2009 April | Reports from The Generational: Younger Than Jesus

“Younger Than Jesus” reviews on Bloomberg.com and Saatchi Online

April 14, 2009 | YTJ

Katya Kazakina reviews “Younger Than Jesus” for Bloomberg.com. An excerpt:

Guilt-free voyeurism and exhibitionism are common threads among the works by 50 international artists born after 1976 (hence the title reference to Jesus, crucified at 33). No surprise here. This crowd grew up in an era where it’s perfectly acceptable to share the most intimate or mundane details of your life on the Internet.

There’s not much rebellion in “Younger Than Jesus.” This cyber-savvy generation instead remixes vast quantities of visual information from all kinds of sources to construct its own reality, all to spirited effect.

To read the rest, click here.

Doug McClemont discusses the exhibition at Saatchi Online, claiming that “YTJ” is “so well conceived and exciting overall that it makes a few recent biennials seem quaint in comparison.” He continues:

Curators Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni, and Laura Hoptman have successfully avoided most of the pitfalls of such an ambitious show of new work by young artists. The exhibition is balanced between sculptors, painters and video artists of different races and backgrounds without inclusiveness threatening to become a theme. The worldwide net cast for the exhibition brings dozens of worthy artists to New York for the first time. It is hip without feeling self-consciously trendy. The young artists, all under the age of 33 and dubbed Millennials by Hoptman, are experimenters who share a romantic fascination with the techniques and technologies of their parents’ generation. They approach obsolescence (cassette players, pixels, collage, turntables) as Hoptman told me, “not with irony but with great delight.” Some creations are perfectly polished, within other works the rough edges feature proudly. With nearly all the selections, one gets the sense that these youthful artists are themselves becoming parents. They’re bunch of Geppetos displaying little Pinocchios for the first time.

To read the rest, click here.

“Generation X,” digested

April 14, 2009 | YTJ

generationxshield

The Guardian publishes a delightful series of short articles under the heading “Digested Read,” in which authors boil down to their essence literary works both classic and new. Humor abounds. Last Saturday’s digested read was Douglas Coupland’s seminal Generation X. Here’s how the short version begins:

Back in the late 70s I flew up to Manitoba to see a total eclipse of the sun. It was like the lights went out. This book reads like they never came back on.

Fifteen years later, Dag, Claire and I are hanging out in California. Dag has just vandalised a car, Claire has been on a date with the yuppy from hell. We have been cheated out of our inheritance. Where is the effortless superiority we were told was our birthright? What do you see?

“We see apocalyptic images,” say Dag and Claire.

I do too, so we drive east. We’re out in the car playing a game of trying to shock the reader. We fail, so we wind up in the constipated town of Palm Springs near the Mojave desert. We head nowhere for a picnic and start telling each other stories.

To read the rest, click here.

Interview with Mark Essen at the ArtCat Zine

April 13, 2009 | YTJ

Mark Essen, Cowboy Ana, 2008, still image from 32-bit video game. Courtesy of the artist.

On April 9, Jessica Loudis published an interview with “Younger Than Jesus” participating artist Mark Essen. Here is an excerpt:

AC: While most of your games employ an 80s retro aesthetic, they also integrate explicitly contemporary features, such as the disembodied baby photos in Randy Balma. How do you see your work building on these older games?

ME: I think it’s important to let people know that these aren’t games from the 80s. They reference them in some ways, but they also make use of new experiences you just can’t have with the older hardware. One example, games now can run really high frame rates: film’s 24, video’s 30, and games can be 60 or more, if you want. For the last level of Randy Balma, I used these high frame rates to make every other frame a different color. When the screen flashes red and blue, the whole thing becomes purple. Maybe it’s just the video card tearing up, but the smoothness is something that wasn’t possible before. I like experimenting with the aesthetic in ways like that.

To read the rest, click here.

Peter Schjeldahl on “Younger Than Jesus” in the New Yorker

April 13, 2009 | YTJ

Ryan Trecartin, Re'Search Wait'S, 2009, still from a video.

New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl weighs in on “Younger Than Jesus” in this week’s issue of the magazine. He begins with a question: “How will upcoming artists respond to the down-going economy?” His answer, and then some:

They will make a point of entertaining themselves on the cheap, often in groups, and self-consciously, as members of an ingenuity- and drollery-loving generation that was weaned on the Internet and is game for the bust of the boom in which it was reared. So testifies “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” the New Museum’s arduously titled, newly instituted triennial, which presents work by fifty artists, from twenty-five countries, who have yet to blow out thirty-three candles on a birthday cake. The show is low-budget bubbly fun, for the most part—and noisy, what with all the videos and sound pieces. [ ... ] What is being done in new art? Whatever the hell anybody feels like doing.

Schjeldahl also addresses some of the broader questions raised by the show:

Unsurprisingly, “Younger Than Jesus” has dicey aspects. Start with the idea of sorting artists by age. One of the show’s crew of staff curators, Laura Hoptman—writing in a catalogue packed with sociological essays, including charts of trends in substance abuse and sexual behavior—admits that generational analysis is akin to reading horoscopes, which are “suspiciously nonspecific, although we long for them not to be.” In the abstract, every new generation is pretty much like the one that came before it: struggling Oedipally with its forebears, embracing the Zeitgeist, and otherwise reactivating stock patterns, meanwhile being fawned upon by marketers. If there is anything unique about today’s young, it may be a precocious alertness to how such rhetorical typecasting and economic targeting work.

To read the rest, in which Schjeldahl singles out artists Ryan Trecartin, Cyprien Gaillard, Luke Fowler, Tigran Khachatryan, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, and others, click here.

Luke Fowler profile in Scotland on Sunday

April 13, 2009 | YTJ

Luke Fowler, Pilgrimmage from Scattered Points, 2006, DVD, 45 minutes. Courtesy of the Modern Institute, Glasgow.

“Younger Than Jesus” artist Luke Fowler is profiled by journalist Moira Jeffrey in Scotland on Sunday on the occasion of his new short films Anna, Helen, David, and Lester being screened on BBC Channel 4’s “Three-Minute Wonder” slot beginning on April 20. From the text:

The relationships between people and the thorny question of what drives them emotionally and creatively have led to a remarkable series of films by Fowler about artistic and social experiments including unconventional portraits of the Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing, the idealistic English composer Cornelius Cardew and the elusive rock musician Xentos Jones.

The Channel 4 commission is part of Fowler’s 2008 Derek Jarman award. Co-sponsored by Film London, the award recognises work in the risk-taking spirit of the late avant-garde filmmaker. The judges, who included the artist Isaac Julien and the writer Ali Smith, singled out Fowler’s “vision and ambition”.

“The recognition for a body of work is quite incredible,” he says. “You are your own harshest critic and I didn’t think I’d ever really produced anything of significance. People in Glasgow have always been very reserved with feedback. They don’t want you to get a big head.”

Click here to read the rest of the article.

“Younger Than Jesus” on Artforum.com

April 12, 2009 | YTJ

Left: Artist Ryan Trecartin (left). Right: Whitney Biennial curator Francesco Bonami with "YTJ" cocurator Massimiliano Gioni. (Photos: Ryan McNamara)

Michael Wang has published a first-person report about attending the opening of “Younger Than Jesus” on Artforum.com’s Scene & Herd. Here’s how the piece begins:

I ARRIVED TUESDAY EVENING at the New Museum’s inaugural triennial, “The Generational: Younger than Jesus,” an appropriately Eastertide roundup of fifty vernal artists, to the sounds of stomping feet, shattering glass, and the twangs of Shahzad Ismaily’s noise performance—all part of artist Liz Glynn’s 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project. The hullabaloo marked the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths, which, according to Glynn’s accelerated history—her cardboard and hot-glued Eternal City had been “founded” the previous evening—was timed to occur precisely as the “Generational” opened its doors for the invite-only vernissage at 6:30 PM. I walked in just in time to see the fiberboard model of the first-century BC “Castra Praetoria” that I’d assembled earlier in the day, as a member of Glynn’s volunteer construction crew, battered to pieces by a couple of overeager adolescents.

To read the rest, click here. To see several dozen other photos from the “Younger Than Jesus” opening reception, visit Adi Shniderman’s website by clicking here.

“Younger Than Jesus” featured on WNYC radio

April 12, 2009 | YTJ

Last week WNYC’s Soterios Johnson spoke with Carolina Miranda, author of the blog C-Monster, about “Younger Than Jesus.” Click here to listen to the discussion and to see images and videos from the show.

Holland Cotter on “Younger Than Jesus” in the New York Times

April 10, 2009 | YTJ

Liz Glynn's Rome, just before its destruction. (Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)

New York Times art critic Holland Cotter weighs in on “Younger Than Jesus” with a thoughtful review. He manages to discuss many of the artworks in the exhibition, so here are a few excerpts that only discuss the show’s themes or offer general comments:

The show is large, buzzy, international in scope and age-specific. As the title implies, only artists 33 or younger were considered for inclusion, a restriction that could be ruled age-ist in a court of law, but it’s business as usual for a museum ever conscious of its clientele.

Big-statement surveys generate big expectations: they will tell us what and who is hot, important, exciting. What we get in this case is a serious, carefully considered show, but one that, apart from a few magnetic stand-alone entries … feels awfully sedate and buttoned-down for a youthfest. Kids R Us it ain’t, but that’s O.K.

[ ... ]

The show was put together very fast; in a year. The initial selection was done Facebook-style, with the curatorial groundwork outsourced to 150 art world experts — artists, critics and teachers — who submitted names of artists for consideration. Three New Museum curators — Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman — made the final cut of the 50 artists, with the critic Brian Sholis assigned to create a resource center to supplement the show. (It’s on the museum’s fifth floor and well worth a visit.)

Most international surveys are assembled this way. The positive difference in this case is that all the sources are credited by name, and the runner-up artists — nearly 500 — are included in a book called “Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory,” a kind of exhibition in print, and a terrific idea.

[ ... ]

“Younger Than Jesus” doesn’t have a comparable sense of unity, texture or lift. It is, despite its promise of freshness, business as usual. Its strengths are individual and episodic, with too much work, particularly photography, making too little impact. But my point is that beyond quibbles about choices of individual works, it raises the question of whether any mainstream museum show designed to be a running update exclusively on the work of young artists can rise above being a preapproved market survey. Removed from a larger generational context, can such a survey ever become a story, part of a larger history? (The same question applies to museum exhibitions that leave young artists out of the picture.) I’m asking. It’s a complicated subject. I don’t know the answer.

Click here to read the rest of Cotter’s commentary.

Jerry Saltz on “Younger Than Jesus” in New York magazine

April 10, 2009 | YTJ

muresanchoose Jerry Saltz’s review of “Younger Than Jesus” is online now at the New York magazine website. Here’s a teaser:

The New Museum’s flawed but tantalizing new triennial … [is] a big show, assembled by a big crowd: The New Museum asked 150 recognized artists, critics, and curators to recommend artists. They put together a list of 500 or so, and three in-house curators—Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni, and Laura Hoptman (a Millennial, Gen-Xer, and Boomer, respectively)—sifted through it to create the final building-filling show of 50 artists from 25 countries. A swell 564-page “artist directory,” showcasing the hundreds of artists who were seriously considered but didn’t make the final cut, accompanies “Younger” and makes this one of the most refreshingly transparent exhibitions ever organized.

[...]

The show suggests that ideas about culture, ethnography, anthropology, and sociology, YouTube and Facebook, and science and documentary film have all become more important than October magazine postmodernism. Sociology is the new black. None of these artists is trying to advance the teleological ball or invent new forms. They’re investigating the whole world, not just the art world. Their work is less about how we affect time and people than about how time and people affect us.

That’s a welcome switch from the super-self-conscious, highly educated, insular art of the recent past.

To read the rest of the review, click here. The New York website also offers a video tour of the show led by Saltz that includes footage of the destruction of participating artist Liz Glynn’s one-day reconstruction of Rome. Click here to watch it.

NPR “On the Media” segment about “digital natives”

April 9, 2009 | YTJ

In late January, John Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, was interviewed on NPR’s “On the Media” about the generation to which the artists in “Younger Than Jesus” belong. He calls them “digital natives,” and has a website devoted to his study of the group. Click this link to listen to the NPR segment, and this link to visit Palfrey’s Digital Natives website. Palfrey is also author of the book Born Digital, a copy of which is available for browsing in the Live Archive, the “Younger Than Jesus” resource center on the museum’s fifth floor.

Archive for April, 2009