Reports from "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus"

Howard Halle on “Younger Than Jesus” in TONY

April 16, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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SMAC video interview with “YTJ” curators and artists

April 16, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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“The Jesus of Generation OMG” on imomus

April 15, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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Metropolis M interviews “Younger Than Jesus” artist Tala Madani

April 15, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and Events

Tala Madani, Fork in Tattoo, 2006.

Maxine Kopsa has interviewed “Younger Than Jesus” participating artist Tala Madani, and the results have been published online at the website of Dutch art magazine Metropolis M. Kopsa’s first question is direct:

Maxine Kopsa: Are you dangerous?

Tala Madani: ‘No I’m very nice. I think it’s important to push one’s own limits and that of societies. I don’t believe in simple provocation, this could get boring very soon, but it’s important to challenge perceptions, especially today where conservatism reigns everywhere. Compared to the 70s and 80s I think the 21st century hasn’t had a good start, for instance in music and television both in America and Britain there’s been a regression toward complacency.’

To read the rest, click here.

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Flavorwire interviews “YTJ” cocurator Massimiliano Gioni

April 15, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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VMAN interviews “YTJ” artist Elad Lassry

April 14, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and Events

VMAN has published an interview with “Younger Than Jesus” participating artist Elad Lassry. In it, he discusses the films on view at the Whitney Museum in New York, the photographs included in “YTJ,” and his upcoming solo presentation at the Liste art fair in Basel, Switzerland. To read the interview, click here.

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

April 14, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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“Generation X,” digested

April 14, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and Events

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.

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Interview with Mark Essen at the ArtCat Zine

April 13, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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

April 13, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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