Rebels without a cause The Guardian

A new exhibition suggests US artists are getting angry. But what about? And what's the point of a polystyrene shark and soiled underpants? By Adrian Searle.

A voice, a mumbling spooky death rattle, echoes inside a cavity in the wall illuminated by an ultraviolet light. "Spy, spy on them. This guy - this guy Al. Al-Qaida. Got to see him." Could this be the cave where Big Al is hanging out? "Natural gas. Gas explosion. Mmnnnn. Campfire ... camp. Training camp. UFO. Nnnrghh."

I stuck my head in through a hatch and wrote down this transcription while looking at Anthony Burdin's Voodoo Room, London, but it is as inaccurate as all that bad intelligence about WMDs. Maybe these are the last words of some ghost detainee in a prison that doesn't exist. There is graffiti on the wall, depicting a pair of guys. They look more like Beavis and Butthead than insurgents. But who can tell - you can't trust nobody these days.

Welcome to Uncertain States of America, at the Serpentine Gallery. Like the country itself, the show is messy, sprawling, contradictory, inexplicable, strange and more than a little bit worrying. At a time when America seems cocksure of itself on the world stage, an art of uncertainty might be no bad thing. Or perhaps it is signal to artistic impotence in the face of world events. At the bottom of two poster works by Matthew Brannon - called Polluted Minds and Open Wounds, and Public Breakup and Career Backlash - the small print reads "none of this is important", a sentiment with which I can only concur.

It is difficult, in fact, to know just what is important here: the piles of paint cans, the photocopied papers covered in scribbles littering the floor, the handles screwed to the wall and the dangling strips of cloth, where a man mummified himself and squatted on a little shelf halfway between floor and ceiling last Friday night. Is Mika Rottenberg's video, featuring a very fat black woman prodding at a mound of drooping, sagging dough, significant? And what is Daria Martin's film trying to say? It is all high production values and empty pretensions, featuring a pentathlon, lots of arch 1960s references (including Rita Tushingham), and an inconclusive ending.

The water in the black-painted fibreglass and cardboard Karl Lagerfeld Jacuzzi churns nicely. I don't know why the thing is named after Lagerfeld, but I'm pretty sure it's a tad too small for an adult to get into. Nearby, Cristina Lei Rodriguez's luscious arrangement of artificial orchids, made from epoxy, plastic and foam, await only a maid to give them a dusting. These are luxury goods for people who want for nothing. Across the room, Matt Johnson's gold-plated bronze spider-crab Buddha is waving his claws atop a mound of sand. A perfectly executed pair of soiled underpants decorates Matthew Ronay's work.

All this is overlooked by an equally artificial naked man. Apart from his weird cosmetic sheen, he's a disconcerting, accidental doppelganger for Hans Ulrich Obrist, recently appointed co-director of the Serpentine and co-curator of the show. Or is this Obrist as a living statue of himself? Can't be; I saw the real thing ambling over to the Serpentine Pavilion a minute or two ago. But the statue's resemblance does add to the cumulative sense of uncertainty.

A great white shark is circling a snowy sea of shredded polythene beneath icy neon stalactites, in an installation by Kori Newkirk, occupying not so much an icy waste as an alcove. More painted sharks circle the wall, and a photograph shows a man in the snow. The whole arrangement seems to be about danger and exposure.

But like the moth-eaten lions in a provincial zoo, much of this show already looks a bit sad and desperate. Maybe the exhibition's tour, which has taken it from Oslo back to the US and now to the Serpentine, is taking its toll. Some things don't travel well, or are hard to grasp outside an American context. Some of the same artists featured in this year's Whitney Biennial in New York, and their work evinces a disenchantment and a cynicism. It is impossible to know if the disenchantment relates to America itself, or just to the art world. But how could one not be cynical - about the stupidity of collectors, the arrogance of dealers, the fickleness of curators, the cruelty of critics, the utter obliviousness of the world at large, as well as the naked knife-in-the-back careerism of every other artist?

The overall tenor is sophisticated, charmless, disaffected and at times deliberately damaged. The collision of artists and works is also often incomprehensible. The pile-up of stuff might be, in part, collaborative, but the effect is merely wearying, a sub-Kippenberger-ish turn-off.

There is no doubt about how to approach Aaron Young's oval, abstract paintings. His titles tell you: "Focus on the four dots in the middle of the painting for 30 seconds, close your eyes and tilt your head back," they all say. I stare and close my eyes, and a wobbly afterimage appears on my retina: Jesus! It's Jesus, or Charlie Manson, or some other bearded long-hair.

Karl Haendel writes in the catalogue that he doesn't believe in originality, inspiration or creativity. He says such terms "pollute artistic discourse", and that artists who believe in them are selfish, misguided and being used. But by whom, exactly? His use of the word "discourse" alerts me to the possibility that he may have spent too much time in the art school theory department. He should get out more. How much use do we really have for the uninspired, the non-creative and unoriginal - the cultural equivalent of the supersize burger, and about as nutritious?

Haendel's own work is nothing like as dead as all this might suggest, so I guess he's just being disingenuous. He has redrawn covers of the New York Times, all dated February 14, for the years 1951 ("Reds Launch New Attacks in Korea"), 1965 ("US Is Considering Troop Increase in South Vietnam") and 1991 ("Iraq Says US Killed Hundreds of Civilians at Shelter"). A big, fat painted line connects these drawings with others depicting a rabbit's family tree, a golf ball with the words The Big Bang written on it, and a very large and skilfully drawn reworking of a woodcut depicting the martyrdom of St Valentine by decapitation. This drawing is presented on its side, possibly because the gallery ceiling is too low for it to fit any other way. The artist also appears on a monitor, propounding a theory of love, dark energy, and a painful-sounding "epistemological block". St Valentine, rabbits and the big bang? This all looks pretty creative to me.

On the floor close by is the most affecting and memorable work of the show; it was one of the highlights of the Whitney Biennial. A projected rhomboid of light tilts across the floor. Murky dawn gives way to full daylight. A telegraph pole hoves into view, dangling wires, a streetlight. It is a world of backlit shadows. Flocks of birds fill the sky. Stuff - mobile phones, pairs of spectacles, cars, an entire train, surge upwards, maybe towards heaven, except it all starts breaking up before reaching tree height. Crows settle on the streetlight, bombing the world with their shit. Could this be the Rapture, as American zealots might have it? Bodies are also falling, just as we remember seeing them on 9/11. They pinwheel down, dance on air, tumble and plunge. Enormous human shadows wrestle with gravity. Paul Chan's 1st Light is transfixing. Really, it needs more space, but so does everything here.

All those videos stuck in odd corners, and available to watch in the Pavilion, have a tendency to become decor. I nearly missed a reworking of Euripides' Cyclops done as very low-budget sci-fi, with human actors and a cardboard set, by Ohad Meromi. This is astonishingly good, both stupid and memorable all at once. The tone is just right: "Unprofessional yet done in the most serious way," as the artist has it. It reminded me of Pasolini's Edipo Re, and of the 1960s TV puppet show Space Patrol. Like Chan's shadow-world apocalypse, it was very convincing - and, dare I say, creative, original and inspired.

But does any of this tell us very much about America? To coincide with the exhibition, the Serpentine is publishing The Uncertain States of America Reader, a number of recent essays on art theory, the art market, 9/11, Abu Ghraib and the war on terror.

But the book has more heft than most of the art in the show. In the end there's too much here that is silly, opaque and, to be honest, immature. How seriously should we take Uncertain States of America? We can probably take it as read that the artists are against current American foreign policy. Sometimes all this is a subplot; sometimes the artists make their position overt. What difference it might make is another story, but then it always is. Little wonder so much of it feels impotent.