulk of their collections in storage, out of sight of both casual viewers and specialists. The branch system allows him to make a far greater percentage of the museum's vast holdings available to the public.

Krens' new conception of the global museum is a response to the heightened expectations for museums at the close of the 20th century. There is ever greater pressure for museums to be responsive to their audiences. Financial pressures from donors and competition from other sources of entertainment have forced museums to be much more attentive to the cultivation of visitors. One result of this has been an elevation of the field of museum education. Once considered a peripheral activity which centered on setting up school tours of museum shows, museum education has become one of the institution's primary purposes.

Two much-celebrated, newly-inaugurated museum projects reveal the ways that museums are expanding their traditional roles. The new J. Paul Getty Center is a billion-dollar arts complex which opened late in 1997 on a hill with a majestic view of the city of Los Angeles. Though its centerpiece is a museum devoted to Greek and Roman antiquities, decorative arts and European old masters' paintings, the six-building complex includes institutes for historical research, conservation, arts and humanities information, education and arts funding. With an annual operating budget of $189 million, it is expected to radically enhance Los Angeles profile in the international art world.

Equally spectacular is the new Guggenheim branch in Bilbao. The spectacular building, designed by U.S. architect Frank Gehry, is being hailed as an art work in its own right. Meanwhile, the museum iself is seen as a boon, and is expected to bring tourists to the region. The $100-million construction cost and the annual operating budget have been provided by the Basque government. In turn, the Guggenheim Museum provides its extensive collection and expertise in creating educational and research programs.

Contemporary U.S. Art

What kind of art suits these volatile times? The diversity of contemporary art in the United States is suggested by the artists chosen to represent the United States for the last three Venice Biennales. In 1993 the choice was Louise Bourgeois, a French-born sculptor in her 80s whose sensuous, surrealistic sculptures evoke the human body without specifically representing it. In 1995 the choice was Viola, the video artist. And in 1997 it was painter Robert Colescott, who draws on his experience as a black man in the United States to satirize the state of race relations and the white bias inherent in conventional U.S. history.

These three artists only begin to suggest the range of media and concerns explored by contemporary U.S. artists. Painting today ranges from the hyper-realism of Chuck Close, whose gargantuan portraits are based on photographs broken into grids and recreated with a kind of finger painting; to Elizabeth Murray, whose domestic abstractions break the square of the canvas to twist and turn in an almost sculptural manner; to Robert Ryman, whose career is an ongoing meditation on the infinite variations of the white canvas.

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ARTIST ELIZABETH MURRAY:
SPEAKING TO THE PRESENT FROM THE PAST

Elizabeth Murray, best known for her large, irregular-shaped and layered canvases, is one of the most important painters currently working in the United States.

Her work has been described as a fusion of abstract expressionism and what one critic called the "highly sophisticated funk figuration" of the painter's Chicago roots. Murray was born in the Illinois city and grew up there and in Michigan. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving her bachelor of fine arts degree in 1962 and later a master's degree from Mills College in Oakland, California.

When she arrived in New York City in the late 1960s, minimalism was a premier art form. Murray began to develop her own way of painting. At first it derived from minimalism, a reductive, geometrically-based aesthetic, but over time it gained energy and narrative. By the end of the 1970s, she became a symbol of the reinvigoration of painting in the United States, and about a decade later was generally hailed as a leading figure of her generation.

Her works are smart, animated, and easy to recognize. She often slips ordinary objects into abstract images. Her big, colorful canvases are loaded with jazzy colors and seemingly abstract forms that are full of references to homey objects such as coffee cups, tables and human figures, full of energy and vibrant disarray.

In a 1991 article in The New York Times, author Deborah Solomon noted that Murray's work "recapitulates great moments in 20th-century art. Cubism's splintered planes, Fauvism's jazzy colors, Surrealism's droopy biomorphic shapes, the heroic scale of Abstract Expressionism -- it's all there in a Murray painting. This isn't to say that she 'appropriates' in the 1980s manner to mock the past. Rather, she shows how past images can speak to the present."

One of Murray's newest works is also the largest and most ambitious of her career -- a 120- foot mosaic mural that graces the mezzanine of a subway station in midtown New York City. Called Blooming, it is one of more than 60 artworks throughout the New York subway system. The mural depicts a richly-colored fantasy of sunbursts, coffee cups and serpentine tree branches.

Murray, 58, who has been riding the subway for more than 30 years, told New York Times writer David W. Dunlap in a May 1998 article that the mural was inspired by "workers."

"I had this vision of people getting up really early, half in a dream state, putting on their clothes, drinking a cup of coffee and getting on the subway to go to work."

Ultimately, her art evolves out of life. "When you walk out of the studio...down the street, that's where you find art... Or you find it at home, right in front of you."

Murray does not view herself as an abstract painter. "The images in my painting all represent something. They're not pure the way abstraction is; they're not trying to be beautiful or eternal or higher than life. Abstraction left out too much."

Part of Murray's appeal, Marlena Doktorczyk-Donohue wrote in ArtScene in February 1997, is the fact that her work cannot be pigeonholed.

"The work is rigorously abstract, yet figuration and narrative are always looming. The formal elements possess a warm-blooded life that allows the abstract notion to enter our collective consciousness. ...If the art world can get head-heavy, Murray, like an insouciant child not noticing anyone else on the playground, creates beauty from someplace in her wild and wacky heart."

"I paint about things that surround me," Murray explains, "things that I pick up and handle every day. That's what art is. Art is an epiphany in a coffee cup."

-- Charlotte Astor        

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Side by side with this are the works of artists exploring new media. These include Nam June Paik, the Korean-born artist who is known as "the father of video art" and who assembles televisions into comic robots; Kenneth Snelson, who has translated his atom-like sculptures into cosmic fantasies using the most advanced digital software; and Paul Garrin, who has created an interactive installation in which a very threatening virtual guard dog follows the viewer around the room.

Adding to the mix is the growing presence in American art of emigre artists whose work explores the complexity of hybrid culture and identity. For instance, Russian expatriate artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid came to the United States in 1978 after making an underground reputation in the then Soviet Union for their witty and affectionate parodies of Soviet-sanctioned socialist realism. Now their work is likely to contain comically heroic representations of figures like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and the sturdy, upright American working man, thereby acknowledging that the idealization of history knows no geographic or ideological boundaries.

Chinese artist Xu Bing was raised in Beijing but now lives in New York. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution, a period in which books deemed counterrevolutionary were destroyed and their authors "re-educated." His work deals with the subversive power of written language through the creation of books whose text is a nonsense hybrid of English and Chinese. And Japanese-born artist Yukinori Yanagi, a resident of New York City, expresses the instability of borders and national identities with giant ant farms whose inhabitants gradually disrupt arrangements of colored sand patterned to replicate the flags of many nations.

As U.S. art heads into the 21st century, it becomes more and more evident how much the world of the future will differ from the world of the past. For artists, as for all of us, these are uncertain times. But uncertainty offers its own creative challenges. In the 21st century, artists may help us understand how to think and function in a world that we can now only barely imagine.

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Eleanor Heartney, a writer and critic for Art and America and other publications, is the author of Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads.