Instead, it seems, we find ourselves in a halfway place, equally incapable of affirming or negating. The curatorial space grants are the clearest example of this, to my mind. Is this practice new? Old? Does it represent a bold effort to link how we think of Biennials - as being comprised chiefly of artists rather than works - with how they are produced? Or is it the opposite, a top-down effort to shift our focus from works towards the artists and their processes? Was it pillaged from Europe? Are we behind the times or ahead of them? Perhaps it's merely a formal triviality, just one more formerly revelatory practice absorbed into the institutional bag of tricks; but isn't this also, in some sense, meaningful? Does that absorption have nothing to say about the parties involved in the transaction, institutional, creative, and otherwise? Isn't something being tested here? Some set of ideas set to work? More to the point, isn't this sort of thing what we've been trying to cultivate? Isn't the combination of self-consciousness and innovation on display in every aspect of this Biennial precisely the result of four decades worth of critical artistic practice and pedagogy? If not, where did we go wrong? And if so, well, what do we think? Where have we succeeded, where have we failed? Quoting, in Peter Schjeldahl's marvelous turn of phrase, that "never-fail appliance for glamorizing malaise,"

– I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.

William Cordova, The House that Frank Lloyd Wright built 4 Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, 2006, installation view, Arndt & Partner, Berlin, 2006, wood, books and suspended drawing, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist; courtesy Arndt & Partner Berlin

But they do mean, don't they? Gone are the tight pants and tinfoil trappings of '06 and in their place consolidated, considered reckonings with production, with place, and with history. Gone is the decadent gag-reel Caligula, replaced by Spike Lee's heartrending J'accuse. Here is William Cordova, Leslie Hewitt and Adler Guerrier tackling '68 from three different, complementary and suggestive angles. Here is Phoebe Washburn growing dandelions from Gatorade while Fia Backström has the curators play with clay. Here is Omer Fast's breathtaking demonstration of poly-disciplinary virtuosity, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn toting NFL icons, messing about amongst the violent detritus of the city without a team, and Coco Fusco breaking our hearts all over again. Alone, the video and film work is worth the price of admission; and if it wasn't, Daniel Joseph's Divine Violence is again, a startling question begging presentation of the names of all those organizations that sought to be their own last practitioners. There's the night sky in copper rods, a leering wall of aging, vinyl phalluses, and the story of six blind individuals meeting an elephant. Amidst all this are numerous half-baked ideas, over-thought instances of ingrown hermeticism, and good, old-fashioned narcissism. I mean, it's supposed to be American, right?

Much has been made of the supposed theme of the show, 'lessness,' as though the works on display were trying to provincialize and impoverish themselves to the point of barely existing at all, thus opting out of the various economies currently striating the field. Quite frankly, I don't see it. Only one artist, Seth Price, seems to be actively engaged in such a performance of self-marginalization and, given the specifics of his situation and his work, it is altogether interesting and meaningful for him to do so. The rest seem to be arguing, sometime softly, to be sure, but sometimes quite loudly, that there might be more at stake at the present moment than a public demonstration of their own righteousness with regards an overheated market and its corresponding discourse, and that, following perhaps the rest of us need to pull over in order to check the map.