In The Media | Reports from The Generational: Younger Than Jesus

Posts in the ‘In the Media’ Category

Week three media round-up

April 24, 2009 | YTJ

Here’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.

Is hipsterdom the “dead end” of western civilization?

April 21, 2009 | YTJ

Illustration courtesy Adbusters.

Daniel Haddow claimed as much last summer in the countercultural magazine Adbusters. His article has sparked more than 4,000 online comments, perhaps a record for that small-circulation title. Its thesis seems less provocative than perfectly pitched to garner responses from its self-conscious and digitally connected subjects. Here are a few excerpts:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

[...]

The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning. Ten years ago, a man wearing a plain V-neck tee and drinking a Pabst would never be accused of being a trend-follower. But in 2008, such things have become shameless clichés of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class.

[...]

With nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of “hipsterdom” is left wide open for attack. And yet, it is this ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global phenomenon that is set to consume the very core of Western counterculture. Most critics make a point of attacking the hipster’s lack of individuality, but it is this stubborn obfuscation that distinguishes them from their predecessors, while allowing hipsterdom to easily blend in and mutate other social movements, sub-cultures and lifestyles.

What is particularly interesting is the way the article recapitulates arguments about the “end of art,” advanced by philosopher-critic Arthur Danto in 1984, among others. “But Danto didn’t mean that artists were no longer making art; rather, he was referring to the end of art history,” reports the introduction to a 2005 interview with Danto in The Nation, where he serves as art critic. “Throughout much of this history, artists–from Hellenistic sculptors in ancient Greece to academic realist painters of nineteenth-century France–sought to realistically depict the natural world. But with the advent of Modernism, realism devolved in a rapid denouement–brush strokes became visible and bold, color was expressive rather than authentic and the figure became increasingly sketchy and crude until nothing remained but pure abstraction. By the 1980s, however, this linear progression came to an abrupt end as the art world entered a new, pluralistic era. This era was not defined by a dominant school or movement but was characterized by its lack thereof.” In the same way, Haddow, in his Adbusters article, claims, “An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it.” Do you agree? Post a comment via the link below or submit an e-mail via the address in the right-hand column.

“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?

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.

“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.

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.