"Younger than Jesus" at the New Museum

By: J. Block

 “Younger Than Jesus,” which opened April 8^th, packs the New Museum with a broad international survey of recent artwork made by fifty selected artists. The exhibition is composed of paintings, drawings, photography, film, animation, installation, dance, Internet works and video games.  The artists are all under the age of thirty-three and represent what the curators of the New Museum believe will “capture the signals of an imminent change, identify stylistic trends that are emerging among a diverse group of creators, and provide the general public with a first in-depth look at how the next generation conceives of our world.”

The installation is confused and noisy, sounds echo across the gallery floors masking the subtle note with the cacophony of a riot in progress. Each artist’s work pours out, one over the other in a tumble with no set value or hierarchy; all is incidental: from celebrity sweetness to mass genocide. This overlap of conversations, music, images and docent preambles are indicative of the nature of this exhibition and a mirror, I believe, of our world today.  Walking the Bowery, away from this exhibition, it become clear that this generation can navigate the white noise; they live it, watch it and record it… it is their natural environment.

One artist that stood out was Katerina Seda who worked with her Grandmother Jana Seda to created simple pen drawings of the household items that once had been sold at the family’s store. The drawings were the method of communication that the artist used to engage a reluctant elder into recalling her personal history and to fight a disabling depression due to the loss of her husband. Sophisticated, strikingly simple and immediately understood, It Doesn’t Matter is the documentation of a forced interaction between two generations separated by loss and experience.

You can find the videos’ of Zaid Antar between the third and fourth floors of the museum, tucked into a niche on the stairway. La Marche Turque is filmed looking sharply downward; the tight framing crops all but the keyboard and hands of the pianist.  The piano has been muted, so that the only sound is the percussive patterns caused by the striking of the pianos soft felt hammers.   Nearly silent, the artist fills this video with the warmth and rhythm of this popular composition by Mozart from the barest of sensory hints.  Antar explains that “This is the only way I know how to shoot a video: find one idea, and make just one shot to translate it. One on one. …I try to get rid of all the additives and leave the subject that I want to photograph alone in the middle of nothing. “ 

 

 

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, The Great Battle Under the Table, 2006, oil on canvas.  On view at “Younger than Jesus” at the New Museum.

       In the sunny and cheerful yellow light of an afternoon, amid a table set with flowers and fruit, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski lays out an Armageddon in miniature. The Great Battle Under the Table is a naïf toy soldier epic that is mature and exacting in its depiction of war and the chaos of conflict. The artist’s precisionist eye details skeletal warriors, Boschian creatures and mad generals as they engage in a weaving mass of pointless carnage. In war, individualism is always the first victim.

        Emre Huner presents a video titled Panoptikon, an oddly powerful animation that has a drawing style found in early medical journals: clinical and crisp while maintaining a sense of detached innocence. The title and subject of this piece refer to Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher who developed the idea of the perfect prison; one in which the prisoner was always aware of the potential of constant observation. As Michel Foucault explains in Discipline & Punish (1975),

“…the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.”

 

 

There is much in this exhibition that is inconsistent and unformed, which is to be expected from any large group show.  What is readily clear throughout the work presented at the New Museum is that this generation’s art is largely without a sense of polished smugness: a reversal of the calculated. “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” is an exhibition made up of curious objects that I believe show great promise and should be seen.

 “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” is on view through July 5^th

Press Statement

 

New Museum
235 Bowery

Take the F or V train to 2^nd Avenue or the J, M or Z trains to Bowery
Museum hours: W, 12-6pm; Thurs and F, 12-9pm; Sat and Sun, 12-6pm

Museum website: www.newmuseum.org

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I really appreciate J. Block's choice of works to highlight and emphasis on the generational characteristics that revealed themselves...very thoughtful.

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