03/05/2024, 22:11 Jerry Saltz on P.S.
1's 'Greater New York' -- New York Magazine Art Review - Nymag
M AY 2 7, 2 0 1 0
Sincerity and Irony Hug It Out
By Jerry Saltz, New York’s senior art critic
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Mariah Robertson’s 88, on view at P.S. 1. Photo: Matthew Septimus/Courtesy of MoMA P.S. 1
I’m noticing a new approach to artmaking in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered
into focus at the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” last year and ran through the
Whitney Biennial, and I’m seeing it blossom and bear fruit at “Greater New York,” MoMA
P.S. 1’s twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent. It’s an attitude that says, I know
that the art I’m creating may seem silly, even stupid, or that it might have been done before,
but that doesn’t mean this isn’t serious. At once knowingly self-conscious about art, unafraid,
and unashamed, these young artists not only see the distinction between earnestness and
detachment as artificial; they grasp that they can be ironic and sincere at the same time, and
they are making art from this compound-complex state of mind—what Emerson called
“alienated majesty.”
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03/05/2024, 22:11 Jerry Saltz on P.S. 1's 'Greater New York' -- New York Magazine Art Review - Nymag
The best of the work at “Greater New York” pulses with this attitude. The worst of it is full of
things that move, light up, or make noise, all frantic enough to make you feel like you’re at a
carnival rather than a museum. I yearned to see more art here that demands that you stop
and be still, like painting, of which there is very little. Instead, the curators—Connie Butler,
Neville Wakefield, and Klaus Biesenbach, the museum world’s unofficial czar these days—
favor things that are “about” painting, like Dave Miko’s canvas propped on a little shelf with
drips painted on the wall behind it, carrying the heavy-handed title Lonely Merch Guy.
(When will everyone get over the ossified idea that painting’s particular alchemy is suspect?
Bad dogma!)
But let’s look on the sunny side. I counted thirteen artists whose work I really like and twelve
others whose work I’d like to see again. Like Liz Magic Laser’s Mine, a secret-life-of-women
video in which she and a surgeon perform an operation, with medical robots, on her purse
(tiny tools snipping the face out of a $20 bill, for example); the artist simultaneously
dismantles and creates, remaking her purse into a Rauschenberg combine. This weirdly
familiar otherness goes green in Brian O’Connell’s funny-strange architectural columns
composed of potting soil, which make you feel like you’re occupying a very large sand castle.
Or David Brooks’s section of real forest mummified in concrete, a sad comment on turning
the natural world into doomed playgrounds. Leigh Ledare’s pictures of his mother having sex
bring us to the dark heart of the human drive for connection; the sweet sight of Ryan
McNamara being taught to dance in the building’s corridors speaks for artists compelled to
strip themselves naked (metaphorically or literally) in public. Saul Melman’s gold-leafing of
the giant double furnace in the building’s basement may be just another labor-intensive
process piece, but it’s also an ancient sarcophagus, a moving memorial to the dead. Equally
serious, particularly in their strangeness, are Matt Hoyt’s tiny carved clay objects, which look
like sculptural-biological forms and dead rodents. They hint at the innate connection
between creating form and creating life.
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03/05/2024, 22:11 Jerry Saltz on P.S. 1's 'Greater New York' -- New York Magazine Art Review - Nymag
Much of the most effective work in “Greater New York” also involves the artists’ leaping from
medium to medium in madly unexpected ways: Sculpture, music, video, and photography
get mashed up; techniques like collage and assemblage are combined with unusual materials
like mud, magnets, stolen record albums, and art reviews (even one of my own, in Franklin
Evans’s walk-in installation-painting). Mariah Robertson’s long strip of photographs looping
along the ceiling and across the floor is photography as sculptural installation, so smudgy
and phantasmagoric and unruly that it looks like drawing, a painting, and a filmstrip all at
once.
Giant group events are distorting organisms: You can like and hate them in rapid succession.
In the 2005 edition of “Greater New York,” there were 162 artists on view, which was
ridiculous. In 2010, there are just 68. More critical is what’s not there: a by-now-familiar
genus of cynical art that is mainly about gamesmanship, work that is coolly ironic, simply
cool, ironic about being ironic, or mainly commenting on art that comments on other art.
I’m glad to see it fading away—sincerely and otherwise.
Greater New York
MoMA P.S. 1.
Through October 18.
L E AV E A C O M M E N T
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03/05/2024, 22:11 Jerry Saltz on P.S. 1's 'Greater New York' -- New York Magazine Art Review - Nymag
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