Because of some harrowing ‘80s experiences, I thought I was through with video art, and most of the pieces I saw today at the press preview for the Whitney Biennial didn’t help: enough process and repetition videos to put anyone off the stuff for a lifetime. Our culture has never been more wedded to screens, yet visual artists, overwhelmingly, seem constitutionally incapable of either embracing their seductions or harnessing their potential.

Not so Marianne Vitale, whose “Patron” (2009) renewed my faith in video art, if not the Biennial itself. Like a cross between Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in “Full Metal Jacket” and Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity,” Vitale delivers the kind of ad hominem beat down Americans so enjoy, whether directed at the poor schmuck kicked to the curb on “American Idol” or the tearful penitent who dared to be dowdy on “What Not to Wear.” Only this one’s parodic.

Vitale’s video harangue is a mashup of aspirational homilies and absurdist directives. “Patrons! The final drill of the night: it’s a five-step run. This’ll take you to the next plateau. Sure it will! Don’t forget to say no. But you can’t. So don’t even try. But don’t forget, either. Number one:close your eyes. Call yourself a number.” A string of nonsense images follows (“copper bonnet timpani,” she says with venom) and Vitale’s manic rant—a vicious scold here, a command to stand in gopher pee there—is impossible to pull into perspective, just like the parade of public humiliations and apologies, small and large, we witness on a weekly basis. Bombed innocent Afghans? Lied about your faulty gas pedal? Wore a blazer with bike shorts? You’re going down.

Unlike the other videos in the biennial, this one actually attracted an audience—that laughed. And while the others played to benches stationed across the room, Vitale’s featured a subtle touch: just one folding chair positioned mere feet from the screen. I dared to sit in it. I was embarrassed. Then I was redeemed. But mostly I was happy to leave the Biennial contemplating a witty, theatrical, well-edited video that resonated with so much media culture.

The Mexican artist Acamonchi uses stencils, silkscreen, tape and spray paint on wood, slaps titles like “Terrible Sexo Sexo” on his creations, and loves to appropriate sexist and racist ads depicting Mexicans, which may explain why the spray cans that have crept into his paintings (carrying the milk of his artistic expression?) inevitably look like breasts. A lifelong Fluxus fan (who wears the Fluxus logo inked on his arm) he emerged from the skate punk and fanzine scene of the 80s in Tijuana/Ensenada and southern California, and moved from San Diego to New York last year. The face of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio,who was assassinated in Tijuana during a campaign rally in 1994, often appears in his work as a symbol of Mexico’s entrenched political corruption (Acamonchi has outfitted him as Colonel Sanders and as a cosmonaut).

When I visited Acamonchi and his six-toed cat in Washington Heights recently, he showed me these paintings, among others:

Terrible Sexo Sexo

Doors Open

Super Limpio

Acamonchi, who studied graphic design, has worked with MTV, Reebok,Vans,Tribal Gear and Obey (and his Osiris shoes are pretty adorable.) But his focus, now, is art. He likes to paint fast, and his improvised stencil and silkscreen imagery adds depth to his chaotic graffiti work. You can see him in action here. Better yet, go to his show at Eyelevel BQE in Williamsburg, in May.

Last week when I stumbled on her 2005 installation, “You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies” at the Phoenix Art Museum, it was a soul-shaking encounter. A darkened, mirrored room with tiny shifting LED lights suspended from the ceiling, the piece is like an existential baptismal font in which Kusama’s signature dots mark her signature distance-infinity-and promise to wash you away.

You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies, Yayoi Kusama, 2005. Mixed media.

Our 1983 conversation was supposed to be about the role of dreams in art, but I soon learned hallucinations were more relevant to her vision. She told me about waking up one day and seeing nets covering everything in her room, before she became New York’s “Polka Dot Girl” promoting self obliteration through the accumulation of “black polka dots of death.”

“Fireflies” makes you feel instantly disarmed, disoriented, lonely—and exhilarated: it confronts you with a terrifying sense of freedom, the kind you might savor, anyway, before jumping off a cliff. But Kusama, who still lives in a mental hospital, knows her limits: if not for art, she has always said, she would have killed herself. And look at her now: she’s an octogenarian superstar.

“Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation,” she writes,” [they have] an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with convoluted, post-feminist second guessing.”

Never mind that in the post AIDS, STD-plagued, post-feminist era, sex is more complicated than it was in Mailer’s day (when typically only one party’s sexual satisfaction was of consequence). To illustrate Mailer’s thrillingly violent virility, Roiphe offers this gem: “I wounded her, I knew it, she thrashed beneath me like a trapped little animal, making not a sound.” The line may constitute great literature, but that doesn’t make the sex good. (And it can only be considered progress that these days one first asks a lady if she wants to be wounded, trapped, and silenced in bed.)

No one expects more from Roiphe, the Ann Coulter of the literati, who made her name as a date-rape denier and disdains “the feminists” (some superannuated army of Andrea Dworkins she believes control vast numbers of impressionable minds). Her personal essay about new motherhood in Slate last August, for example, asked, “Why Won’t Feminists Admit the Pleasure of Infants?” without so much as identifying the kill-joys against whom she defined her own post-natal pleasure.

But you might expect more from The New York Times. How is it that the last stand-alone book review section in the country can spare three full pages for this retro-rumination? (Great American male novelists? Still a conversation?) The essay is poorly argued (Roiphe traces the problem to the 1970 book Sexual Politics, in which Kate Millett takes the literary lions of her day to task for their sexism, which doesn’t explain who sissified today’s men of letters), and it’s biased: her contemporary authors are all middle class straight whites who hardly represent the scope of quality literature by American men. A more timely essay might have asked how women authors approach sex now that they have an equal shot at greatness.

But do they?

During the same week The Book Review was celebrating male conquest and consummation, The Washington Post ran author Julianna Baggott’s essay revealing that Publisher’s Weekly’s top ten books of 2009 featured only men, Amazon.com’ s Best Books of 2009 put just four women in the top twenty, and in the last 30 years, only 11 Pulitzer Prizes have gone to women.

“I wish I were scandalized, or at least surprised,” wrote Baggett. But she was ahead of the curve: she kick-started her career by taking a pen name and passing as a man, and promptly got herself shortlisted on a pick list, next to Bill Clinton and David Sedaris. Last month, business blogger James Chartrand (Men With Pens) came out as a woman, saying that by writing as a man, she had doubled and sometimes tripled her fees, thereby climbing out of freelance purgatory.

I notice that even The Guardian’s famously fun Bad Sex Award for fiction favors men: in its 17-year history, just two women have won—not, presumably, because women write better sex scenes; more likely, they just aren’t in the competition.

Baggott, a professor at the Florida State University, wrote that this year’s lists “forced me to explain to my students — the next generation of writers — that the men in the class have double if not five times the chance of this kind of recognition.” That goes for the bad along with the good.

The forgotten painter William Holbrook Beard’s rendering of Santa in his swan sleigh only touches down in the galleries of the RISD’s Museum of Art during the holidays. You can see it through January 3, just past the main lobby, for a look at St. Nick as he carpet bombs a house with gifts—no chimney-surfing for this Sinterklaas. But Beard’s (like Clement Clarke Moore’s, before him) is just one (green-clad) personification of father Christmas: he emerged during the industrial revolution, when yuletide was evolving from an occasion for the exchange of homemade gifts into the consumer smack down we know today. For the rest of Santa’s story, see “The Vast Santanic Conspiracy” in The Las Vegas Weekly, where Mark Dery traces Santa’s roots to both an altruistic third century Greek orthodox bishop and a horned and hairy fertility god of the Middle Ages, asking, “Were Satan and Santa separated at birth?”

Predictably, reaction to Moody’s experiment hasn’t addressed its literary value at all: readers can’t see the story for the tweets. Whether you followed “Some Contemporary Characters” burst by burst or read it in its entirety, bottom to top, later, it was a dyspeptic experience. Some of my grad students delighted in the way Moody gave new meaning to intertextuality: the narrative seesaws between the voices of the two characters, one of whom is texting her thoughts to a friend.

Others liked the withholding aspect of the delivery—waiting for the next burst made the whole thing more tantalizing, they said, in the same way that awaiting the next season of “Madmen” only enhances its mystique. But a ten minute break between tweets is a lot different from days or months between episodes or seasons (or chapters) that have developed within their discrete installments, and the format requires way too much puritan restraint for my literary libido.

As a reader on Replacement Blog noted:

Initially, the medium seemed tyrannical—for some reason I wanted to be present for each update, to read each new tweet as it came across my screen, difficult when you’re at work and have meetings all day, like I do. Eventually, though, I discovered that reading each new installment in isolation was diminishing my enjoyment…I constantly had to go back to previous tweets to remind myself of what was happening in the story.

Content posed an even bigger problem. The story itself is, well, tweedy in itself-consciousness. The style is spotty—some tweets are abbreviated and slangy, others are composed and strangely mannered–possibly, I considered, in a deliberate attempt to show the philosopher’s hopeless old-fartism and inability to adapt. (Note to self at dawn:,” he writes, “S. Spielrein recognized the destructive essence of longing, an idea she passed on, like an STD, to Freud and Jung.”)

But the hipster girlfriend’s comments made me wonder if Moody just wanted me to hate these people equally: “On the train I told him that I was pierced, I was tattooed, I was tribal, I loved whatever way I wanted to, and that was my revolution.”

This medium is merciless on a bad passage: First it’s framed in silence, then it’s yanked out of context, then it’s blasted across the internet, then ten minutes pass during which the reader reflects in tranquility on the confounding awfulness of a sequence like this:

“We twisted around some way so I was on top. For a while. He couldn’t crush me. I could feel his complications in the dim light.”

It gets worse (when they kiss, she tastes like “the middle class”) before it gets better (Moody pulls off a clever structural twist at the end, where social media becomes a hall of mirrors for the relationship.) But the story is never satisfying, twittered or not, because the characters are too busy modeling generational types, and the Nation-reading, Hegel-invoking old relic, as Moody paints him, would probably never get on Facebook in the first place, which is where the story ends.

Rightly worried about the state of publishing, the editors of Electric Literature are making a noble effort to save fiction through digital platforms including Iphones, ebooks, and audiobooks. They’ve invited responses to Moody’s experiment on their Facebook page, and they’re genuinely committed to promoting new work. But their remedy for this endangered art calls its very integrity into question: their web site features charmingly animated video interpretations of selected sentences from random stories, which implies some basic inadequacy on the part of literature itself, and confuses rethinking its distribution with repackaging it altogether. Lydia Millet, for one, doesn’t need extras.

And here’s the rub: Electric Literature is also a smart looking, fine quality, print-on-demand magazine. Throughout the week, it lay on my nightstand calling to me while Moody’s story stuttered across the internet. So I ended up following “Some Contemporary Characters” by day, fighting a case of simmering resentment. At night, I read Electric Literature in bed, devouring, for starters, the truly marvelous Marisa Silver, pages at a time. I did it in the dim light, where I could no longer feel Moody’s complications.

Titled, 2003

First, Kay showed books shelved vertically in neat rows. A few were overrun with rogue illustrations that crept across the spines and onto neighboring volumes:

Life Study, 2005

Sometimes, in satisfying bouts of violence, Kay abstracted the books beyond recognition:

Whaling Stories, 2003

Then he stacked them. The light and color shifted, and a Thiebaud-like touch emerged:

Learning Curve, 2006

Lately, Kay’s had a change of view. The books are laid flat in overlapping planes of color, with new depth. They’ve reclaimed their bodies.

My Back Pages (Gray), 2009

You can see Kay’s acrylic paintings at The Hopper House in Nyack, NY until Dec. 6, with the work of Buzz Spector, another artist in love with books.

Phong Bui, from “The Family of Mind,” 2009

Not so in “Beyond Appearances,” a fabulous group show at Lehman College Art Gallery (marking the 25th anniversary of this consistently innovative cultural outpost in the Bronx.) A multimedia bonanza, it throws together such unlikely bedfellows as Andres Serrano, Dottie Attie, and Tony Oursler (whose green aluminum splat frames a videotaped face whose nutty mutterings include repetitions of the word “superstition.”)

Some of the most arresting pieces leap far beyond traditional representation: Daniel Rozin’s “Peg Mirror” is a disarmingly intimate portrait of, well, me. Or you–depending who stands in front of it. A round “mirror” of motion-sensitive wood discs tracks your movements with a seductive electronic rustling as you approach, catches your crude outline as you stare like a trapped animal in silent amazement, then registers your vaguely guilty retreat. I watched a trio of students horse around in front of it, mugging for the cycloptic eye that beheld them, as a fourth, holding a camera, tried to capture its image catching hers.

Devorah Sperber’s “After Van Gogh” also rewards participation: her canvas of colored spools of thread form an upside down portrait; when you walk closer and view it through a glass sphere mounted on a pole, it rights itself and becomes Van Gogh, miniaturized. He’s yours, having leapt from the wall straight into your own body bubble.

In Deborah Willis and Hank Willis Thomas’ “After Madonna,” a topless, digitized Madonna holds her beautiful baby, glowing with maternal pride. But alas, her belly button has migrated to her side and one nipple has disappeared altogether. She’s as unnatural in her maternity as any virgin knocked up by God.

Even the more traditional drawing and sculpture in “Beyond Appearances” gives you a good-natured conceptual whack: Nina Levy’s “Large Head” is giant polyester rendering of a wide-eyed toddler who floats above the room, assuming the ridiculous proportions our own children tend to occupy in our consciousness.

And some of these pieces are simply lovely, like Whitfield Lovell’s “Deuce,” a crayon on wood portrait of a weary looking young couple pulled from the past. It looks like a tintype made of wood.

In this show, diversity is a mere given. It’s the bounty of forms and affects that push these portraits beyond appearance, seizing not the subject, but the viewer, in the moment of perception.

In a promotional trailer, the author, Elle, explains how to “bag your buck” through techniques like “bag and tag” (“bag them, tag them, bring them around for another go round when you want”) and “trophy hunting” for commitment (which involves “mounting your buck on your wall of life”). Like Pepsi’s heavy breathers, Elle (who evidently lost her surname in a hunting accident) taxonomizes her prey:there are “velvet tip bucks” (“fine looking young men,”) and 6- or 8-point bucks (“older, more mature gentleman, probably around for the keeping”) along with her personal favorite (don’t tell her husband), “the elusive stag.” Geez, at least Pepsi doesn’t suggest blasting your date with a thirty-aught-six and violating the carcass. I’m thinking most women would prefer to mount their bucks somewhere other than on the wall, while they’re still breathing. Score one for equal opportunity sexism: grab a gun; objectify your man.