Those of us born since the late 1970s have to wince when well-meaning journalists make pronouncements about who we are. Articles published in USA Today or The Wall Street Journal and directed primarily at middle managers, themselves fiercely curious about the character of their livestock, say we are entitled, impatient and self-aggrandizing. First of all, how dare they try and describe us with mere adjectives? Secondly, this sort of talk smacks of mythologizing, and at an especially hurried pace.Weren’t there enough schlubs in the “Greatest Generation,” anyway, and squares who grew up in the ‘60s? Because of its apparent fragmentation—the Internet challenging mass culture and sponsoring sub-niches ad infinitum—the current crop of twenty-somethings seems especially amorphous.
That’s why the New Museum’s new triennial, The Generational, evokes skepticism as well as curiosity. Younger than Jesus, the debut exhibition opening April 8, encompasses about 145 works from 25 countries and by 50 artists, all of whom were born since 1976. But it is not an answer, only a response, to the question of identity.
“Everyone who’s been trying to identify commonalities, they want to own your identity because they want to sell you something,” says co-curator Massimiliano Gioni, who is himself 33. “What we were trying to say is, ‘Let’s define it but let’s not try to make a fetish of it,’ because that’s the ultimate violence you can do to a generation.”
Gioni says this distinction is actually made more possible by the recession. He suspects that the art crowd’s financial impotence will subdue its giddiness and trend spotting, allowing plain curiosity to surface.
Gioni is wisely reluctant to generalize about today’s artists. But one thing we can agree on is their abundance. Recently, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter frowned over the “thousands of groomed-for-success graduates” of MFA programs, entering an art world functioning “as a full-service marketing industry on the corporate model.”
Between this and the groundswell of Brooklyn-style DIY artists, editing is ever crucial. To select artists for this show, the New Museum tapped into networks across the world. Some of the more far-flung participants include Lebanese video artist Ziad Antar and Cypriot multimedia artist Haris Epaminonda. Having cast such a broad net, museum officials hauled up a horde of specimens that overshot the exhibition but could not be forgotten in their survey. A literary supplement to “Younger than Jesus,” which will be available at the show, catalogs a total of 500 young artists. Yet the model was supremacy, not democracy.
“If you do a show in which you want to have representation,” Gioni says, “then you end up having something like the U.N., which we have seen not to work properly.”
Gioni goes on to mention, tentatively and almost dismissively, some reappearing motifs in the work of these artists. Most of them are reactions or reactions to reactions: linguistic play, factory-style productivity, a return to abstraction and the deformation of authority figures, who act as emblems for our common dread. He continually cited the art of Ryan Trecartin, who works in a sort of culturally voracious style that Gioni called “hysterical realism.”
But really, the point of Younger than Jesus is to open-source the description of Gen-Y artists. My approach to the problem of generational branding is to discuss the timing of these artists mainly in
terms of practical, unambiguous factors that nonetheless define their
work.Two artists I spoke to about their appearance in this exhibition
not only wouldn’t have but couldn’t have made the art that they do 20
years ago.
Mark Essen, for example, is a video artist who makes lo-fi
computer games on his laptop and relies on buzz from online forums. While
I try out the video game he’s chosen to exhibit, Essen hovers a few
feet back, chuckling when I curse his challenges, betraying his
restraint by giving unsolicited hints. He’s a little beside himself.
Essen designs these levels to tantalize and torment an imagined player,
but rarely does he get to watch in person when they’re finally played.
This
is a drawback to the geographically collapsed world in which he works.
Indie gaming is more popular in Sweden and Holland than it is in the
United States, so most often his art is shown overseas. I’m reminded of
something Gioni said about modern artistic communities: “Some people
are more isolated in the digital age, but at the same time they can
reach out to an incredible amount of people.That relationship can no
longer be called intimacy or strangeness.”
Essen, 22, grew up on low-tech but highly engaging arcade games like Bubble Bobble and Zelda, and
he nurtured those memories while studying film and electronic arts at
Bard College. His faculties matured, warped with age, and eventually he
regurgitated his childhood loves as a series of psychedelic, surprising
and at times maddening games that retained their early-’90s graphic
charm.
The second youngest of the Younger than Jesus exhibitors,
Essen is currently crashing with friends in a Park Slope apartment. In
pure postmodern tradition, he has no intention to centralize his world
by claiming a home. He plans, in fact, to take his laptop on the road
and become a sort of techno-bard: “My dream right now,” he says, “is to
get a good setup in my backpack with good clothes and my computer and
make games for a week and then cruise on royalties for a while. Do air
couriers or just drive around. ‘Cos there’s no reason to be
anywhere, you know? If there’s something going on somewhere, there’s no
reason not to go.”
As technical progress has birthed new mediums for
art, cultural precedents enable a new kind of artist.Thirty years ago,
someone whose photography and films depicted a black mother addicted to
crack cocaine would have been branded either a political artist or a
racist, depending on her color.
Nearly all of LaToya Ruby
Frazier’s work exploits the embattled relationship between her and her
mother, and she’s grateful that it can (usually) be appreciated as art
without a message.The gift that decades of black female artists have
passed on to her is the freedom, long reserved for white males, to be
pointless.
Sure, says the 27-year-old, if she’s making a
presentation to an African-American studies department at a university,
she’ll mention the historical relationship between black women and
crack. But she’ll feel she’s wasting her time. Fine-art audiences, on
the other hand, will inquire about the artistic milieu she’s mining—one
that comprises mostly white artists, like Sally Mann and Lee
Friedlander, who have also photographed their family members.
Frazier’s
distinction from most of these artists is that she often cedes control
to her mother and allows herself to be photographed. By
pairing their subjectivities in this way, she aims to literally
document their relationship. The artist’s statement on her website
mentions “the Black family experience,” but Frazier says she wrote the
phrase only “because people haven’t let me escape that yet.”
“I
want to simplify all these things that have made barriers for people
sub-culturally for centuries, since we’ve existed,” says Frazier, “wipe
all that away and get down to this tender moment in this relationship.”
Frazier’s fixation on her mother fits another of the motifs
that Gioni mentioned: a renewed comfort with family values.“It seems,”
he said, “to be a generation that’s not so obsessed with killing their
parents as, say, the ‘60s.”
But if there are any trends or unifying sensibilities in these artists’ work, Gioni says he would rather they be discovered by the audience than explained by the museum.Thus, the works will not be organized by any themes or aesthetics. “The experience of the show will be hopefully much more physical and visual and sensual than didactic,” he says. “We also debated a lot whether the construction of the show should have reflected some generational preoccupations,” like new media, he adds. “Then it would have become kind of gimmicky and presumptuous.”
> The Generational: Younger Than Jesus
Opens April 8, New Museum, 235 Bowery (at Prince St.), 212-219-1222, www.newmuseum.org
