The View From Abroad

Old Power: In Gilles Barbier's Nursing Home, 2002, America is an impotent hero

COURTESEY THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART,NYC

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It's no joke being the only superpower. Not only do you preside over a world that you hold at arms' length, but sometimes the arms are supplied by the Pentagon. You dump industrial waste, bad TV and McDonald's wherever you go. And all around the world, people get very tired of you.

That's the main message of "The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003," the very mixed bag of a survey show now at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. It consists of work about the U.S. by artists from 30 nations, almost all of it made after the fall of the Berlin Wall and much of it since 9/11. Though it includes a few pieces that treat the U.S. fondly, the show is produced largely by artists who are sick of America's rawboned incursions on the world stage, its imperial hauteur, its global misalliances. Some of them don't even like our T shirts.

O.K., we can't chew gum and shoot at the same time. Still, you wish the international art world came at us with better work than this. In the catalog, Lawrence Rinder, the Whitney curator of contemporary art, quotes Alexis de Tocqueville, America's most subtle visitor. Americans live, Tocqueville wrote, "in a state of perpetual self-adoration; only strangers or experience may be able to bring certain truths to the Americans' attention." Actually, American artists have already dissected their homeland to a fare-thee-well. If you want a thoroughgoing refusal of the national mission, you can't do better than James Rosenquist's ferocious mural F-111, 1965, or anything by Leon Golub. By comparison, Gilles Barbier's Nursing Home, 2002, a sculptural suite of elderly superheroes — Captain America attached to an IV and so forth — is a one-liner about aging superpowers that overspends the already deflated currency of Pop.

All the same, pick your way carefully, and there are some surprises here. In the category of deluxe political cartooning, there's Hisashi Tenmyouya, a onetime graffiti artist who updates the 19th century Japanese-warrior block-print pictures called musha-e. In Tattoo Man's Battle, 1996, he pits an outmatched Japanese horseman against a fire-breathing black giant (read, America). How you feel about the picture may depend in part on how you feel about a Japanese nationalism as honking and sentimental as any Charlie Daniels song, but I dare you to peel your eyes off the thing.

Then there's the video projection called Death in Dallas, a lament for John F. Kennedy made three years ago by Zoran Naskovski, a Serb artist who treats the murdered President as a figure of myth. Over footage of the Kennedy years, including the assassination, Naskovski plays a long, keening song-poem about J.F.K.'s death. Written days after the killing, it was recorded by a Serb singer who accompanies himself on the gusla, an ancient string-and-bow instrument. We know that the Kennedy mystique has dwindled, but as we see the dead President being absorbed by this mournful song into a heavenly kingdom we stop caring about the dry newspaper in our hearts.

The deceptively modest video piece Larger than Life, 2000, by the young Polish artist Pawel Kruk, has the opposite effect, ever so gently pulling the rug out from under another American icon. In a mock interview, Kruk channels Michael Jordan, mouthing words (in his Polish-accented English) from Jordan's 1993 autobiography, Rare Air: Michael on Michael. What looks at first like pure homage ends up as a masterstroke of passive aggression that finds the slightly unnerving undertow in Jordan's words. That implacable self-possession of his, so very American, is the kind that can lead to triumph or hubris.

Add to that Kruk's attempt to take on those characteristics himself, literally to be the man, and you have a better deconstruction of the Yankee cultural mystique, of its beguiling contradictions, than you can find in a whole shelf of French theorists. Or for that matter, in most of "The American Effect."

--By Richard Lacayo