2009 April | Reports from The Generational: Younger Than Jesus

Archive for April, 2009

Last Chance to see “YTJ” artist Elad Lassry’s New York solo show

April 17, 2009 | YTJ

Still from Untitled (Agon), 2007, Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery.

Los Angeles–based artist Elad Lassry presents photographs in “Younger Than Jesus.” His exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, on view through April 19, presents three films. Here’s the Whitney’s description of the show:

Elad Lassry: Three Films is the first New York museum exhibition of this Los Angeles based artist who produces carefully crafted images in both photography and film. While often drawing on traditional photographic conventions, Lassry focuses his attention on the surfaces and histories of the objects and individuals he captures, asking the viewer to reassess even the most quotidian images. The three films in this exhibition draw upon the legacy of Structuralist film to examine and interpret modes of image production. Untitled (2008) reconstructs a series of 1970s photographs illustrating perception, using the film camera to shift the focus of the image from the mechanics of vision to the subjectivity of the individuals in the photo. Untitled (Agon) (2007) records two dancers performing the pas de deux from George Balanchine’s 1957 ballet Agon. Using a diagram from Doris Humphrey’s 1958 book The Art of Making Dances to determine the camera’s positions, Lassry examines the way cultural production is framed and transformed through different methods of representation. Finally, Zebra and Woman (2007) vacillates between two disparate subjects to both expose a synchronicity between forms and interrogate the construction of the image within the film frame.

For further reading, check out the blog Carefully Aimed Darts, which has an extended post about the exhibition.

“Younger Than Jesus” reviewed on VillageVoice.com and in the Financial Times

April 17, 2009 | YTJ

Installation view of Josh Smith's work in "Younger Than Jesus"

Two more reviews of “Younger Than Jesus” have come to our attention, and once again they highlight the way this exhibition divides critical opinion. The first appears on VillageVoice.com as part of the weekly Bones’ Beat column. The author of this blog happens to know that the pseudonymous Bones is a member of the Millennial Generation, which seems useful information to share in the context of the exhibition review. Here are some of its salient points:

The organic, permissive vibe, projecting a core idea that the Museum is listening to the young, makes Younger Than Jesus feel like a laid-back parent, a cool dad. The work and the way it’s put together is emphatically inconclusive, comfortable with the fruit of its own sophistication and conviction while entirely lacking in lessons or spittle-spattering theoretical bluster. One wanders around, basically, eyeing things and things’ wall-texts, then wandering off. The cadence of the work is unflirtatious and lacking in hustle, either in the football-team or the corner-boy sense. Stakes seem low, and rank narcissism–a unifying characteristic of young artistic practice–is deflected in a way that will shock anyone who’s weathered the barely-legal photogenic mania in the preening New York art scene of the last five years.

Here, Bones turns Howard Halle’s complaint about “low stakes” into a compliment. Bones goes on to note that there is an absence of “oppression” in the show, and suggests that “these young artists are not raging, freaking out or self-destructing, because there’s no cell they can’t get out of.” Does that accord with your own experience of the show? We’d love to hear, either via the comments section or by e-mail (use the address in the right-hand column). To read the rest of Bones’ Beat, click here.

In the meantime, be sure to read this dissenting opinion from Ariella Budick, published in the Financial Times. Her lede (journalism-speak for opening paragraph or opening gambit) is unequivocal:

This survey of artists under 33 puts its finger to the pulse of the youngest generation and finds it very faint indeed. The show’s overwhelming dreariness suggests that, despite the messianic title, the coming of art’s saviours is farther off than ever.

These are the Millennials, born since 1976 and natives of the digital nation. You might expect them to be gazing forwards but, with a few exceptions, they are either afflicted with nostalgia or destitute of fresh ideas. They seem to have taken to heart the environmentalists’ dictum: recycle, recycle, recycle.

Optimists, of course, could turn the last statement around by emphasizing how such rampant recycling of historical materials—artistic or otherwise—signifies a new emphasis in cultural reception and production. Think “remix” instead of “recycle.” Budick goes on to chastize the curators by suggesting they have “kept the overall quality [of the exhibition] extremely low.” Yet despite such unfairly sweeping statements, she does offer the following morsel for thought at the end of her review:

The show also draws a different line that seems arbitrary: the one between generations. To group art by the age of its makers is to imply that the young have a special relationship with innovation, that as a group only they can produce a ferment of fresh ideas, unburdened by habit or received wisdom. In fact, what you get is little more than a student show, heavy with influence and anxiety. The artists may feel like they are carving out a freewheeling space in a culture rigidified by commerce. But the museum has simply trapped them in a marketing concept.

To read the full review, click here. Of course, the largest questions raised by the exhibition concern periodization and generational coherence. Are we now at a historical moment in which assigning broad characteristics or traits to a given age cohort—say, everyone born between 1976 and 1986—is no longer possible? Now that media, technology, and relatively inexpensive travel brings the lifestyles, ethics, and cultural folkways of so many people of such different backgrounds into view, can we subsume such differences under a cross-cultural generational rubric? Are such master narratives worthwhile? Is the network of artists, dealers, curators, critics, and institutions a small enough subset of world cultural production to form a kind of “control group” that makes such generalizations possible? What do you think?

Joseph Epstein on the “culture of celebrity”

April 17, 2009 | YTJ

paparazzi-5 Joseph Epstein, a talented essayist, former American Scholar editor, and longtime professor at Northwestern University, published in the Weekly Standard in late 2005 a consideration of what he terms the “culture of celebrity.” Here is the opening passage:

CELEBRITY AT THIS MOMENT IN America is epidemic, and it’s spreading fast, sometimes seeming as if nearly everyone has got it. Television provides celebrity dance contests, celebrities take part in reality shows, perfumes carry the names not merely of designers but of actors and singers. Without celebrities, whole sections of the New York Times and the Washington Post would have to close down. So pervasive has celebrity become in contemporary American life that one now begins to hear a good deal about a phenomenon known as the Culture of Celebrity.

The word “culture” no longer, I suspect, stands in most people’s minds for that whole congeries of institutions, relations, kinship patterns, linguistic forms, and the rest for which the early anthropologists meant it to stand. Words, unlike disciplined soldiers, refuse to remain in place and take orders. They insist on being unruly, and slither and slide around, picking up all sorts of slippery and even goofy meanings. An icon, as we shall see, doesn’t stay a small picture of a religious personage but usually turns out nowadays to be someone with spectacular grosses. “The language,” as Flaubert once protested in his attempt to tell his mistress Louise Colet how much he loved her, “is inept.”

Today, when people glibly refer to “the corporate culture,” “the culture of poverty,” “the culture of journalism,” “the culture of the intelligence community”–and “community” has, of course, itself become another of those hopelessly baggy-pants words, so that one hears talk even of “the homeless community”–what I think is meant by “culture” is the general emotional atmosphere and institutional character surrounding the word to which “culture” is attached. Thus, corporate culture is thought to breed selfishness practiced at the Machiavellian level; the culture of poverty, hopelessness and despair; the culture of journalism, a taste for the sensational combined with a short attention span; the culture of the intelligence community, covering-one’s-own-behind viperishness; and so on. Culture used in this way is also brought in to explain unpleasant or at least dreary behavior. “The culture of NASA has to be changed,” is a sample of its current usage. The comedian Flip Wilson, after saying something outrageous, would revert to the refrain line, “The debbil made me do it.” So, today, when admitting to unethical or otherwise wretched behavior, people often say, “The culture made me do it.”

As for “celebrity,” the standard definition is no longer the dictionary one but rather closer to the one that Daniel Boorstin gave in his book The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream: “The celebrity,” Boorstin wrote, “is a person who is well-known for his well-knownness,” which is improved in its frequently misquoted form as “a celebrity is someone famous for being famous.” The other standard quotation on this subject is Andy Warhol’s “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes,” which also frequently turns up in an improved misquotation as “everyone will have his fifteen minutes of fame.”

But to say that a celebrity is someone well-known for being well-known, though clever enough, doesn’t quite cover it. Not that there is a shortage of such people who seem to be known only for their well-knownness.

Click here to read the rest. Epstein goes on to make a distinction between fame and celebrity, with the former “based on true achievement.” The latter, Epstein argues, has “altered intellectual life.” Do you agree? Do you feel that the “culture of celebrity” has in some way changed the shape of the art world? If so, will that change be effected by our new economic climate? Does the “culture of celebrity” have a greater effect on young artists than old?

James Hannaham on “Younger Than Jesus” in the Village Voice

April 16, 2009 | YTJ

voicecover 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.

Howard Halle on “Younger Than Jesus” in TONY

April 16, 2009 | YTJ

tonylogo Howard Halle, longtime editor at TimeOut New York, has a review of “Younger Than Jesus” in this week’s issue. Perhaps due to lack of space, he discusses the show’s themes and what the exhibition represents in the art world more than the work of specific artists, and the points he makes are well worth thinking about.

There is the brutally reductive logic of the exhibit’s organizing principle: That no one is older than 33. If that makes “The Generational” seem a bit like Logan’s Run, that’s the point. It’s an admission that when people confuse innovation with youth, it’s not because of any factual symmetry, but because they want their emerging artists pink-cheeked and easy on the eyes. For a cattle call like this one, veal is preferable to beef.

Doubtless the show’s organizers—Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman—would argue a more complicated point: The artists, by virtue of being born around 1980, share a sensibility uniquely shaped by the events and technologies they grew up with. That they may, but they also seem to have all read the same art-historical textbooks, for the works here, by and large, are much too indebted to the strategies of the past four decades. Still, if no one is thinking outside of the box, consider the cardboard: The exhibition begins with a timeline, kicking off in 1976, in which milestones the artists consider important are highlighted in black. Among these are the first NBA title the Chicago Bulls won with Michael Jordan, and the suicide of Kurt Cobain. With a history like that, the stakes, art-wise, aren’t bound to be very high.

To read the rest of Halle’s review, at the end of which he concedes that despite his reservations the show “crackles with … electricity,” click here. What do you think of these points? Does the art world too often “confuse innovation with youth”? Does the exhibition seem to have low stakes, art-wise? Voice your opinion by clicking the comment link below or dropping an e-mail to the address in the right-hand column.

SMAC video interview with “YTJ” curators and artists

April 16, 2009 | YTJ

Scribe Media Art Culture, a web TV channel, has published on its website a video that includes interviews with “Younger Than Jesus” exhibition cocurators Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman as well as participating artist Cory Arcangel. The video is embedded below; to read Maren Miller’s additional commentary, click here.

“The Jesus of Generation OMG” on imomus

April 15, 2009 | YTJ

The artist/musician/writer Momus has published a post about “Younger Than Jesus” in general, and about participating artist Ryan Trecartin in particular, on imomus, his blog. Here is part of his description of Trecartin’s work:

I get a camp aggression towards normality from the films — all the characters seem exaggeratedly obnoxious, the settings ugly, heightened from normality into a kind of farce-normality. And yet the pushing-into-garishness of normal suburban ugliness (which happens also formally, on the level of edits and video effects and dialogue) actually becomes weirdly compelling, and suggests a utopia of artificiality, a kind of peacockery of ugliness which becomes a new sort of beauty. I don’t think you could really ask anything more of a 28 year-old artist.

To read the rest, and to watch several embedded YouTube videos, click here.

Flavorwire interviews “YTJ” cocurator Massimiliano Gioni

April 15, 2009 | YTJ

Flavorwire, the site offering “cultural news and critique from Flavorpill,” has published an interview with “Younger Than Jesus” cocurator. Here is an excerpt:

FW: Did you encounter anything unexpected about this generation when you were putting together the show?

MG: Well, there were a lot of things. When you look at young artists you expect them to be messy and confusing. I think that’s a patronizing assumption that many people who are older than young artists make. We weren’t coming across artists who were making messy, chaotic work. There are a lot of artists in the exhibition who are making very finished, very beautiful work. There is also very “mature” work — whatever that means. I think that these were the biggest surprises and we were very thankful that our patronizing assumptions were questioned and ultimately criticized by the work itself. As you go through the show there are many recurring themes and many more than we expected when we started….

To read the rest, click here.