Lessness.

This year's Whitney Biennial, the most poetic I can remember, feels mildly unhappy and restlessly alert. If it were a sound, it would be the muttering of a cast awaiting the inexplicably delayed rise of a curtain. The show confirms impressions of a new, gray mood among younger artists, one at odds with the recent prevalence in international art of both commercial glitz and festivalist brass. Call it a decline in producer confidence. Who is making art? For whom? Why? As usual at the Biennial, few good answers are in evidence. But, for once, bad answers prove almost as elusive. The show is conventionally anti-conventional, like most of the world's biennials, in its emphasis on installations and videos and its paucity of painting in particular and of traditional mediums in general. Its strongest suit is certain types of sculpture that have flourished lately--the same assembled, shaggy varieties that dominate "Unmonumental," the inaugural, solid show of the New Museum, downtown. Yet this Biennial is remarkably free of forced ideas, despite an occasional appeal to ecological virtue. It is full of busy ingenuities that smack of art school--but of art-school studios, not seminars. Two decades of academic postmodernizing have trailed off into embarrassed silence. One of the show's curators, Henriette Huldisch, writing in the catalogue, borrows a title of Samuel Beckett's to characterize the Zeitgeist: "Lessness." Not less is more. Less is all--get with it. (Good old Beckett, the never-fail appliance for glamorizing malaise.) I favor being encouraged. There isn't a lot in the show to like very much, but the over-all tenor puts me in mind of the "aridity" that, according to another exigent author, John of the Cross, is a key stage in the "dark night of the soul," preceding redemption. Even if little comes of it, the drama of this state--a sort of exasperated modesty--will etch the 2008 Biennial in memory.

"An Ideal Disjuncture," a big sculpture by the Los Angeles artist Ruben Ochoa, is a case in point. It is made of unprepossessing stuff: jumbled slabs of cement on wooden pallets; an off-kilter cement shape, like a blasted tree trunk, sprouting naked rebar; a swooping expanse of chain-link fence. It evokes a municipal construction site subjected to an earthquake. Ochoa, born in 1974, is an artist with a socially critical bent, whose past works have included shows that travelled in his family's tortilla delivery van and murals of absent natural landscapes on freeway containing walls. But a formal impulse overqualifies "Disjuncture" for discursive purposes. A sheer and ungainly fact in the room with you, the work transposes features of banal reality--chiefly the look and feel of concrete, the ur-material of Los Angeles--into qualities to savor. Whatever it started out to mean has been waylaid by fascination. The effect is a stuttering, halfway transcendence. Imagine a stranger who has forgotten his name and importunes you, on the off chance that you know it. It is an awkward moment, but he is a pleasant stranger. Works by Charles Long are similarly befuddling: vaguely Giacometti-esque, vaguely figurative skinny sculpture in papier-mache, plaster, and assorted debris on steel armatures, their forms derived from found patterns of bird droppings. Bizarre in the mind while lovely in the eye, they make for another odd halt, marked by mutual, cordial incomprehension. Then there's Rachel Harrison, the leading light of new sculpture, with objects and collages that combine trashy bric-a-brac, vulgar images, and slathered paint with an uncanny confidence, as if she knew precisely what she means--and you would, too, if you were just the littlest bit smarter than you are.

The few painters in the show are well chosen and register keenly. The veteran abstractionist Mary Heilmann is famous for what may at first look to be fast, brushy messes but which hang together with the mysterious cogency of free jazz. Three new pictures that are challengingly woozy, even for her, broadcast a smiling sympathy with the show's bravely irresolute youngsters. Karen Kilimnik, with a typical installation of girlishly romantic canvases on themes of bygone European aristocracy, in a room with a pretty chandelier, offers similar reassurance, to the effect that confused feelings are a problem only if you ...