This week’s Village Voice features a review of “Younger Than Jesus” by James Hannaham. Though Howard Halle, in TimeOut, culminated his piece with the admission that the show is “electric” (see below), Hannaham disagrees: “But you’d expect that a gathering of so much promising youth in one place would foster an electric feeling and a sense of possibility, to balance out the Second-Year-MFA-gallery-show blahs. Not exactly. As the show sprawls out over five floors, the visual noise gets pretty loud, that need for attention almost palpable. Yet the splashiest pieces, if initially arresting, are universally unintriguing (and only partially because they have so much company).” He prefers the quieter work in the show, and mentions Carolina Ceycedo, Ziad Antar, Tala Madani, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Chu Yun in that context. To read the rest of the review, click here.
Does the artwork in the show seem visually noisy? The artist Hannaham describes as the show’s “squeakiest wheel” is Ryan Trecartin, whom other reviewers have singled out for grasping something essential about this generation, saturated as it is with technology and flexible in its understanding of the construction of sexuality and gender. Can those points get lost in their presentation? Do the “quieter” artists in the exhibition stand out for you, too? Weigh in by clicking on the comment link below or dropping an e-mail to the address in the right-hand column.
Most of my friends and colleagues in NYC only say Trecartin’s piece made an impression. The rest of the show wasn’t weird enough. I think a growing conscience is forming that the art world wants to see art that really misshapes their perceptions of reality, and that uses the internet for breakneck cross-referencing at every point of the decision making process. Trecartin and his group of artists are the only ones who apparently know how to do this.
Thanks, Steve, for weighing in. Can you think of other artists who are making work that does what you’re asking–that distorts perceptions of reality and avails itself of the Internet from start to finish? One can also argue that precisely because Internet cross-referencing is increasingly “normal,” art practices that foster a contemplative space _apart_ from hyperlinked network life have particular value. Perhaps a painter like Julian Jakub Ziolkowski or a photographer like LaToya Ruby Frazier, precisely because their practices benefit from engagement across the “dilating swells of time” (to borrow an art-historian friend’s phrase), are on the opposite end of the spectrum from Trecartin & Co.