The art of involvement

The works on display at the Whitney Biennial highlight a more coded, personalised approach to art.

A carnivalesque frenzy has descended upon Madison at 75th. The famous Whitney Biennial is here again. In the heart of New York, one of the world's most watched art "events" has unfolded: surprising, mesmerising, engaging, yes, but is it provocative?

A couple of days spent on the modest four floors over which the Biennial (titled Day for Night) is spread, reveals how curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne present the manner in which diverse art practices seek engagement with the contemporary.

If there are just a few trends that scream out at a viewer, they are these: that there is sharper engagement with the construction and stereotyped expectation of identity; that there is a call to re-view the many givens we've lived with; that you could be in your 20s or your 50s, even dead "" it doesn't matter "" it's your art that gets you in the Biennial.

The Biennial kicked off on the edge of what the US celebrates as Black History Month. Texas-based Dawolu Jabari Anderson, 33, questions this allocated celebration time.

In his multi-media painting, "Black History Month-Feel What the Excitement is About", three ethnically diverse girls gasp over star black athletes, celebrated as performers and forgotten thereafter. And no other kind of black person is applauded.

Besides, encasing the community's history for a month actually segregates them as "another". Robert Pruitt, 32, meanwhile draws upon the tensions that gangs like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) glorified. In "Throwback", he uses graffiti and slogans across a white KKK robe to deflate its menacing image.

Using beads, the kind often used in Afro hairdos, Kori Newkirk, 36, creates ceiling-suspended sculpture with glitzy urban scenes in colour on all sides. This is "Glint", where the city is often seen as a melting pot where one can grow beyond parochial biases.

Meanwhile, Marilyn Minter, 58, whose work also forms the cover image of the Biennial materials, brilliantly sends viewers pirouetting. Her works focus on apparent glamour: glitter, rhinestones, heels and designer brands. She offers close-up like snaps of hurrying celebrities, taken to satiate hungry packs of celebrity watchers.

Look closer, it's all enamel painting, applied with the finger and smudged with finger-prints. It takes a few moments to realise that we're seeing Dior stilettos caked with mud encasing really dirty (un-pedicured? Heavens!) feet. The Page 3 unreachable tumbles to everyday grime.

Conversely, Troy Brauntuch, 52, draws out the seductive in the ordinary through her work, Untitled (Shirts). Using the most delicately shaded conte crayon on cotton, Troy allows shelves of folded clothes to partly emerge through a great grey fog, recalling the Impressionists, if only for a moment. Lucas de Guilio, 30, stretches this.

He picks up twigs, cans and other debris/detritus, working with them to create lyrical sculpture. Does this mean that increasingly prosperous societies now trash low-grade valuables (not zero-value items), which Lucas resurrects and upgrades, to put back in the most elite market of all-the art market? Can he then confront high-end consumers of art with their own remains?

Richard Serra, 57, has circulated his famous image "Stop Bush" as a work of activism, and he does the same here. Ahead at the entrance, Mark di Suvero,73 and Rirkrit Tiravanjiya, 45, create the "Artists Tower for Peace".

Redesigned from the original of 1966, used to protest against Vietnam, the metal structure stands emblazoned with messages in a square 2 x 2 format fencing it. As the war enters its third year, these works testify to the need to resist.

Less frontal is Nari Ward, 44, who uses old oil barrels to create a tanning bed where the tan can be cookie-cut in the form of with stars and stripes, if you prefer to wear your patriotism on your skin. The machine has a US seal and a CD plays fragments of American-English training for a parrot.

Everyone must prove their loyalty, because if you're not with us, you're against us, remember? Liz Larner, 46, uses diverse materials in red, blue and white in combination to create a mound-like sculpture, recalling the same patriotic symbols.

Perhaps it's the absence of the hugely provocative (or maybe we've all become so cynical that we're hard to provoke) that allows us to calmly enter the space of many intense Biennial works. Many of them push the limits of high taste, erotica, social equilibrium, and it's strange to be unruffled spectators in this.

Just as much of the content is interrogative, the process and visual outcomes duck the expected. Much of the two-dimensional work, such as that of Carter, 36, testifies to this. But it's not in your face, somehow.

It's mostly all much more sublime, sophisticated, almost like a membrane exchanging ions with your body. Art making, even when seeking wider connections, is becoming more personalised and coded.

It's fascinating how unlike the Indian art scene all this is. In India, the engagement with contemporary reality is so reduced, it may as well be a chocolate chip in a cookie. Besides, the range of practices is much narrower, with much less overlap and mingling edges.

It's almost as if there's a lethargy amongst most of the art-making community and their patrons. Just the sheer number of experimental, thirst quenching two-dimensional works at the Whitney remind us that to produce interesting and new art, you don't necessarily require multi-media.

It's not the next step to progress as an artist. Nor is selling at dream-like prices at Christie's or becoming an "art legend". Both these, if anything, impede art practioners to think for themselves about how they would like to be involved in making art.