The Whitney Biennale - random rants

The Whitney is always crowded when I go - I need to make sure not to go on Fridays anymore - maybe that will help with the feelings of clusterphobia. Too many women in furs and hipster kids from williamsburg! Anyhow. I need to head back to see some more of the video and film installations, but on the whole I was a bit disappointed by the Whitney Biennale. Though one of the themes of the biennale was that of nostalgia an interesting topic to explore artistically and processually. Curator Debra Sanger writes: "Many of the artists in this biennial and beyond take full advantage of nostalgia's possibilities, putting it to use as a means to their own critical ends... the most visible specters from the past are from the political, social, and cultural histories of the 1960s and 1970s." However, the pieces that I remember seeing tended to unproblematically re-appropriate images and ideals from that era under the theme of selective misremembering. I didn't get the sense from the pieces of the ideological basis and impetus for selective misremembering and nostalgia that Renato Rosaldo outlines in his essay "Imperialist Nostalgia" in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. But rant aside - it is intriguing to me the turn towards the unfinished in almost a folk art sort of a way that many of the pieces exhibited. It seems that materiality and the evidence of the process of artmaking is starting to be something that artists are playing with again. Seems that people are starting to get tired of sleek clean digitally enhanced lines in there works so prevalent in contemporary work for the past couple of years.... There was a series of "self-portraits" done by this artist whose name I can't recall... but they were of men in different life stages... and none of theme were technically images of the artists own body. I liked this series, though I think it was part of the permanent collection and not part of the Biennale.