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New York: City of Art and the End of the Future

Four days is not nearly enough time to tour four art fairs, Chelsea’s galleries and a set of major museum exhibitions, but the experience made for a long weekend to remember in New York at the end of March.

That said, the city still seems haunted by the missing towers of the World Trade Centre. The view down 6th Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) from Greenwich Village is not the view I expect—or New Yorkers either, I imagine. There is a hole in the skyline. This year, one of the art fairs, VOLTA NY, is across the street from the Empire State Building, and it seems strange that a 77-year-old building is once again, by default, the focal point of Manhattan.

This hauntedness accounts for much of the art I saw too, especially at the New Museum and the Whitney Biennial, in shows marked by a pervasive distemper that seems to speak for the moment in America, with its bad president, endless war and diminished international stature and reputation.

The new New Museum, in the Bowery, set the tone for this unsteady moment with “Unmonumental,” a show with a hangdog curatorial theme that meshed sculpture, collage, sound and web-based media in a cross-disciplinary demonstration of the levelling power of the contemporary realities of fracture and entropy. There was lots of slacker pride on view, in various junk assemblages wearing the mantle of sculpture—lots of sarcasm too, mostly directed at exemplars of modernist art like Donald Judd, Anthony Caro and others in the formalist/post-formalist crew that once shaped the culture of 20th-century American art.

The show’s cartoonish variants on high art, however, carry not much bite in their critique of inherited form. A good portion of the art seems to put itself outside of art, assuming the virtues of exclusion, yet becoming an art better described as orphaned than as avant-garde. Established artists in the show, like Thomas Hirschhorn and Isa Genzken, together with younger peers, such as Urs Fischer and Rachel Harrison, have made interesting work out of shapeless materiality and drifting social codes, but the show’s annexing of look-alike artists has the net effect of making a crafted existential awareness seem no more than a style. Under the high ceilings of the new gallery spaces, the repetitive will to un-form in “Unmonumental” registers not as a direction, but as a manic symptom—a depression created by the fallen towers.

On the plus side, however, is the building itself, which carries not a whit of unmonumentality. If anything, in its economical and inventive insertion into the Bowery, the New Museum embodies a monumental realism that makes it one of the most appealing new spaces for showing contemporary art. Bilbao and signature values have finally been left behind; New York may have a convivial new centre for its art scene. From a fusty street, you enter a welcoming ground floor that doubles as a café and bookstore. The building has an appealing approachability: it eschews the oppressive luxe of the new MOMA and the monster scale of the upriver Dia:Beacon. In contrast, the new New Museum is modest, clever and conceptual. It matches the ingredients of contemporary art. Its stripped-down, American Apparel utility is a breath of fresh air in the museum world, intimating a new sense of public instruction and engagement.

In comparison, the Whitney pales. If “Unmonumental” at least has viral life, the 2008 biennial is near-comatose. Aside from a strong video and film program—Spike Lee, Olaf Breuning, Stanya Kahn, Javier Téllez—there is precious little that commands attention. The wanness is partly the result of a conflicting curatorial agenda. As with “Unmonumental,” the organizing principle was to assemble art that finds its meaning and relevance in the abject. However, at the Whitney the abject has an air of soft aestheticization; it is an uptown version of abject.

One of the names that has been mentioned as a standout in the show is that of the California artist Charles Long, who presents a sculpture—Poem of the River—made from plaster-coated storm-drain waste held up on steel armatures. The forms look like a series of thin, bleached Giacometti figures. A variant of found-object sculpture, the work finds its most active life when converted into language, reframed as a narrative of garbage collection and high-toned intention—“Long sees his tall, desiccated ghosts as harbingers of death that paradoxically assert the resilience of life...” Giacometti—who reinvented figuration by showing the whittling effects of perception—it is not. It might be seen to advantage in some other show, as a generational statement in a room with an early Richard Serra Prop piece: Serra’s statement of darkness and balanced weight would represent a different universe than Long’s whitewashed environmental secretions. Long’s wilful effort to process the raw into precious poetry makes his works register as passive forms of acquiescence and acceptance. The same, sadly, could be said of the Whitney show as a whole.

The art fairs—crowded, loud and brimming with commercial energy—seem a respite. It is hard not to be excited by the treasures that occasionally show up on gallery booth walls. This is art that is seen under less than perfect circumstances, but proves fluid and resilient, and it doesn’t matter if it is shown at the high-end, midtown Armory Show, the lower-end, lower-Manhattan PULSE fair, the solo-work-only VOLTA show or the tented carnival that is the SCOPE fair. What seems clear is that art fairs are building a public for art, and that they are doing it in a rough-and-tumble way that breaks down the museum world’s perceived hauteur. The fairs reinstate art as something first-hand and unmediated, without the distancing interface of the institutional marketing that has come to stand between art and its audiences.

To walk through Chelsea is to be reminded of how overwhelming the area has become as a cleaned-up point of access for contemporary art. The galleries in Chelsea are the galleries that rule the art world (with the exception of a few in London and Berlin), and with every passing year they become more like private museums. The shows on view are good—Brian Jungen at Casey Kaplan, Marcel Dzama and Daniel Richter at David Zwirner, Piotr Uklanski at Gagosian and Dan Walsh at Paula Cooper, among others—but what is most striking is their palatial setting. Spectacle is the rule (it makes you wonder if Tate Modern is the imagined destination for everything). There are Swiftian overtones to the vastness of the rooms and the diminished stature of visitors within them. Chelsea Gullivers come to see—and find themselves in something that no longer fits a human scale.

I had not expected to come to New York and find an art world so simply framed by the gutter, the palace and the rough-and-ready market in between. This Hobbesian landscape perhaps explains why the Nicolas Poussin show at the Met strikes a chord. I see it only a few hours before my flight home. Poussin is the painter of Arcadia, a maker of classical landscapes that date from the middle of the 17th century. You want to look at Poussin for his tight compositions, for the way he constructs paintings with punctuating focal points in the foreground, middle ground, background and then beyond, over the horizon. Each stopping point is a place to settle into the image. They build time into the painting and let Poussin present a narrative equipped with a past, present and future. Pictorial space becomes plastic, subjective, wrapped in dimensions that are not bound by literal measurements. In one famous painting, shepherds convene around a weathered stone fragment to read the carved words “Et in Arcadia ego.” The phrase translates as “Even in Arcadia I exist,” and the “I” who speaks is Death.

Poussin is a lyrical painter of the presence of death in life. This is a theme he tackles by showing venomous snakes, clustering shadows and distant thunderstorms. The narratives in his paintings are about surprise and unknowingness in the face of death and the stoical resolve to survive. They seem a well-timed message for New York and for art: the abject is only a moment, not a lifestyle. The end of one future is the beginning of another.

The new New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York City / photo Dean Kaufman Courtesy New Museum

View of the Empire State building from the entry to Volta

The Nicholas Metivier Gallery booth, Pulse Contemporary Art Fair

Dan Walsh at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea

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