Jul 5, 2009 04:45 PM
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Wed Feb 10
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Things I Did On My July 4th Vacation: hit up The New Museum's Younger Than Jesus exhibition. It's a contemporary art exhibit showcasing only artists born after 1976. It ends today. Here is what I saw, presented without comment.
An apocalyptic, borderline Mad Max sculpture by two guys who go by AIDS-3D. The center of the sculpture was a tower with the words OMG inscribed on it in lights. It originated as a GIF image file, at one point, they say. Interview with them here.
Someone sleeping in a bed, in the middle of the museum. Chu Yun, the artist, "supplied" his subjects with sleeping pills and the bed. The sleepers were being paid $10 an hour to sleep in the museum. Yun's previous work has included putting a woman with down's syndrome in a chair, in a gallery.
Artist Guthrie Lonergan's Myspace Intro Playlist, in which the artist remixed a bunch of MySpace intro videos. It is not intended to be funny, according to the arist.
This video of rival street gangs in Belgrade fighting, scored to a trance techno track.
Three very large banners, one of which advised me: "DON'T PAY TAXES."
A installation with videos by artist Ryan Trecartin. The room had discarded Lay-Z-Boys and part of an airliner's interior on the side of it. I also remember seeing a shelf with sand on it, and a BlackBerry in the sand. Here is a Ryan Trecartin video. I'm simply incapable of describing its contents:
The remnants of an art project that took place on the first floor of the museum. There was a bunch of cardboard paper, unfolded boxes, and various other "construction" scraps lying on the floor. There was a small TV in the corner depicting in fast-forward the artist and her friends, building a replica of Rome in 24 hours, and then destroying it. From New York's art critic Jerry Saltz's review of the show:
The first night, I watched kids fashion the altars and temples of Rome's archaic period; by the next morning, when I returned, they'd been destroyed ("by fires," said the artist), and I spied the beginnings of Classical Rome. Just before the opening, the whole city was again wrecked and left in ruins, as the Dark Ages began. Glynn is saying she's not going to listen to the bromides that assert that change takes time.
An 8-bit videogame called FlyWrench by artist Mark Essen. You use an original Nintendo controller to control a line going through different colored shapes:
The laid out contents of three people, from whom Chinese artist Liu Chuang offered to buy everything off of their person for display in a museum. One included a cell phone, some pictures of themselves, and of course, all of their clothing.
A rotating spiral staircase on a platform, entitled: Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted, Stairway Edit.
Photographs of adults acting out Second Life and video game scenarios.
One of the gallery attendants, wearing a white 80s tracksuit with bloodstains on it. There was a card for it; this was part of this exhibition.
The last thing I saw before leaving was a banana peel on the floor. I couldn't tell if it was part of the show or not, and I didn't bother to check.
Okay, so, some comment, and some context (I lied! Getting you past the jump: it's an art.):
I'm by no means an educated art consumer or art critic, which is why it's probably safer to read Jerry Saltz's assessment of this thing for an actual, critical appreciation. The video game was fun. The message advising me not to pay taxes was nice. But: a woman was sleeping in a bed, in a museum. I'm often advised by people who know more about art than me that much of the point of this is to ask: is it art? Don't get me wrong: as you can tell by the publication you're reading this on, I'm all about the subversive (or painfully obvious) art of fucking with someone's sensibilities. But how does one get into the position to be able to put someone sleeping in a museum and call themselves an artist? Do you have to be embedded in the art scene? Well-established? Anyway. Maybe this makes me a conservative yokel without any kind of appreciation for the more intelligent "pleasures" of life. Or maybe it just makes me someone who went to a museum and "didn't get it." On that note, however, here are some ideas for the next time the New Museum goes at something like this. I submit them in sincere pursuit of the advancement of art and human civilization's ability to express itself:
That is all. Oh, and this:
The Generational: Younger Than Jesus [New Museum]
‘Jesus' Saves - God bless the New Museum's tantalizing triennial. [New York]
Send an email to Foster Kamer, the author of this post, at foster@gawker.com.
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