Featuring the latest work by emerging and established American artists, the 2004 Biennial Exhibition accompanies the Whitney Museum of American Art's signature survey of contemporary American art. This biennial is organized by a team of three Whitney curators: Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer.
More than 100 artists and collaborative teams are included in the exhibition, which explores the idea of an intergenerational conversation reflecting a number of overlapping trends: an engagement with the art, popular culture, and politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s; the construction of fantastic worlds, uncanny spaces, and new narrative forms; and paintings, drawings, and handmade films that show an obsessive working of line, surface, and image. The Biennial is consistently one of the most exciting exhibitions of contemporary art in the United States; as always, it will garner attention around the world.
The three curators have developed a new format for the Biennial catalogue. The catalogue comprises two elements: the first, a bound book that includes essays by each of the curators, as well as more than a dozen contemporary and historical writings by a range of authors, including historians, critics, and artists such as Susan Buck-Morss, Richard Davenport-Hines, Tim Griffin, Wayne Koestenbaum, Laura Mulvey, Robert Smithson, Anthony Vidler, and a collaborative text by Rachel Greene and Johanna Fateman. The second component of the catalogue features a box filled with projects created by artists participating in the exhibition.