The noise of art

WHEN DID THE visual art world steal pop music's thunder, leaping aboard the bandwagon with the frenetic abandon of Courtney Love cutting ahead in a buffet line of outrage, scoping out yet another serving of scandal?

I couldn't escape the idea as I wandered through the Whitney Biennial in New York a few weeks ago, shortly after its opening. Sure, the art school-rock star connection goes back to the Beatles and the Stones. But for whatever reason, these days the visual and sound art camps seem to be closer than ever – relegated to the same economically dodgy, fringe neighborhood, I suppose, where the popular kid (pop music) lends the smart kid (fine art) some sex and glamour while art gives music a cerebral cast and conceptual depth. The evidence was all over the Biennial, which includes Banks Violette's drum kit, Beck CD artist Jeremy Blake's Brit rock-drenched video ode to designer Ossie Clark, Jim O'Rourke's bathroom installation, and Cory Arcangel's Super Mario Bros. video and music reedits/remixes – not to mention performances of "video-game rock music" by Arcangel, punky mind games by Tracy and the Plastics, and lovelorn ballads by Antony of Antony and the Johnsons.

Talk about sensory overload. I appreciate cross-disciplinary commingling as much as the next multitasking overachiever. But I couldn't help but wonder at the show's mother lode of musical references and whether it was a sign that the visual arts have truly run out of passion, ideas, emotion, or simply juice and have thus resorted to exploiting pop music's connections.

I queued up along with the other gawkers to get into Yayoi Kusama's trippy Fireflies on the Water room, in the latest of a series of lines that began outside in the bitter cold wind tunnel called Madison Avenue. That's what you get for cruising the Biennial and its white-rabbit warren of a fun house. This on a weekday before the rapturous reviews poured in from critics such as Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times and Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker, who praised the show as "easily the best in some time" and "startlingly good," respectively, and earmarked it as proof that craft, skill, and, specifically, painting and drawing are baaaack, Governator style.

But is that really news considering the work of relative oldster Raymond Pettibon, who got his start drawing record-cover art for his brother and Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn's SST label and making bleakly hilarious one-frame comics/zines that fixated on Charles Manson and hippie culture gone wrong from a très-SoCal punk perspective? Or looking at that of generation-younger painter Elizabeth Peyton, who first received attention for her paintings of Kurt Cobain and other rock stars that tapped a particularly rich and tumescent vein of girlish obsession? Her paintings are rough, small, and jewellike, like inverted Vermeers – only with a gaze fixed intensely on the artist herself in a biker tee, not on a girl with a pearl earring.

Peyton definitely left her brush strokes on the pop passion play of Sue de Beer's Hans und Grete installation. I mounted a massive fake fur-covered stuffed animal in de Beer's faux teenager's bedroom, right next to the paper-and-board facsimile of Fender amps, to watch her sex, drugs, and demonic possession video diary of the two little tots lost – this time without the lederhosen and Black Forest and with references to Slayer and the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Bank robberies, kidnappings, and political resistance are boiled down to – take your pick – juvenile rebellion, morbid self-involvement, or a quest for authenticity. Dario Robleto's sculptures – including Our '60s Radicals Forgot to Stay Suspicion and Our Sin Was in Our Hips (two "grinding" pelvises made with vinyl record dust culled from the artist's mother's 45 rpm singles collection, female pelvic-bone dust, pigment, resin, and, yep, dirt) – are more resonant and hilariously literal.

My favorite piece was S.F. native and now Los Angeles-based artist and musician Dave Muller's ...That Hollywood Adage Be Nice to People on the Way Up, Because They're the Same People on the Way Down, an installation of mixed-media concert posters, records, and a musical family "tree" or, rather, landscape. Borrowed from Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo's '70s book Rock 'n' Roll Is Here to Play: The History and Politics of the Music Industry, the musical time line starts at 1955, branches out into dozens of strata, such as R&B, ballad R&R, jazz rock, acid rock, glitter, heavy metal, soft soul, and "schlock rock," and some 470 artists before stopping at 1974, a disco ball and a formidable framed portrait of the spines of Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, Yoko Ono's Fly, and the Butthole Surfers' Brown Reason to Live, before picking up at 1984 and heading back to 2004 by simply flipping the earlier time line in reverse. At least now we know how Muller really feels about the past 20 years of pop music.

In a recent e-mail, Muller told me the piece is the latest spin-off in a series of drawings of his record collection, which is 3,500 LPs strong and ever growing. "This began a dissolving of barriers, which allowed the introduction of the music world into my ever-increasing sphere of topic fodder for art production," wrote Muller, who's also known for his curatorial efforts as the organizer of Three-Day Weekend shows and his involvement in the revived Destroy All Monsters with original members Jim Shaw and Carey Loren. "The Whitney installation is the third in an ongoing series using the chart as a backbone for rumination on various ways to describe my passion for music and how I relate it to other parts of my cultural production.

"I don't know if it's possible, but I'd like my work to incorporate an adolescent thrill that some music contains, combined with an adult intellectual rigor that's rare in pop music," he added. "Someone like Caetano Veloso has been successful doing this in music, so why can't I do it in art?"

Veloso – along with Tim Buckley, Arthur Russell, Moondog, LCD Soundsystem, Nina Simone, Joseph Spense, Red Snapper, West Street Mob, Motörhead, and Metal Urbain – made Muller's DJ set of underappreciated songs at the museum March 12. Having a foundation in, if not the classics, music history (as much as he pokes fun at it) seems to be a major point of ... That Hollywood Adage. And perhaps that's why it cuts through the noise. In this context music and pop culture are less a trendy vehicle – unlike the show's images of nature and skulls (the '00s version of the happy face) – than a clear source of affection and fascination, apart from the gloss of celebrity. Muller lets his geek colors show, and that kind of sincere, loving yet critical engagement is what gives this show its charge, its sense of change.

The 2004 Whitney Biennial continues through May 30. For more information go to www.whitney.org.

Tip it in; e-mail Kimberly Chun