Disturbed by the failure of PS1 Contemporary Art Center's quinquennial "Greater New York" to address exigent social issues, Thom Donovan asked if I found the curation of the show pusillanimous, a question which I'm still puzzling. Feeling similarly disconnected from the show, I wondered if, as Thom suggested, curatorial timidity was the central issue, or if, perhaps, the central flaws in this iteration were an overly narrow understanding of the current moment in New York and a tendency towards artists relying on the known forms of avant-garde production as alibi for critical contribution.
Painting is nearly absent and ill-selected, with some of its typical roles played by photographic media. The photographic projects of note include Tamar Halperin's gestural action-paintings-by-other-means and Mariah Robertson's similarly Ab-Ex-aspirational works, the latter set in irregular-shaped abstractions (conjuring Richard Tuttle), and memorably, in a frankly Richard-Serra-esque ceiling-to-floor roll piece; Daniel Gordon's facial photo-collages replace the School-of-Schutz neo-early-Modernist painting of the 00s; and David Benjamin Sherry's high-pitch photographs, commercially slick to the point of being a near outlier in a show of liminal, paltry essences, mimic tropes of painting in the key of fashion (though the haphazard hang nods to Wolfgang Tillmans). The actual painting in the show is weak beyond belief, saying almost nothing about the major emergent practices in the region in the past five years; painting is summed up by Caleb Considine's awkward, unfinished gray figures and Morandi-esque still lives, Leidy Churchman's Robert-Colescott-meets-Justin-Craun cartoon porn, and Franklin Evans' candy-colored installation of painted paper, the last of which is barely painting at all.
The insistence on eschewing traditional media seems part of a larger agenda of selecting artists who historically signify cultural disturbance, like some empty shell of an avant garde: i.e. watching Ryan McNamara practice ballet in a gallery hardly adds anything relevant to the discourse of gallery-bound performance art whose history is rich with real social and political disturbance. Or take the Bruce High Quality Foundation: working in a collective with relational strategies—such as inviting art schools to exchange their pedestals—and the rhetoric of institutional intervention suggests meaningful critique. But, in failing to provide it, the work further empties out the power of traditional forms of resistence. Perhaps most guilty of this kind of empty second-order signifying in “Greater New York” is Darren Bader, a multi-media artist relishing in an obfuscation of meaning reminiscent of the output of historical Dada, but distanced from any meaningful critical statement.
Sculpture is similarly approached as an enterprise that should fit the mold of the historical avant-garde, namely the modified readymade, and relatedly, assemblage, following, in more immediate history, a lineage of the paltry and post-exuberant art of the late 00s, as seen in the “raw-wood Biennial” of ’08 at the Whitney, Museum 52’s “Without Walls,” and in spirit if not always look, the New Museum’s “Unmonumental.” Exemplifying this tendency is David Brooks' Preserved Forest (2010), a cement-covered live tree, occupying the sunken centerpiece slot on the main floor. Treating the pressing issue of infrastructral encroachment on the Brazilian rainforest, the piece furthers the historically-engaged forms of the late 00s with an iconographic element, covering the ecological crisis. Similar in its urgent environmental theme expressed in modified readymade form, Ismael Randall Weeks mixed-media installation includes a desktop piled with seemingly laser-cut mountains of Architectural Digest magazines, printed publications returned to a landscape-like form, a poignant meditation on the destructive culture of the printed page, if one whose clarity is lost in an overly activated arrangement of interior bric-a-brac.
Painting is nearly absent and ill-selected, with some of its typical roles played by photographic media. The photographic projects of note include Tamar Halperin's gestural action-paintings-by-other-means and Mariah Robertson's similarly Ab-Ex-aspirational works, the latter set in irregular-shaped abstractions (conjuring Richard Tuttle), and memorably, in a frankly Richard-Serra-esque ceiling-to-floor roll piece; Daniel Gordon's facial photo-collages replace the School-of-Schutz neo-early-Modernist painting of the 00s; and David Benjamin Sherry's high-pitch photographs, commercially slick to the point of being a near outlier in a show of liminal, paltry essences, mimic tropes of painting in the key of fashion (though the haphazard hang nods to Wolfgang Tillmans). The actual painting in the show is weak beyond belief, saying almost nothing about the major emergent practices in the region in the past five years; painting is summed up by Caleb Considine's awkward, unfinished gray figures and Morandi-esque still lives, Leidy Churchman's Robert-Colescott-meets-Justin-Craun cartoon porn, and Franklin Evans' candy-colored installation of painted paper, the last of which is barely painting at all.
The insistence on eschewing traditional media seems part of a larger agenda of selecting artists who historically signify cultural disturbance, like some empty shell of an avant garde: i.e. watching Ryan McNamara practice ballet in a gallery hardly adds anything relevant to the discourse of gallery-bound performance art whose history is rich with real social and political disturbance. Or take the Bruce High Quality Foundation: working in a collective with relational strategies—such as inviting art schools to exchange their pedestals—and the rhetoric of institutional intervention suggests meaningful critique. But, in failing to provide it, the work further empties out the power of traditional forms of resistence. Perhaps most guilty of this kind of empty second-order signifying in “Greater New York” is Darren Bader, a multi-media artist relishing in an obfuscation of meaning reminiscent of the output of historical Dada, but distanced from any meaningful critical statement.
Sculpture is similarly approached as an enterprise that should fit the mold of the historical avant-garde, namely the modified readymade, and relatedly, assemblage, following, in more immediate history, a lineage of the paltry and post-exuberant art of the late 00s, as seen in the “raw-wood Biennial” of ’08 at the Whitney, Museum 52’s “Without Walls,” and in spirit if not always look, the New Museum’s “Unmonumental.” Exemplifying this tendency is David Brooks' Preserved Forest (2010), a cement-covered live tree, occupying the sunken centerpiece slot on the main floor. Treating the pressing issue of infrastructral encroachment on the Brazilian rainforest, the piece furthers the historically-engaged forms of the late 00s with an iconographic element, covering the ecological crisis. Similar in its urgent environmental theme expressed in modified readymade form, Ismael Randall Weeks mixed-media installation includes a desktop piled with seemingly laser-cut mountains of Architectural Digest magazines, printed publications returned to a landscape-like form, a poignant meditation on the destructive culture of the printed page, if one whose clarity is lost in an overly activated arrangement of interior bric-a-brac.
