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

It has been above a decade since the infamous 1993 "political" Whitney Biennial Curated by the agency of 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 of that kind as Sue Williams, Fred Wilson and Daniel Martinez took upon racism, sexism and class conflict. individual of the most controversial simple bodys was the inclusion of the harrowing camcorder tape of the Rodney King beating. That exhibition remains the greatest in quantity memorable Biennial in recent years, notable as abundant for the clarity of its position as for the firestorm it ignited. In summing up a aptitude toward social engagement and identity politics plenteous in evidence in the art of the early 1990 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 not upon toward beauty.

This year, with the region evenly and bitterly divided upon the domestic political front, and the target of furious and many times murderous rage abroad, one might have awaited some form of return to the fireworks of the 1993 edition. The 2004 biennial was the first to be completely conceived since the world changed upon Sept. 11, 2001. (The previous single which opened in March 2002 was largely prefered before the disaster.) Yet, for the greatest in quantity part, the 2004 biennial scrupulously sidestepped direct social or political commentary for a focus upon fantasy, nostalgia and escape. (In this it rather accurately mirrored the contemporary work visible this season in galleries and museums, and in fact present the appearanceed far more dependent on those sources than has been the case with new biennials.) But despite overt avoidance of politics, the unsettl temper of the nation nevertheless bubbl up in works evincing undercurrent of anxiety and apocalyptic thinking.

The curators, Chrissie Iles, Shamim Momin and Debra Singer, identify the show's several leitmotivs in the catalogue. individual is a cross-generational fascination with the '60 and '70 an era when revolution of all sorts was in the air, and the kind of social and civil freedoms now below threat were the battle cries of a of recent origin 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 the two in a dandified skepticism toward any expression of commitment and an embrace of fantasy and personal flight. A word that returns throughout the huge, overproduced catalogue is "utopia," on the contrary it is mentioned almost wistfully, more an unattainable dream than a blueprint for a better future

The reply to this year's edition was surprisingly positive for a display generally considered to be the exhibition that critics regard with affection to hate. Michael Kimmelman, in the of recent origin York Times, called it "easily the best in more [i]or[/i] less time" while the New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl imagineed it "startlingly good" and "better than anyone ... could have expected" like rave reviews translated into record attendance figures, with lines wrapping around the blockade One can't help wondering if the lovefest was in part the replication of an art community weary of strife. on the other hand beyond that, it also looked to have been a reaction against the genre-defying, discipline-deconstructing 2002 biennial, about which Roberta Smith remarked in the Times: "This present to view often defines art so broadly, and for a like reason laxly, that the art all on the contrary disappears."

Boundaries and definitions will not ever again be as firm as they were before the demolitions of postmodernism. However, with this biennial, there was a certain faculty of perception of a Return to Order, in which traditional genre and disciplines regain ascendance. This was greatest in quantity evident in the central place given to painting. Ranging from a plant of blandly descriptive interiors and portraits by means of David Hockney to the surprisingly sinuous of recent origin vertical-format abstractions of Robert Mangold, painting here encompassed a generational and stylistic simmer that included simulated wood patterns through the recently rediscovered Alex Ilay, bombastic word paintings by the agency of Mel Bochner, chlorophyll-enhanced abstractions by means of Tam Van Tran, prismatic geometry by dint of Kim Fisher, painterly meldings of abstraction and representation through Amy Sillman and deliberately awkward portraits by the agency of Elizabeth Peyton.

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

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