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

Posts in the ‘In the Media’ Category

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.

“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.

“Younger Than Jesus” in the New York Press

April 9, 2009 | YTJ

A view of Liz Glynn's performance taken by Flickr user Haiku575.

Journalist Justin Richards writes about “Younger Than Jesus” in the New York Press. “What Would Jesus Show?” includes quotes from curator Massimiliano Gioni and participating artists Mark Essen and LaToya Ruby Frazier. In between, Richards offers this:

But really, the point of Younger than Jesus is to open-source the description of Gen-Y artists. My approach to the problem of generational branding is to discuss the timing of these artists mainly in terms of practical, unambiguous factors that nonetheless define their work. Two artists I spoke to about their appearance in this exhibition not only wouldn’t have but couldn’t have made the art that they do 20 years ago.

To read the whole story, click here.

Profile of Dineo Seshee Bopape

April 6, 2009 | YTJ

adayinthelife Kathleen Massara profiles South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape on the eve of her participation in the New Museum’s “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus.” The piece opens like this:

In her solo exhibition at the Thami Mnyele Foundation in Amsterdam last year, South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape shoved a gray bicycle into a cracked doorway; hanging from the back of the bicycle frame was a bouquet of roses and baby’s breath, as well as a broken red umbrella. A sign reading “it’s a celebration bitches” was duct-taped to the front of the bicycle, a reference to a skit on the Dave Chappelle Show. Bopape knows how to tell a joke. But are we ready to get it?

To read the rest of the piece, click here. Bopape keeps a blog with photographs of her own work, which you can visit by clicking here. The photograph illustrating this post is from a post on that blog titled “grassgreen/sky blue.”

Interview with AIDS-3D

April 6, 2009 | YTJ

AIDS-3D, OMG Obelisk, 2007. Courtesy of the artists.

Last month Interview magazine posted an interview with “Younger Than Jesus” artists AIDS-3D (Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas) on its website. Keller discusses the duo’s participation in the New Museum survey. Here is an excerpt:

AG: You’re showing the OMG Obelisk. I thought that only existed as a .gif file. I thought most of your work did.

DK: No it was an installation, and it will be re-staged there, although yes, it’s mostly known in its animated .gif form. We installed it at the Rundgang at UDK in Berlin in the summer of 2007, but it was highly ephemeral. It was made with duct tape, and the fire lasted for only a few minutes at a time.

AG: Do you prefer it in one way or another?

DK: I think that it’s essential that the piece has two existences. I like that the piece has a digital , phenomenonal existence and then a sorta downloaded, shittier real form. That it can be translated.

To read the rest, click here. AIDS-3D will also have an exhibition at the Lower East Side project venue Three’s Company that is on view from April 6 to May 4. For more information on the show, click here.

“Younger Than Jesus” Featured in El País

April 3, 2009 | YTJ

In today’s El País, Irene Serrano publishes “Más Jóvenes que Jesús,” an article about “Younger Than Jesus” and the millennial generation. (Note: the article is in Spanish.)

Spread from El País, April 3, 2009.

Mark Essen profile in New York magazine

March 31, 2009 | YTJ

Mark Essen (Photo: David Sherry for New York magazine)

This week’s New York magazine includes a one-page profile of twenty-two-year-old Mark Essen, the youngest artist included in “Younger Than Jesus.” The piece begins:

Upon graduating from Bard College last May, Mark Essen and his friends planned to buy cheap, damaged bikes on the Hudson Valley Craigslist, fix them up, then sell them in Manhattan. But they were too lazy to move them down to the city. Months later, after he was laid off from a tech job, Essen moved back in with his parents in Los Angeles, where he listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin. Since returning to New York, he’s been living out of his backpack, camped on friends’ couches.

Sounds like your typical slacker’s postcollegiate year, except for one thing: At 22, Essen is about to erupt on the art scene. He is the youngest of the 50 artists in the New Museum’s “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” the international exhibition exclusively showcasing the work of artists 33 and under.

To read the rest, click here.