The well-tempered Biennial: leaving behind the controversies that dogged previous editions, the 2004 Whitney Biennial placed painting at the heart of a national roundup that stressed individual expression over critical issues

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Eleanor Heartney

It has been over a decade since the infamous 1993 "political" Whitney Biennial Curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Thelma Golden, John Hanhardt and Lisa Phillips, it attracted bilious criticism for its strident and supposedly single-minded obsession with the world's ills. Artists such as Sue Williams, Fred Wilson and Daniel Martinez took on racism, sexism and class conflict. One of the most controversial elements was the inclusion of the harrowing camcorder tape of the Rodney King beating. That exhibition remains the most memorable Biennial in recent years, notable as much for the clarity of its position as for the firestorm it ignited. In summing up a tendency toward social engagement and identity politics much in evidence in the art of the early 1990s, it also, paradoxically, marked a sea change in the ever-shifting relationship of art and politics, sending an art world weary of social causes skittering off toward beauty.

This year, with the country evenly and bitterly divided on the domestic political front, and the target of furious and often murderous rage abroad, one might have expected some form of return to the fireworks of the 1993 edition. The 2004 biennial was the first to be fully conceived since the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001. (The previous one, which opened in March 2002, was largely selected before the disaster.) Yet, for the most part, the 2004 biennial scrupulously sidestepped direct social or political commentary for a focus on fantasy, nostalgia and escape. (In this it rather accurately reflected the contemporary work visible this season in galleries and museums, and in fact seemed far more dependent on those sources than has been the case with recent biennials.) But despite overt avoidance of politics, the unsettled mood of the nation nevertheless bubbled up in works evincing undercurrents of anxiety and apocalyptic thinking.

The curators, Chrissie Iles, Shamim Momin and Debra Singer, identify the show's several leitmotivs in the catalogue. One is a cross-generational fascination with the '60s and '70s, an era when revolution of all sorts was in the air, and the kind of social and civil freedoms now under threat were the battle cries of a new generation. However, the 21st-century version of this rebellion takes a more introspective and individualized form, seeking change in the mental rather than the political landscape.

Another recurring theme is a resignation about belonging to what Momin calls a "post-everything" world--a feeling that manifests itself both in a dandified skepticism toward any expression of commitment and an embrace of fantasy and personal flight. A word that recurs throughout the huge, overproduced catalogue is "utopia," but it is mentioned almost wistfully, more an unattainable dream than a blueprint for a better future.

The response to this year's edition was surprisingly positive for a show generally considered to be the exhibition that critics love to hate. Michael Kimmelman, in the New York Times, called it "easily the best in some time" while the New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl deemed it "startlingly good" and "better ... than anyone ... could have expected." Such rave reviews translated into record attendance figures, with lines wrapping around the block. One can't help wondering if the lovefest was in part the response of an art community weary of strife. But beyond that, it also seemed to have been a reaction against the genre-defying, discipline-deconstructing 2002 biennial, about which Roberta Smith remarked in the Times: "This show often defines art so broadly, and so laxly, that the art all but disappears."

Boundaries and definitions will never again be as firm as they were before the demolitions of postmodernism. However, with this biennial, there was a certain sense of a Return to Order, in which traditional genres and disciplines regain ascendance. This was most evident in the central place given to painting. Ranging from a set of blandly descriptive interiors and portraits by David Hockney to the surprisingly sinuous new vertical-format abstractions of Robert Mangold, painting here encompassed a generational and stylistic stew that included simulated wood patterns by the recently rediscovered Alex Ilay, bombastic word paintings by Mel Bochner, chlorophyll-enhanced abstractions by Tam Van Tran, prismatic geometry by Kim Fisher, painterly meldings of abstraction and representation by Amy Sillman and deliberately awkward portraits by Elizabeth Peyton.

Even some of the works in other mediums were about painting. One of the most striking was the late Stan Brakhage's cinematic succession of Abstract-Expressionist compositions painted directly on the film stock. Turning to a different painting tradition, Eve Sussman's video, 89 Seconds at Alcazar, allows the figures in Velazquez's Las Meninas to assume and then depart from their familiar poses.

But the overall mission seemed to be not so much the simple reinstatement of painting and drawing as a demonstration of the myriad ways these mediums are currently being employed to create private worlds that are only partially accessible to the viewer. Engaging a melange of references that include Japanese woodblocks, Persian miniatures and children's book illustration, Amy Cutler's paintings create a strangely unsettling universe in which boundaries between humans, animals and inanimate objects seem to have disappeared. In her works, women carry horses on their backs, busy themselves like beavers building dams, or morph into camping tents and electric fans. Laura Owens was represented by a single monumental landscape painting centering around a nearly barren tree occupied by a population of endearing squirrels, birds, spiders and dogs. Set against a romantically turbulent night sky, the scene exists somewhere between innocence and irony, presenting a contemporary and weirdly unsettling riff on Edward Hicks's Peaceable Kingdom. Zak Smith took on that most hermetic modern novel, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, providing a grid of complex, vaguely referential drawings that purport to offer a pictorial gloss on every page of the book.