New Yorkers are uniquely positioned to assess the recent development of Banks Violette's art. While his star is everywhere on the rise, it is already incandescent in this town, evidenced by his recent omnipresence in group exhibitions and the commission he received from the Whitney for his first-ever solo museum exhibition. The artworks he has exhibited in New York—sculptures, drawings, paintings, and installations comprised of works from more than one of his preferred mediums—have, with amazing consistency and increasingly eloquent concision, probed the fluid borders of the American cultural psyche. Violette understands that fictional worlds—the private, personal fantasies engendered by, for example, adolescent subcultures or obsessive music fandom—can and have pierced the fabric of reality, often horrifically. He works like a cultural forensic pathologist, tracing backward from these punctums—the ritualised murder of a teenage girl in Arroyo Grande, California, in 1995; the 1994 suicide of Kurt Cobain; a plethora of suicides that have occurred in his hometown of Ithaca, New York—to elucidate the corrosive influences that lead to such denouements. As is pointed out by the curator Shamim Momin in her catalog essay, Violette does this not by offering didactic lessons—'Kids, don't listen to Nirvana, or else ...'—but by accumulating peripheral details from which meaning is accrued. This 'content' is wedded to a material repertoire and formal vocabulary redolent of minimalist and postminimalist influences, and a reductive color palette that rarely wavers from black, white, and the gleaming silver of steel.

Violette's untitled sculptural installation at the Whitney, which consists of the wood-beam framework of a ruined church cast in salt and set upon a low plinth of black epoxy-covered panels, and which is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Norwegian musician Snorre Ruch, is too large for the first-floor gallery in which it is housed, forcing upon the viewer a constant, somewhat menacing proximity. This adds to the theatricality implied by the plinth's formal affinities with a typical rock club stage, the black-painted walls, and the dramatic lighting. It is an altogether enveloping environment, implicating even an idle or distracted viewer as a participant in its showiness. The interaction of the soundtrack and its environment metaphorically transubstantiates Ruch's ninety-eight minutes of 'white noise,' which oscillates between a low bass rumble that evokes wind and a blender's whirl of processed guitars, into 'the white stuff,' thereby placing this church in a wintry Norwegian landscape. (And, by extension, into the tradition of Romantic landscape paintings.)

But this is a distinctly dystopian sublime. In the early 1990s, Ruch, the leader of a band called Blackthorn, was party to a series of church burnings and at least one murder allegedly perpetrated by other members of the Black Metal community, most notably Varg Vikernes (aka Count Grisnackh) of the band Burzum; Ruch has only recently been released from jail. An image of the Fantoft church, the first to be burned, in June 1992, appeared on the cover of a Burzum EP titled Aske (Ashes) that was recorded only two months later, in August. This record cover could very well be the loaded image Violette is working from, in a sense extruding the ruin depicted in the photograph into three dimensions.

I can't help but see this installation as a step away from the trend that most excited me in Violette's recent works. The move toward total visual abstraction—an arc that can be traced from Twin-Screen (american murder anthem) (2003) to Untitled (Black Screen) (2004) to untitled (disappear) (2004), for example—forced the viewer to embark upon an imaginative reconstruction of events ever more glancingly depicted. The latter work is nothing more than four black epoxy panels fitted together, in a two-by-two arrangement, and supported by a steel framework. It was exhibited opposite anthem (to future suicide) (2004), which consists of five horizontal bars of bright white fluorescent bulbs arranged in decreasing widths as they approach the floor. The formal austerity of these works—a mute onyx mirror and a synthetic sunset—suppresses the 'content,' just like the culture at large does, and the tension was palpable, the effect haunting.

By contrast, the Whitney installation seems more like an illustration, a version of ashen and bloody events somewhat sanitised by Violette's visual translation. Perhaps he felt what the novelist Michael Cunningham, writing in an altogether different context, described as 'the fundamental human obligation to try to do at least a little more than one is technically able to,' and attempted to make available to viewers too much information from a source too far removed from our own experience. That Violette has failed, albeit only by the high standards set by his own recent installations, does little to reduce the nobleness of the effort.