Reports from "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus"

Luke Fowler profile in Scotland on Sunday

April 13, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and Events

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.

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“Younger Than Jesus” on Artforum.com

April 12, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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“Younger Than Jesus” featured on WNYC radio

April 12, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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

April 10, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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

April 10, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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

April 9, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and Events

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.

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Two events of related interest

April 9, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and Events

While “Younger Than Jesus” offers a full slate of public programs, other events in the city invariably touch on issues related to the exhibition’s themes. Two forthcoming later this month seem particularly relevant.

The first is a conversation on Saturday, April 11, between Mark Greif, Jace Clayton (a.k.a. dj/Rupture), Christian Lorentzen, and others on the subject “What Was the Hipster?” The event was organized by the editors of the magazine n+1 in collaboration with the New School, which will play host to the discussion. Here is the description:

Who was the turn-of-the-century hipster? Who is free enough of the hipster taint to write the hipster’s history without contempt or nostalgia? Why do we declare the hipster moment over—that, in fact, it had ended by 2003—when the hipster’s “global brand” has just reached its apotheosis?

A panel of n+1 writers invites n+1 subscribers and the public to join a collective investigation. Short presentations will be followed by audience debate, comment, and recollection, to be transcribed and published in book form this year.

Note: n+1 editor at large Marco Roth is participating in “Who Are Our Peers?” as part of “Younger Than Jesus.”

The other event is organized by the editors of Bookforum magazine in collaboration with the New York Public Library, which will play host to the discussion. “The Death of Boom Culture?” features Walter Benn Michaels, David Simon (creator of The Wire), Susan Straight, and Dale Peck. Subtitled “Fiction in the Age of Inequality,” here is the event’s publicity description:

Now that markets have proven a flawed index of our economic well being, our cultural life needs to look beyond the pat certainties of laissez faire ideology. Among the ills afflicting the American novel at the height of boom culture, Walter Benn Michaels argues, was a curatorial obsession with past oppressions—from slavery to the Holocaust to memoir-style accounts of family abuse. Writers should now be asking less about what it meant to oppose the Holocaust, he contends, and more about what it means to support free trade.

If any “Younger Than Jesus” visitors also attend one of these events, please send in a report!

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“Younger Than Jesus” in the New York Press

April 9, 2009 | by YTJ | In the Media

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.

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“Younger Than Jesus”: Let the Feedback Begin

April 8, 2009 | by YTJ | Exhibition Information

Photo of works by Chu Yun (foreground) and Cory Arcangel (background) in "Younger Than Jesus." From Flickr user clementine gallot.

Yesterday morning members of the press arrived at the New Museum to survey “Younger Than Jesus.” Last night crowds packed into the galleries for the exhibition’s opening reception. Today the exhibition opens to the public. Let the feedback begin! The exhibition’s curators, the participating artists, and the museum staff have been working on the show for a long time; we’re eager to know what the public thinks. We’ll try to collect some of this commentary here on the “YTJ” blog, and we’ll look across multiple media. To that end:

Jonathan T.D. Neil, who works at the Drawing Center and is a contributing editor at Art Review, tweeted his progress through the show yesterday morning, wondering aloud what it means to find “mature” work in a show of young artists. (He also likes Tauba Auerbach’s contribution.) Artnet reports that BLT Gallery, across the street from the museum, is hosting an exhibition, titled “Wiser Than God,” that features artists 83 and older. A woman who goes by the name Dream Sequins photo-blogged her way through the galleries yesterday. And, of course, the first batch of photos from exhibition visitors have hit Flickr.

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A generational divide in Cambodia; protesters use new technology in Moldova

April 8, 2009 | by YTJ | Related Reading, Media, and Events

In the last two days, the New York Times has published articles that touch on generational divides in other parts of the world: Cambodia and Moldova. In yesterday’s paper, “Pain of Khmer Rouge Era Lost on Cambodian Youth,” by Seth Mydans, begins:

Thirty years after the killing stopped, Cambodia suffers from a particularly painful generation gap — between those who survived the brutal rule of the Communist Khmer Rouge and their children, who know very little about it.“I used to tell my children the stories, but they only believed a tiny bit, like nothing,” said Ty Leap, 52, who sells noodles and fruit drinks from a roadside stall. “I don’t like it, but what can you do? It really is unbelievable that those things happened.”

For nearly four years, from 1975 to 1979, the Communist Khmer Rouge caused the deaths of 1.7 million people from overwork, starvation and disease as well as torture and execution as they attempted to construct a peasant utopia.

Almost everyone here of a certain age has stories to tell of terror, abuse, hunger and the loss of family members.

“Some older people get so upset at their children for not believing that they say ‘I wish the Khmer Rouge time would happen again; then you’d believe it,”’ Mr. Ty Leap said.

Protesters storm the presidential building in Moldova (Photo: Vadim Denisov/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images)

In today’s paper, a story reporting on anti-communist protests in Moldova emphasizes the protesters’ use of text messages and Twitter to spontaneously mobilize. Ellen Barry, reporting from Moscow, notes:

A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police.

Protesters opposed to Moldova’s Communist leaders threw a sofa out a window in Parliament in the capital on
The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.

The protesters created their own searchable tag on Twitter, rallying Moldovans to join and propelling events in this small former Soviet state onto a Twitter list of newly popular topics, so people around the world could keep track.

If this subject interests you, it’s worth noting that Ethan Zuckerman, who is participating in the “Younger Than Jesus” panel “Networked Equality” on May 30, discusses the use of new technologies to organize protests in an essay included in Younger Than Jesus: The Reader.

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