EXPRESS YOURSELF.(Here Is Elsewhere, at the Museum of Modern Art, in Queens)

I've been thinking about "Here Is Elsewhere," a group show that just closed at the Museum of Modern Art, in Queens. It was selected from the museum's permanent collection by Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese-born (to Palestinian Christian refugees), London-based sculptor and installation-maker who has been ubiquitous in international exhibitions since the early nineteen-nineties. The show consisted of sixty works by twenty artists, most of them dating from the past fifteen years, and all bearing some affinity to Hatoum's own art. I was slow to gauge its importance, beyond agreeing with Roberta Smith, of the Times, that it affirmed the value of having artists curate shows from museum collections. Seeing art as artists see it--through a play of sensibility rather than a filter of ideas--cuts against the deadly pedagogy of much current curating, especially at institutions of contemporary art. Strikingly, "Here Is Elsewhere" featured the very kind of art that is most typically accompanied, in museum shows, by didactic, moral-pointing wall texts. Eschewing these, Hatoum submitted topflight examples of such work to a fair aesthetic trial. The perhaps not fully intentional result was revelatory: it enabled a viewer to look at the era of politically rhetorical postmodernism as history.

Interviewed by the moma assistant curator Fereshteh Daftari for the show's brochure, Hatoum associated herself with a tradition, which blossomed in the nineteen-eighties, of "deconstructive theories, psychoanalysis and feminism, discourse around identity and the 'Other.' " These concerns became marching orders for a generation of artists, curators, and critics. Daftari, in an introduction, declared that Hatoum's choices "gravitate toward beauty that masks political pungency and familiar appearance that conceals a divergence from the 'norm'--be it gender, sexuality, culture, or race." This lets us know where we are, intellectually: on tendentious ground, where words wobble. (Beauty, an engulfing experience, can't mask anything; Daftari has it mixed up with glamour or prettiness.) Hatoum trotted out a do-gooder shibboleth: "The best art is that which complicates things for you by exposing impossible contradictions, which makes you question your assumptions about the world so that you walk away with more questions than answers." As if anyone goes to art for answers! But Hatoum's eye proved to be far more acute than her attitude.

The videos, installations, sculptures, photographs, prints, and paintings in "Here Is Elsewhere" told a story of gifted artists doing their best under a foreign occupation by political imperatives. There were brilliant things by the African-American painter Ellen Gallagher, the gay visual dramatist Robert Gober, the late Cuban-American installationist social critic Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and others, each flying the requisite flag of an "identity." The show was an aggressively drab-looking affair on the whole, but touched with formal and spiritual elegance. In one instance, Hatoum juxtaposed recent works by Gallagher--pale abstractions riddled with grotesque racial symbols, such as tiny "banjo eyes"--with works from the nineteen-fifties and sixties by Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist who for many years was a lightly regarded resident of New York and whose feverishly expressive patterning with dots and polyp shapes has lately won overdue recognition. The pairing pointed up a fugitive convention in abstract art, often by women, of loveliness laced with needling discontent. Transcendent humor put early "Film Stills," by Cindy Sherman, and satirical appreciations of the prestige of basketball in black culture, by David Hammons, outside the ambit of political reason.

The set of ideologies that bear the brand "postmodernist" agitated for marginal social constituencies, but did so from smack inside the cultural wheelhouse of universities and other institutions. This irony gave a tinny timbre to a movement that did considerable good as an overhaul of democratic manners and mores for a plural society. In the art world, converging factors produced the irresistible clout of a Zeitgeist: the staffing of institutions (notably, an international network of biennials and the like) with grownup nineteen-sixties lefties, an academic passion for French and German strains of engaged ...