Tomorrow evening (May 15) the New Museum is hosting an event conceived by the editors of the literary journal n+1. It dovetails nicely with the concerns of “Younger Than Jesus.” “The ’90s vs. the ’90s” includes Michael Azerrad, Mark Greif, Emily Gould, A. S. Hamrah, Marisa Meltzer, and Aaron Lake Smith, and considers the legacy of the ’90s and how we are being shaped by them. To find out more, click here.
Friday night: “The ’90s vs. the ’90s”
May 14, 2009 | by YTJ | "YTJ" EventsVisitor suggestions for the Live Archive timeline, part two
May 7, 2009 | by YTJ | Exhibition Information
The Live Archive. Photo by Benoit Palley.
The Live Archive is a resource center presented on the fifth floor of the New Museum in conjunction with “Younger Than Jesus.” One of its features is a selective historical timeline—the multicolored grid seen in the photo at right—that lists historical and cultural events from 1976 to 2009. The participating artists selected some of these for the importance the events had in their own lives. The timeline also includes a suggestion box in which visitors can write in events or cultural creations of importance to them. Here is a sampling of the suggestions submitted since April 23.
August 19, 1987 – In Hungerford, England, a twenty-seven-year-old unemployed man, Michael Robert Ryan, shoots and kills sixteen people (including his mother), wounds fifteen others, then takes his own life. The massacre led to the Firearms (Amendment) Act of 1988, which banned the ownership of semi-automatic rifles and restricted the use of shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than two rounds.
July 2001 – During the 27th Summit Meeting of the Group of Eight countries, thousands of antiglobalization protesters turn the city of Genoa, Italy, into a virtual theater of war as they battle 19,000 police troops. One protester, twenty-three-year-old Carlo Giuliani, is killed. The reported number of persons injured in the mayhem amounted to more than 200, and about 280 arrests were made.
Summer 2001 – The first Lollapalooza festival, conceived and created by Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Farrell as a farewell tour for his band, debuts. The music festival features alternative rock, hip hop, and punk rock bands, performances, and craft booths. It would run annually until 1997, and then be revived in 2003.
March 8, 1993 – The animated television series Beavis and Butt-Head premieres on the MTV network. The show centers on a pair of teenagers who live in the fictional town of Highland, Texas, and spend their time making sarcastic conversation and fantasizing about sex. During each episode, Beavis and Butt-Head make fun of several music videos.
March 2009–present – The first major outbreak of swine flu—also known as A(H1N1)—in thirty years begins in March in Mexico City. By the end of April, more than 2,000 cases of an influenza-like illness had been reported throughout Mexico. On April 25, Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization, declares the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. On April 29, the New York Times reports the first death in the United States related to the A(H1N1) virus.
December 6, 2008 – Athens police fatally shoot a fifteen-year-old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, leading to weeks of protests throughout Greece that, by December 17, were reported to have caused $1.3 billion in damage.
February 13, 2008 – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offers a comprehensive apology to the country’s indigenous peoples for past wrongs and calls for bipartisan action to improve the lives of Australia’s Aborigines and Torres Strait islanders.
April 30, 2009 – Six people are killed and a dozen wounded when a thirty-eight-year-old Dutchman drives his car into a crowd in Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, in an attempt to crash into an open-topped bus carrying Queen Beatrix and members of her family. Shortly afterwards, the man, who has not been identified by name, admitted that he had aimed the car at the royal family. He died the next evening.
Be sure to stop by the fifth-floor Live Archive to see if the events of great importance in your own life are on our timeline. If not, please place them in the suggestion box and check back here.
An update on several “Younger Than Jesus” artists
May 6, 2009 | by YTJ | "YTJ" Artists Exhibiting Elsewhere
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Momme Portrait Series, 2008.
Several “Younger Than Jesus” participating artists are speaking or presenting work elsewhere in New York at the moment. Here are a few listings:
This evening (May 6), artist Cory Arcangel will speak about his work as part of the Public Art Fund’s talks series. The event begins at 6:30 PM and will take place at the Tishman Auditorium on the New School’s campus at 66 W. 12th Street. For more information, click here.
Brendan Fowler is included in a four-artist exhibition at Rental, 120 East Broadway, 6th Floor, that is on view through May 31. For more information, click here.
LaToya Ruby Frazier will present a solo exhibition at Higher Pictures, 764 Madison Ave., that runs from May 14 through June 27. An exhibition of Sebrina Fassbender’s exhibition will also be on view. For more information, click here.
“YTJ” artists Liz Glynn and Mariechen Danz perform in LA
May 5, 2009 | by YTJ | "YTJ" Artists Exhibiting Elsewhere
"Building Paradise" installation view, 7+FIG Art Space, Los Angeles, 2009.
Two “Younger Than Jesus” artists, Liz Glynn and Mariechen Danz, are participating in the exhibition “Building Paradise,” curated by Kyungmi Shin and hosted at the 7+FIG Art Space in downtown Los Angeles. As part of the show, the duo will perform on the evening of May 14. The duo’s installation, object lesson: house of song, walled garden, island in the sea, culminates with this event. For more information and additional views of the exhibition, click here.
Interviews with women participating in Chu Yun’s artwork
May 5, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and EventsPhotograph by Flickr user jblocknyc.
Ten dollars an hour is nothing to laugh at these days. It’s what Megan Robb was making before she was laid off from her job at an architectural firm. Unemployed, she applied for a new gig that requires considerably less effort on the job—sleeping in an upcoming participatory art installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
“My brother told me about it as a joke because he thought it was weird,” said Robb, 24. “But I’m not doing anything else. I enjoy sleeping, art and money.”
So begins an article in the Columbia Journalist, titled “Sleeping beauties in the New Museum,” which contains interviews with several of the women participating in Chu Yun’s artwork. “More than 170 women responded to the [recruitment] ad with their pictures, said Jarrett Gregory, a curatorial assistant. About 50 were asked to audition at the museum. “Some people seemed like they had better motivations,” Gregory said. “Some were more exhibitionist. It’s just sleeping. It’s not a performance. It’s not people pretending to sleep.”
What is it like to sleep in a museum? What are the motivations of some of the women who have signed up? To read the rest, click here.
Luke Fowler exhibition opens May 7 at the Serpentine Gallery, London
May 4, 2009 | by YTJ | "YTJ" Artists Exhibiting Elsewhere
Luke Fowler, The Way Out, 2003, dvd, 32 minutes. Courtesy of the Modern Institute, Glasgow.
“Younger Than Jesus” participating artist Luke Fowler opens a solo exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery on May 7. Here is the press release:
The films of Luke Fowler explore the limits of documentary film-making. Innovatively combining new and archival footage, interviews and photography with a densely layered soundtrack, his work is also a critical response to the idea that documentary can offer a single objective truth.
Fowler’s meticulously researched subjects include vanguard thinkers and counter-cultural figures, such as R.D. Laing, Cornelius Cardew and Bogman Palmjaguar. Collaboration is a key element of his process and he moves fluidly between the roles of artist, curator, historian, film-maker and musician.
A central figure in Glasgow’s vibrant art scene, Fowler won the inaugural Jarman Award 2008 for artist film-makers, presented at the Serpentine Gallery. This exhibition is the first major survey of the artist’s work to date.
Millennials as consumers and workers, not producers
April 29, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and Events
From the first page of Google Image results for the search term "Gen-Y workplace"
In the introduction to Younger Than Jesus: The Reader, Brian Sholis writes:
Examine the surface of this topic and one encounters marketers and management gurus. The former group hopes to capitalize on the fact that members of the millennial generation were raised during a period of nearly uninterrupted Western prosperity and accelerating economic development around the world. They have established sophisticated ways to counter the increasing sophistication of the young consumers they covet. They wrestle with appealing to a group whose relationship to the world at large is mediated, thanks to computers, in ways unlike any previous generation. The latter group wants to help corporations to bridge the social and cultural gap that runs alongside the generational divide. These writers attempt to explain how the millennial generation’s values and mores shape its attitude toward work. Both the marketers and the managers seek to integrate young people into adult society as seamlessly as possible, turning them into competent, amiable workers and reliable consumers.
What does this literature look like? A quick glance around the web reveals YPulse.com, a site that offers information about “youth marketing to teens, tweens & Generation Y”; the Generation Relations blog, the most recent post to which is titled “The Booming Gen Y Narcissism Epidemic”; DrivenLeaders.com, which offers “thoughts, insights, and refelections [sic] for emerging leaders of Generation Y”; and the Personal Branding Blog, written by “the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y.”
For many in the art world, delving into this material is like entering Alice’s wonderland: the material encountered on these sites is both fascinating and faintly abhorrent. And yet this is by far the most popular literature on the Millennial Generation. A simple but difficult-to-answer question arose during the research for the exhibition catalogue: In surveying the work created by artists of this generation and attempting to identify its salient characteristics, how necessary is it to be familiar with the ideas of these marketers and managers?
Ron Charles on the Twitter generation’s reading habits
April 27, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and Events
Handelingenkamer Tweede Kamer Der Staten-Generaal Den Haag, the Hague, Netherlands
Six weeks ago Washington Post critic Ron Charles caused a stir with an article titled “On Campus, Vampires Are Beating the Beats.” Looking back to the days when college students read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice or Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, Charles laments that today, “the best-selling titles on college campuses are mostly about hunky vampires or Barack Obama.” He continues:
Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.
Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans — those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents’ dismay? [...] Could any author of fiction that has not inspired a set of Happy Meal toys elicit such collegiate mourning today? Could a radical book that speaks to young people ever rise up again if — to rip-off LSD aficionado Timothy Leary — they’ve turned on the computer, tuned in the iPod and dropped out of serious literature?
Charles cites a recent survey that suggests two-thirds of American college students identify themselves as “middle-of-the-road” or “conservative.” Among the responses to Charles’s cry of anguish are online posts by Jenna Krajeski, at the New Yorker, and Scott McLemee, at Inside Higher Ed, who interviewed Charles about his essay:
“I was surprised and disappointed,” he told me, “by the number of respondents who felt I wanted college students to start reading the works of Abbie Hoffman and other ’60s and ’70s writers. Or that I was complaining that they weren’t reading more Serious Literature. That wasn’t really my point: I was actually disappointed that they weren’t reading more age-appropriate material: not stuff for middle schoolers and not stuff for adults, but all the kinds of crazy, wild, naïve, in-your-face, big-think literature that young people should be reading during that magical moment between high school and the first soul-crushing job.”
In preparing the Live Archive on the museum’s fifth floor, participating artists in “Younger Than Jesus” answered a survey question about books that had influenced them. Among the authors listed in their responses were Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Naomi Klein, W.G. Sebald, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Sello K. Duiker, Victor Pelevin, Audre Lorde, Roland Barthes, Parastou Forouhar, and Hamid Mossadegh. Now we’re curious about our audience: What “in-your-face, big-think literature” has shaped you?
Week three media round-up
April 24, 2009 | by YTJ | In the MediaHere’s a roundup of new “Younger Than Jesus” coverage. This site will return with new posts on Monday.
Artnet has posted three articles about the show (or its participating artists) to its online magazine. One is by Ben Davis, one is by Charlie Finch, and one, titled “Artnet Gossip,” is by “Rosetta Stone.”
Sharmila Devi, foreign correspondent for the Abu Dhabi–based English-language paper The National, files a report that focuses on participating artists from the Middle East, in particular Lebanese photographer Ziad Antar.
Meredith Bryan speaks with participating artists Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas, of AIDS-3D, for the New York Observer; Cynthia Daignault reviews the exhibition for Last Exit magazine.
For those of you who read Polish, Krzysztof Masiewicz has published a lengthy commentary, with many photos of artworks included in the show, at the website ArtBazaar.
Bloggers have responded to the show, too: Melissa Tuckman offers thoughts on Ryan Trecartin on her website Melitism; Charles Kessler discusses last Saturday’s panel with artists Joan Jonas, Mira Schor, and Carroll Dunham at his Left Bank Art Blog; and Jenni, who blogs at “Crazy,” has posted a review of the show.
