{"id":923,"date":"2010-11-01T21:49:05","date_gmt":"2010-11-02T02:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/?p=923"},"modified":"2011-08-01T22:02:06","modified_gmt":"2011-08-02T03:02:06","slug":"greater-new-york-at-ps1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/01\/greater-new-york-at-ps1\/","title":{"rendered":"“Greater New York” at PS1"},"content":{"rendered":"

The third of three blockbuster contemporary art survey shows to hit New York in the past year, Greater New York<\/a> was worth waiting for.\u00a0 The New Museum\u2019s youthfest,\u00a0The Generational<\/a>,\u00a0showcased an under ripe generation still finding its voice.\u00a0 The Whitney Biennial<\/a> presented artists self-consciously grappling with new ways to be \u2018experimental.\u2019\u00a0 Despite the fact that these shows shared several artists, Greater New York swapped the previous \u2018watch-this-space\u2019 vibe for mature, confident work by 68 artists and collectives, evenly balanced between male and female, whose collective fostering of identity politics \u2013 sexual, racial, political and personal \u2013 broke with recent art world trends towards hermeticism and reconnected with the larger world.<\/p>\n

If identity politics has come to sound retro in \u2018post-black\u2019 days, Hank Willis Thomas\u2019 monumental photo series made it joltingly relevant, connecting yesterday to today by tracking the persistence of stereotype and recent fantasies of racial integration through forty years of magazine ads. \u00a0Rashaad Newsome\u2019s video of over twenty female performers uttering partial phrases like \u2018excuuuuuse\u2026\u2019 or \u2018giiirl\u2019 is one of the best pieces at PS1 (though technically part of an auxiliary exhibition reviewing the last five years of artmaking), succinctly demonstrating how slang and role play create exclusive group identities.<\/p>\n

Alternative sexuality was the norm in the third floor galleries, where Sharon Hayes\u2019 five channel video installation \u2018Revolutionary Love\u2019 brilliantly integrated the concerns of participants inside and protesters outside the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions before veering quixotically off topic by demanding love along with legal rights.\u00a0 But her assertion, \u2018we\u2019re all queer\u2019 makes perfect sense in light of Leigh Ledare\u2019s creepily incestuous photos of his exhibitionist mom, which prove that anyone, heterosexuals included, can pretty much chart their own course.\u00a0 LaToya Ruby Frazier\u2019s photos of her own mother come to mind (from the New Museum Triennial); in her video contribution here, her tense, naked torso – juxtaposed with clouds of factory steam – pulsated with unspoken feeling.<\/p>\n

Proving that identity politics don\u2019t have to be dour, K8 Hardy\u2019s fabulously eclectic self-portraits in outrageous getups place her characters outside recognizable \u2018types.\u2019 \u00a0\u00a0A similar inventive exuberance carries downstairs to A.L. Steiner\u2019s photocollaged lesbian utopia where one nude joker embraces a reproduction of Courbet\u2019s \u2018Origins\u2019 and another dangles her pendulous breasts over two globs of dough.\u00a0 Identity aside, other galleries exploded with color or formal inventiveness, including Kerstin Bratsch\u2019s and Adele Roder\u2019s abstract paintings, which distill distinctly a modernist appeal in terms of color and geometry, and Mariah Robertson\u2019s audacious, show stopping 30\u201d by 100\u2019 photogram wrapped around gallery floor, walls, and ceiling.<\/p>\n

Press material posited the \u2018process of creation and the generative nature of the artist\u2019s studio\u2019 as the show\u2019s dominant theme, though Robbinschild\u2019s installation conveyed little when the artist\u2019s weren\u2019t present, Ei Arakawa gave out candy to studio visitors one day in apology for lack of a performance, and The Bruce High Quality Foundation\u2019s program to swap new pedestals for used ones from art collages was a space-hogging one-liner.\u00a0 On the other hand, Naama Tsabar\u2019s \u2018Speaker Wall,\u2019 two walls of bookshelf speakers rigged with strings into irresistible collaborative instruments, generated the hive of activity that the curators must have hoped for.<\/p>\n

Tsabar\u2019s invitation to engage in her work was literal, but for the most part, Greater New York\u2019s best pieces stood out for their complex engagement with issues outside the art world (gay rights, racial, class and gender politics, etc).\u00a0 A couch featuring news clippings of President Obama and photos of a disfigured young Marine were among the most memorable images of the Whitney Biennial; likewise, pieces like David Brook\u2019s living trees encased in concrete \u2013 a protest of deforestation in the Amazon, amongst other things \u2013 made the connection to an existing conversation amongst a wider audience, making this show the one we\u2019ll likely continue to talk about.<\/p>\n

Originally published in Flash Art International, no 274, October 2010.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The third of three blockbuster contemporary art survey shows to hit New York in the past year, Greater New York was worth waiting for.\u00a0 The New Museum\u2019s youthfest,\u00a0The Generational,\u00a0showcased an under ripe generation still finding its voice.\u00a0 The Whitney Biennial presented artists self-consciously grappling with new ways to be \u2018experimental.\u2019\u00a0 Despite the fact that these … <\/p>\n

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