Generation ‘Ehh’
by CMatlin
- The Generational: Younger Than Jesus. At the New Museum, on view till June 14, 2009
Let’s get right to the point: if this is the best the so-called Millenials have to offer (myself being one of them) then the art world as we know might as well pack up and leave. It’s been a good run. Everyone should be proud. Lots of great memories. Tons of money. Successful careers. Names in the pantheon. It was bound to come to an end sometime. But that it was going to be so soon no one could have known. So mediocre is the New Museum’s newest and perhaps most important show, The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, that if this is the best of the future then the future is bleak and boring.
Culled from the recommendations of 150 artists, critics, and curators, 500 artists, all younger than the age Jesus was when he was crucified at the age of 33, were narrowed down by the curators Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni, and Laura Hoptman to get to a final headcount of fifty artists from twenty-five countries. It must have been a Herculean task – if one wants to get a sense of its enormity, one can purchase the show’s Artist Directory, a phonebook sized tome of those who made the cut and those who didn’t. But, as is the fate of so many things of the Herculean variety, the ambition proved to be its own undoing. This is not to say that an attempt to try to give a state of the young art world is invalid, quite the opposite, but the situation that we are presented with could easily have been predicted. The last two major group shows at the New Museum, the terrible Unmonumental and the better After Nature, set the stage for Younger Than Jesus by showing us the New Museum’s chosen aesthetic. And what have we learned from the exhibition? Well, apparently young artists really love video and photography. Conceptual art is back. And painting and sculpture are too much work.
It is well within the New Museum’s institutional right that it have its own sense of the type of art it believes to be important, but asserting that the New Museum is in fact the most qualified voice and venue to tell the viewing public what is definitively happening seems tenuous at best. That there was a dearth of good painting is especially troubling. Only one can be recommended, the Polish painter Jakub Julian Ziolkowski whose medium sized to large scale canvases have a strangely surrealist freneticism to them but also manage to succeed in their illustrative qualities. I’m not sure what it means that so few painters, let alone good ones, were represented in the show. Perhaps patient, considered work is falling by the wayside in favor of the immediate gratification of more technologically driven mediums such as photography and video art.
Although the New Museum makes no claims otherwise, there seems to be no real cohesion to the show other than the age of the artists in it. It’s a shame really, because this could have been a chance for the New Museum to shine. As Holland Cotter observed, “it is, despite its promise of freshness, business as usual. Its strengths are individual and episodic.” Personally, I didn’t get it. There is no real narrative structure, no consistent through line. There are, however, a number of middling, dull works. For The Consequence British conceptual artist Ryan Gander has instructed the museum that whatever gallery attendant is on duty on the fourth floor he or she is to wear a white Adidas tracksuit with two dark bloodstains on it. The title of course is directly linked to the unknown story that we make up in our heads. I had to look for the blood, that was my consequence. Two insignificant bloodstains do not a compelling narrative make. Polish video-artist Anna Molska’s video of two beautiful, muscular young men dressed in some sort of warrior costumes pushing around enormous puzzle pieces and magically making something that approximates Malevich’s Black Square feels more like a failed fashion shoot from “America’s Next Top Model” than a work of any consequence. Both artists are on the fourth floor. Stay away from the fourth floor.
Czech artist Kateřina Šedá’s video, however, depicting her depressed grandmother drawing her way out of her sadness is truly a moving work. Elad Lassry of Israel engages with the same mimetic themes that Richard Prince addressed in the early 1980s when he re-photographed magazine ads. Prince, however, did it better. Chinese photographer Cao Fei’s images of cos-players (people that dress up as characters from video games and comic books) have no weight. They look exactly like what they are: photographs of people dressed up in constumes; not very interesting and reminiscent of freshman year photo-lab work.
Continuing to list all the mediocre art that comprises Younger Than Jesus would be unfruitful while making me look like some sort of angry Hilton Kramer-esque critic, constantly lamenting the downfall of art. Younger Than Jesus is not entirely devoid of good art. Oddly enough, the best piece is video, which as a heavily saturated medium can’t usually make such a claim. Three artists in particular stand out. Add me to the list of people overwhelmed by Cyprien Gaillard’s 30-minute video, with its spectacular soundtrack by the French composer Koudlam. Gaillard’s video, told in three parts and shot at a distance, is a stunning meditation on violence, desperation, desolation, and the problem of forced community building. It begins with rival gangs of “underground fight clubs” in St. Petersburg, Russia housing projects beating the shit out of each other. It then cuts to an elaborate light and fireworks show projected onto a Parisian suburb housing project before it is imploded. A weird, almost sentimental send-off of an obsolete object that is at once the face of a community and yet is not deemed worthy of existence. The final third is an aerial view of snow-covered public housing in a suburb of Kiev. The camera shakes as the airplane flies around buildings and grounds. The buildings look as if they have always been abandoned, that there was never any intent to have people live in them. Gaillard lets us know that America doesn’t hold a monopoly on failed community building and public welfare. It is a work that is both disturbing and exhilarating. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen in New York in two years.
Philadelphia-based video artist Ryan Trecartin’s absurdist installations/video works are so screwball that they defy explanation. His heavily made-up, gender bending performers rant and rave, the digital effects are decidedly low budget. The viewer sits in a two-room installation that resembles a plane and watches as Trecartin’s performers bounce around the television screens. The work is not only morbid and perverse but hysterically funny, each video displays a distinct narrative that veers toward Dadaist exuberance. South African video and installation artist Dineo Seshee Bopape is wonderfully strange. Her installation thewebula/uhthwebula (the process of making someone into a zombie which is also the same word for taking a picture) features black walls, reflective foil, plants painted black, a disco ball, and glitter on every available surface. Couple that with her moody black and white video dreamweaver, which features her with what looks to be a beard, sunglasses, an umbrella, and white sacks tied around her waist while a single exposed light bulb swings above her head as the only source of light and nonsensical mash-up soundtrack plays in the background, and the effect is incredibly haunting. It is as if one has stepped into private ritual from another world, producing an experience that is ghostly and unsettling.
I was heartened that most of the reviews (Holland Cotter of the The New York Times and Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker) reserved heaping praise on Younger Than Jesus. It’s good that they didn’t buy in to the intoxicating qualities of youth. The same can’t be said for New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz, a habitual praiser of youth. Perhaps the main problem with his assessment of the exhibition, other than his belief in it as a success, is that he somehow manages to argue that the sublime has “moved into us” and is no longer the province of “God or nature or abstraction.” The sublime, and thereby its potential, is always in us. It is not an exterior event but its power rests in its inherent interiority. Burke understood this and so did Kant. The external terrors trigger our internal collapse. We step into the sublime experience because it, the fear of our death, what Burke calls “the king of terrors,” is awakened within us. The sublime is there to remind us of the immanence of our death and the reality of flesh. Kant argues we are made better, more human, in our experience of the sublime. This does not happen with Younger Than Jesus. There is no being “made better.” If anything, one exits it entirely unchanged. And that is why it amounts to a nothing experience.
The very problem with the exhibition is that it really isn’t “bad” in the sense that the work in it is awful and unconsidered. There are standouts, including German minimalist artist Kitty Kraus along with the ones I have already mentioned. But most of it is just a sort of bland rehashing of work we’ve already seen. It doesn’t feel terribly original. The one thing that remains consistent is that it’s all remarkably thoughtful; even the works I have singled out to chastise are smart and thoughtful.
But that isn’t enough. Being thoughtful and smart doesn’t make art good. It makes it thoughtful and smart. There is a difference and that is where Younger Than Jesus gets lost in its own ambition. It’s not a terrible exhibition and it is without question important. If one has been following the art world at all for the past five to ten years then none of this should be surprising. The problem lies in the fact that so much of it is spectacularly mediocre, signifying that, possibly, art is on its way to a long period of pedestrian work that neither surprises nor excites. And this is fine. Art can’t always be great but let’s not celebrate this. Perhaps there is hope. Maybe video art is going to be the new important medium. A lot of people think so. I’m not sold, though. Three really good artists, video or not, out of fifty isn’t great odds.
