Reports from "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus"

Visitor suggestions for the “Live Archive” timeline

April 23, 2009 | by YTJ | Exhibition Information

The Live Archive. Photo by Benoit Palley.

The Live Archive is a resource center presented on the fifth floor of the New Museum in conjunction with “Younger Than Jesus.” One of its features is a selective historical timeline—the multicolored grid seen in the photo at right—that lists historical and cultural events from 1976 to 2009. The participating artists selected some of these for the importance the events had in their own lives. The timeline also includes a suggestion box in which visitors can write in events or cultural creations of importance to them. Here is a sampling of the suggestions submitted during the exhibition’s first two weeks.

December 15, 1989 – Manuel Noriega was given the title chief executive officer of the Panamanian government, and he declared a state of war with the United States. Two days later, US President George Bush ordered troops to Panama. Noriega took refuge in the Vatican nunciature (embassy) in Panama, until he surrendered on January 3, 1990, and was transpored to Miami, where he was arraigned on criminal charges.

January 22, 2008 – Australian actor Heath Ledger is found dead in his apartment in New York; it was later declared that he died from an accidental overdose of a mixture of prescription drugs.

July 12, 1998 – France defeats Brazil 3-0 in the final at Saint-Denis, near Paris, to win the 16th World Cup.

January 17, 1995 – A large-scale earthquake, measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale, hits the southern part of Hyogo prefecture in Japan. It causes an estimated 6,400 deaths, injured approximately 40,000 people, displaced 300,000 people from their homes. The city that suffers the worst damage is nearby Kobe.

November 5, 1982 – Jacques Tati, a French filmmaker and actor who gained renown for his comic films, several of which he starred in as Monsieur Hulot, dies.

April 30, 1997 – Actress Ellen DeGeneres reveals she is gay on the television show Oprah. On the same day, ABC airs “The Puppy Episode” of her television show Ellen, in which the main character Ellen Morgan realizes she is gay and comes out.

July 4, 1976 – The United States celebrates its bicentennial with festivities across the country.

September 20, 1985 – EMI releases singer Kate Bush’s album Hounds of Love in the United Kingdom. It is Bush’s fifth studio album and the second to reach No. 1 on the charts.

Be sure to stop by the fifth-floor Live Archive to see if the events of great importance in your own life are on our timeline. If not, please place them in the suggestion box and check back here.

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Last Chance to see “YTJ” artist Matt Keegan’s New York solo show

April 22, 2009 | by YTJ | "YTJ" Artists Exhibiting Elsewhere

Installation view, D'Amelio Terras, 2009.

“Younger Than Jesus” artist Matt Keegan has a solo exhibition on view in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, and this weekend is your last chance to catch it. Titled “New Windows,” the show is on view at D’Amelio Terras through Saturday, April 25. For more information, click here to visit the gallery website and click here to read a review by Sarah Douglas published on Artinfo.com.

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Is hipsterdom the “dead end” of western civilization?

April 21, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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Young People, Art, and Today’s Economy

April 20, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and Events

1213-biz-webcharts

Art-market speculation has saturated art-world discourse for at least the last eighteen months, with “When will the bubble burst?” worrying giving way to “What do we do now?” strategizing. How do changing economic conditions effect the young? According to a report published last December in the New York Times, younger job-seekers have it worse: “The recession provides a double whammy for the job prospects of those trying to establish themselves. There are fewer jobs to go around, and older Americans who can do so are either delaying retirement or seeking to return to the work force.” According to another story in the same paper, even the relatively well-to-do are feeling the pinch: “It is impossible to quantify how many affluent parents have trimmed allowances in recent months — or how many of their offspring, in turn, have sought either formal employment or odd jobs. But interviews with dozens of teenagers, parents, educators and employers suggest that many youngsters from well-to-do families seem to have found a new work ethic as the economic crisis that has jeopardized their parents’ jobs and investments has also led to less spending money for Saturday night movies or binges at Abercrombie & Fitch.”

The questions this raises, of course, have to do not only with immediate prospects, but with long-term effects. So noted Kate Zernike in an article published last month:

So what of the youth shaped by what some are already calling the Great Recession? … Will they marry younger, be satisfied with stable but less exciting jobs? Will their children mock them for reusing tea bags and counting pennies as if this paycheck were the last? At the very least, they will reckon with tremendous instability, just as their Depression forebears did.

“The ’30s challenged the whole idea of the American dream, the idea of open economic possibilities,” said Morris Dickstein, an English professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, whose cultural history of the Depression will be published in September. “The version you get of that today is the loss of confidence on the part of both parent and children that life in the next generation will inevitably be better.”

How today’s young will be affected 10, 20 or 40 years on will depend on many things — the children of the Depression were shaped as much by the war that followed. The recession generation will include those born into it, at the youngest end, and those emerging out of college and high school into a jobless marketplace, at the oldest. If history is any guide, what will matter most is where they are on the continuum.

“There is no simple cause-and-effect relationship in how economic adversity pushed a generation into any one kind of behavior,” said Neil Howe, who with his longtime co-author, William Strauss, is credited with naming today’s 20-somethings the millennials. “The impact depends on the context and the mood of the time and how children understand the spirit of the times.”

We’re curious about how this affects art-making. Will young artists have to give up their studios and work from home? Will there be a decline in big-budget art films and sculptures that require production teams? Will there be a concomitant rise in drawings and small-scale painting? Will artists increasingly turn to using found (i.e., free) objects in their work? How do you see the economy changing your practice? To paraphrase Morris Dickstein’s quote above, how will it affect your vision of art’s possibilities?

UPDATE, 2:15 PM: Last week, the New York Times‘ ArtsBeat blog posed a similar question, and many responses have been filed. Click here to read them and here to read arts journalist András Szántó’s comments at the website Art World Salon.

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Exhibitions by “YTJ” artists in Minneapolis, New York, Malmö, and Rotterdam

April 20, 2009 | by YTJ | "YTJ" Artists Exhibiting Elsewhere

“Younger Than Jesus” participating artists Ryan Gander, Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, Haris Epaminonda, and Patricia Esquivias all have solo exhibitions on view at the moment.

Ryan Gander’s traveling survey exhibition “Heralded as the New Black” is on view from March 21 through May 24 at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. For more information about the show, click here.

Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch have just opened new exhibition featuring a large-scale installation and a number of sculptures at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York. The show is on view from April 11 through May 16. For more information, click here.

The Berlin-based artist Haris Epaminonda has a solo exhibition at the Malmö Konsthall in Malmö, Sweden. It opened on April 2 and remains on view through May 10. For more information, click here.

The Madrid-based artist Patricia Esquivias has a solo exhibition at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The show, titled “Reads like the Paper, 2005–2009,” is on view from April 4 through May 30. More information can be found by clicking here.

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Brian Sholis’s introduction to “Redefining Generations: Then and Now”

April 18, 2009 | by YTJ | "YTJ" Events

Here is part of the text Brian Sholis read to introduce the topic of “Redefining Generations: Then and Now,” a panel discussion with artists Mira Schor, Joan Jonas, and Carroll Dunham. Did you attend the event? Please feel free to discuss the themes outlined below, or offer your impressions of the panel. Use the comment link at the bottom of this post or the e-mail link in the right-hand column.

Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s essay “The Concept of the Generation,” which is reprinted in the “Younger Than Jesus” exhibition catalogue, has informed much subsequent sociological thinking about generations. I decided to organize today’s panel in part because Ortega wrote this: “Generations are born one of another in such a way that the new generation is immediately faced with the forms which the previous generation gave to existence. Life, then, for each generation, is a task in two dimensions, one of which consists in the reception, through the agency of the previous generation, of what has had life already, e.g., ideas, values, institutions, and so on, while the other is the liberation of the creative genius inherent in the generation concerned.”

I’d like to suggest that this exhibition’s “Live Archive,” a resource center on the fifth floor, contains information about some of what the Millennial Generation has to “received,” in Ortega’s sense, and that the artworks in the museum’s galleries demonstrate whether or not, in processing their given cultural and historical material, these young artists have “liberated their creative genius.” I leave it to each of you to decide to what extent that has happened. I’d also like to suggest that the artworks made over the past few decades by today’s three panelists—Joan Jonas, Mira Schor, and Carroll Dunham—and by their peers are very much a part of that legacy. An important phrase in the Ortega quote is “through the agency of the previous generation”: In this older generation’s multiple roles—not only creative example, but also teacher, writer, friend—their agency helps shape the art created today. What have the “Younger Than Jesus” artists taken up from previous generations and what have they rejected? Again, that’s for everyone here to determine after spending time with the show. What may be more difficult to discern from the exhibition itself is how the idea of “the generation” manifests itself throughout an artist’s career. This no-doubt shifting understanding is one of the key themes I hope to draw out in the conversation to come. But before I bring our panelists up I’d like to mention a few other issues that may also be relevant to the discussion. One benefit of an exhibition like this is that it raises more questions than it answers.

The first, and largest, question is whether the generational conceit underpinning “Younger Than Jesus” is useful or salient today. With our ever-increasing awareness of the very different particularities of others’ experiences—even in the face of the West’s powerful ability to project its own values into other corners of the globe—can any international group of artists be said to represent a “generational sensibility”? To take an example from the juxtaposition of two artworks upstairs, what unites an artist like Cory Arcangel and an artist like Chu Yun? What meaningful experiences do they share? It’s one thing for us to ask such questions. What might they suggest as answers?

Secondly, and in a related vein, any discussion of artistic generations and artistic succession necessarily implies related questions about art-historical categorization and periodization. How do the innumerable experiences and influences that effect artists in complex ways get boiled down into the comprehensible narratives of art history? What role do museums play in this process? What is gained and what is lost when artists are slotted into medium-specific categories or into chronologically bounded eras?

Lastly, many argue that the contours of a generation are visible only in the fullness of time, and that any attempt to make sense of that shape while it is still being formed entails unavoidable distortions. If this generation is still being formed—and no one I found while doing research for the exhibition catalogue claimed the door has closed on it—what does someone born in 1979 have in common with someone born in 1989, in 1999, or, for that matter, in 2009? It’s unlikely we will know until, say, 2039.

In the meantime, I have the great pleasure of introducing three talented artists whose own experiences, and the insight they have gained from them, will be the fodder for this afternoon’s conversation…

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

April 17, 2009 | by YTJ | "YTJ" Artists Exhibiting Elsewhere

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.

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

April 17, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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?

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Joseph Epstein on the “culture of celebrity”

April 17, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and Events

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?

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

April 16, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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