Auction houses are gravitating towards mature artists and critics have sounded the death knell for the ‘young art star,’ but the New Museum’s first triennial still carries the torch for youth with its showcase of work by fifty international artists, all thirty-three years young or less. If this extravaganza of newness suddenly seems a little out of touch, the show’s curators insist that they’re following the lead of sociologists and marketers in examining the Millennial identity, intending to show it as a generation of producers, not just the consumers they’re made out to be. It falls to one of the generation’s own to honestly portray his contemporaries as consumable; Matt Keegan’s year-book style photo portraits of recent college grads, fresh faced and earnest, tellingly point out that their lives are, as of yet, still largely unlived.
Perhaps that’s why, despite input from fifty artistic voices, the generation’s defining characteristics stay hazy, regardless of the curators’ anthropological efforts. Artists like Liu Chuang get in on the investigation with a creepy, clinically neat display of personal effects he purchased from unknown women on the street. Fellow Chinese artist Chu Yun takes a reverse approach, inviting women to sleep in a bed in the gallery, presenting us with a person but no information on who she might be. Ryan Gander’s blood-flecked white tracksuit worn by one of the museum’s guards is one of the show’s best pieces, primarily because it creates a compelling, if fictional, identity for its wearer.
The show’s two most ambitious, riveting and unsettling works loosely relate to what the Millennial dossier does make clear: that the under-thirty population around the world is booming and its perception of social relations has been radically altered by the Internet. Cyprien Gaillard’s video of two large rival gangs in a sprawling, organized fight amid Soviet-era high-rises taps into fears of a generation out of control. Less alarming but no less alienating, Ryan Trecartin’s two-room bachelor(ette) pad is an eccentric setting for fast-paced videos in which zany characters act out personal dramas in a world of their own.
Josh Smith’s hastily produced, collaged abstractions are a painterly version of this overdrive, though their installation in a huge, pretty grid neuters their disregard for art making tradition. Appropriation and recycling also plays into Elad Lassry’s whimsical, ad-inspired images that evoke Sara van der Beek’s carefully constructed setups and Roe Ethridge’s mood-creating series but with more humor. Cory Arcangel’s gorgeous, fakey cyan abstraction (a default pattern from Photoshop) resonates with Tauba Auerbach’s process driven paintings, which recall Liz Deschenes’ op art patterns and Eileen Quinlan’s abstract setups in their adherence to a set of parameters established by the artist.
But the Generational isn’t the context for artists who are in conversation with their slightly older peers and its homogenizing approach to art from around the world assumes a global, artistic lingua franca, devoid of contextual details, that probably doesn’t exist. Several works echo better known artwork or familiar ideas, they appear to be fragments of a more complex practice, or simply beg the question of why they’ve been chosen to represent a generation. The show’s premise is more compelling than its content, its flip title promising big ideas that the artists themselves don’t even aim to produce. In a recorded introduction to the show, one of its curators says that today’s super-abundance of art product forces a redefinition of ‘new,’ though it may be better to ask if we should continue to expect the youngest artists to be the chief suppliers of ‘newness’ or original artwork in tune with contemporary life. Because to judge by this show, art’s obsession with youth is past its prime.