Many happy returns

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The Biennial looks up when it gets around to the business of surveying tendencies in the newest art. As I settled into the show and particularly the time-based work, glimmers of light (even heat!) began to issue, not just from individual works, but from the friction between works--which is to say that I respect the curators for venturing frames and syntheses in a show whose do-it-all nature can make such a prospect fraught, if not thankless.

I appreciated, especially, the nostalgia conceit, which lends a (timely) affective gloss to that contemporary cultural staple, sampling. Moving, in this light, was Mary Kelly's composite image based on several press shots of the student uprisings of '68 studiously reconstructed of dryer lint; so, too, were Sam Durant's penciled protests, their casual, hand-rendered quality slowing down our processing of these literally seen-to-death shots--including mass-media imagery of the student rebellion at Columbia University in 1968--so that we might pause to measure our thrall to these disembodied half memories and their role in the everyday processes of wresting present from past. Richard Prince offered a self-reflexive spin on the nostalgia problem, sampling himself in a new installation that reprises his '80s car hoods (based on '70s car designs). In his hyperclever conflation of auto styling and high-art finish fetish, Prince, who is not a painter, or not just a painter--or if, as he insists, he is a painter, then he's a meta-painter of a very particular sort--admits to those new hybrids the signs of painterly "process." Where the paint jobs of the '80s works were seamless, the new hoods are patchy and sanded, offering added "art" value but also recalling auto-body work in progress.

But the most topical "image" of pastness in the show was the nod back to the eclectic affect associated with the proto-Pop imaginings of the Independent Group in the '50s. In the ecstatic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sprawls by the likes of assume vivid astro focus and Christian Holstad, high- and mass-cult yearnings collapse: One feels the tug not only of British proto-Pop but also, at least in assume vivid astro focus's case, of that perennial magnet for decadist longing: Swinging London of the '60s. In their voracious embrace of all things Pop--as well as things high and in between--these artists plot a point at the opposite end of the post-Pop continuum from Peyton's tidy packages.

My own favorite moments of double voicing and determined nostalgia were both to be found in the basement bookstore: Two works, both documentaries, employ that most prosaic of forms to tap into something like the (political?) unconscious of the proceedings upstairs. Isaac Julien's BaadAsssss Cinema (2002) looks back on the '70s blaxploitation film. Taped interviews with film critics, social commentators, actors, producers, and directors, including Quentin Tarantino, who has often tapped this contradiction-rich mother lode, suggestively complicated the "exploitation" factor in the equation, by unpacking a dense network of cultural dependencies and contradictions. For Tarantino the genre affords a refreshing (and productive) dip into the subcultural well from which emerges a vital new art-house hybrid; for Melvin Van Peebles it would ultimately represent the vicious cycle of recuperation whereby a subversive new art is devoured in the maw of the movie industry; and yet for numerous actors, agents, and producers, it represented, more often than not, an empowering foot in the door, an opportunity to seize a piece of the pie and be counted. Key to Julien's take is this ambivalence--reflected in the views of those who played a firsthand part in the short life of the genre--which in this work lends the nostalgia a bittersweet cast: It reflects the tug of a culture on the verge, a vital efflorescence that, however fraught or compromised, remains a resonant episode in the larger narrative of empowerment. For me, BaadAsssss Cinema is one of the show's exhilarations.