summer in nyc 2: 2 more belated reviews
Material World at Marianne Boesky + WHERE'S YOUR FUTURE? at O'Flaherty's
Material World at Marianne Boesky, curated by Gina Beavers
Artists: Sarah Meyohas, Jared Madere, Andrew Roberts, Josh Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Jack Whitten, Jonathan Sánchez Noa, LaKela Brown, Allison Janae Hamilton, Ghada Amer, Rosemarie Trockel, Leslie Wayne, El Anatsui, Sanford Biggers, Darren Bader, Mike Kelley, Jessica Stockholder, Elizabeth Murray, Samara Golden, Heidi Bucher, Claes Oldenburg, and Woody De Othello.
A lot of the work appears sticky, glossy and messy, like a hot girl’s apartment from a sitcom where one would probably feel more at home if they too were an inanimate household item. Beavers’ curatorial hand excavates a proverbial landfill to tap the wellspring from which trash art has since flowed abundantly. This scavenging approach can be hit and miss, but here, I think it hits for the most part.
One of the greatest hits is Jessica Stockholder’s assemblage of the flat, rudimentary neon plastic ingredients of a sunset scene that’s only visible via a convex truck mirror mounted to the wall above. Compared with her usual large-scale works, its compactness is alluring: it’s dwarfed by every other work in the room, but the light the mirror throws sideways and the shadow the shelf casts below give it an outsize personality. The adjacent Rauschenberg print immediately betrays that the show owes much of its visual impact to midcentury product design, which is also evident in Claes Oldenburg’s plastic sundae (carefully sequestered in an acrylic box to create an airless diorama) and El Anatsui’s painstaking tapestry of aluminium can squares that drapes the back wall with a Glomesh-like tactility. For a long time, I hadn’t thought about Glomesh - a chainmail-like metal textile that was invented in Australia in the 50s - so I looked them up, and if collaborating with PacMan is the sign of a heritage brand’s strength right now, I guess they’re going strong. This is somewhat depressing, but here amongst the work, the nostalgia machine refreshingly feels like more of a defibrillator than a downer.
Mike Kelley’s reconstruction of American adolescence, also on a shelf, elucidates a comfortable warmth. Rosemary Trockel addresses haters-to-be via knitting ‘Who Will Be In In ‘99’ in 1988, casting revisionist cynicism upon Suprematist sensibilities and prescient cynicism towards a Buzzfeed-listicle future she foresaw. Lowlights include a charmlessly incongruous billboard-sized AI monstrosity generated by Jared Madere and Sarah Meyohas, and Darren Bader’s random assortment of celebrity detritus where a found chair, a clock and Jane Fonda’s doily exclaim ‘Celebrities, they’re just like us!’ in a steampunk olde-worlde dialect. Missteps aside, there are enough heavy hitters to ground the show in a playful, self-perpetuating artistic tradition. I enjoyed the dearth of references to the human body, like the plastic jetsam had artfully rearranged itself when no one was looking and ended up slightly askew in the playroom.
WHERE'S YOUR FUTURE? by Oluwasegun Oyetunde at O'Flaherty's
Bathed in the sickly green light emitting from O’Flaherty’s cursive neon sign, an older woman donning an embellished orange tunic and several brooches is reviewing all the young ladies’ sartorial choices for viewing this new short film that promises to be an ‘experiential mediation of the modern youth experience.’ She’s upset by the cultural shift she seems to be observing; the black-clad simulacra composed of Rock Star Girlfriends and Post-Grunge Health Goths. “Back in my day, we used to wear interesting dresses to things like this. You girls all have BORING dresses. BORING!” Noted. Inside, the film is akin to an advertisement for imbibing the kind of anonymous, vaguely countercultural lifestyle infection transmitted by watching too many Vice documentaries alone in your teenage bedroom. There are some opening shots of drab Jeffrey Smart-esque concrete highways and broken-down graffitied caravans to set the quintessential scene of suburban boredom. Then it’s slow-motion footage of people in the club with epileptic strobes blasting. Footage of burnouts being performed by people in shiesties. Footage of someone who is hurt. Danger! Nobody seems to want to be filmed in the club, or doing burnouts on the highway, or being hurt. It’s not quite candid and it’s not quite contrived. It’s painful to watch, and painful to know that escapism hasn’t changed shape for a while. It’s rehashing a moral panic attack that was quelled by taking beta blockers years ago. Perhaps rebelling can be fun, but is it fun to watch? It’s making me suddenly want to Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. I suddenly want to follow the warnings they put on cigarette packaging. It’s All Gas No Brakes meets the anti-piracy ad that appeared on every DVD, saying ‘You Wouldn’t Steal A Car.’ Naturally, the film takes up 10 minutes of the event’s (supposedly unlimited) runtime, and around this, there’s a DJ. People mill around on the dancefloor for a while but can't seem to find the right moves.