Generation Everything

The Generational: Younger Than Jesus
The New Museum
April 4 – July 5, 2009

On the elevator ride up to the New Museum’s 5th floor to start my descent through the many levels of the exhibition, I overheard a conversation between the two forty something hipsters behind me. The woman was describing how a mutual friend had caught his wife in an affair by searching through her phone records. As we all stepped off the elevator she said, “I never in a million years would have thought to do that! I mean, isn’t that extraordinary?” I immediately thought to myself, I absolutely would have thought of that - I’ve seen it done a thousand times before, and realized abruptly that, that may very well be what separates my generation from hers: the smug cynicism of a “have it all/seen it all” mentality.

In The Generational :Younger than Jesus, this youthfully condescending attitude is well represented to the inclusion of little else. The show contains a mash-up of pop culture with various styles from the history of 20th century art, without much thought to the meaning of either element. Born in 1980, I am the median age for artists in this targeted group show and I felt a shameful connection to the fragmented, confused, cluster-@$*%! on display. We are a generation that has been taught to do it faster, like the group AIDS-3D’s OMG Obelisk, which tries to generate a conflict between a popular text message abbreviation and ideas about worship and religion through a stoic black rectangle topped with glowing letters, surrounded by odd little glow ended line sculptures that comes off as cheesy and simple minded. We are a generation who has been taught to look to the past, like Josh Smith’s wall gridded with poster-like paintings that represent little more than a teenager’s willful reinterpretation of abstract expressionism or Chu Yun’s contrived meditation on vulnerability through a series of drugged, sleeping women; an archetype in the history of performance art. We are a generation who has been taught to embrace technology, evident in the pervasive amount of video and web based art which ranges from Faye Driscoll’s tiny screen full of pointless, vogue, stop motion dance to Cory Archangel’s glib, wall consuming, blue photo-shopped screen, to Anna Molska’s weird, homo-erotic, wall projection of buff men in almost nothing but archaic soldier’s helmets arbitrarily pushing around large geometric pieces to an equally arbitrary soundtrack of upbeat bleeps.

The show stopper, however, is Ryan Trecartin’s centrally located video/sculpture piece which turns the tables by commenting on youth culture in a way that psychologically encompasses the failings of his present company. Sibling Topics (Section A and Section B) is a deeply satirized vision of reality tv, my space, and their self-indulgent solitude, that looks a lot like a bizzaro episode of MTV’s The Real World; a show our generation was raised on. The characters are ridiculous to the point of ingenious with their painted, gentrified faces, excessive slang, and slothful over attention to fashionable, self centered, emptiness. Set in two rooms, ludicrously overstuffed with fragmented, mismatched furniture and items that feel like a packrat’s first one bedroom apartment, the piece’s insanity is pitch-perfect. Trecartin succeeds where others fail because he uses the short hand of a generation to describe it instead of pick it apart.

But in the end, even all of these observations on generational attitudes and tendencies through the filter of this show are unreliable. Doesn’t it seem a little soon to be summing up an entire generation that has just barely moved out of its parent’s basement? And The New Museum’s method of weaning out “the” artists through the recommendations of curators seems more like a bad commentary on the failings of our art system’s tendency toward commodification and authoritative elitism than a faithful documentation. The set up is contrived to sell museum tickets to a generation of egocentric consumers, who are guaranteed to love the attention.

In the End.

Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867–1947)
Self Portrait, ca. 1938–40
Oil on canvas; 30 x 24 in. (76.2 x 61 cm)
Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Purchased 1972
© 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
www.metmuseum.org

Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
January 27 – April 19 2009

Pierre Bonnard’s interior paintings from the last twenty years of his life are so lusciously radiant it is easy to get caught up in the color and miss what is insubstantial, and more important. Like Monet, whose late works leaned toward belligerent, linear insanity due to his failing eyesight, and Louis Wain whose illustrations of cats turned into sinister, kaleidoscopic patterns as he succumbed to schizophrenia; Bonnard’s late in life works feel more like a charged descent from his more famous earlier works. This collection represents distortion at the hands of depression and loss, not ingenuity through bright palate.

Much like the work of Matisse, who was painting in a similar style during this same period in history, Bonnard’s paintings from this late period are more about patterns than subjects. The difference between someone like Bonnard and someone like Matisse, however, is that while Matisse focused decidedly on using his abstraction definitively, with distinct, bold colors, heavy outlines and a concentrated simplicity; Bonnard is comparatively messy, hazy and indecisive. It is the repetitive actions of his messy lines and bold colors that force his subjects into an oblivion of abstraction. In The White Interior, for example, the bent figure (assumably Bonnard’s wife Marthe) is nearly indistinguishable from the floor; the salmon-navy speckles of the rug synonymous with her clothing. The table, doors and windows jut out in blinding, but muddled white competing in intensity with the dark blotches of plant life outside and in, while the lighter outlines of the dishware on the table barely resist a dappled unity with the tablecloth. The effect is aggressive, but so universally aggressive that no one element separates itself from the whole; there are no centers of interest, just one big mess of equally active lines and colors competing with each other in a way that is visually stimulating and mentally exhausting.

Despite the pervasiveness of subjects such as bowls of fruit and food, books, papers, furniture and plant life, Bonnard’s people are the most interesting. In Flowers on the Mantelpiece at Le Cannet a woman stands with her back to us, hand on the mantelpiece dissected by the edge of the canvas. Her face, turned only slightly inward, as if resisting a glace over her shoulder, suggests her tense awareness of the viewer’s eyes on her. In Before Dinner, two female figures stand to the back and the side of the canvas, looking dartingly downward and away, also aware of a viewer whose eyes they shamefully refuse to meet. Each figure is pushed into the background behind huge tables of food, overly detailed bouquets of flowers and immense windows. They hover, alienated from themselves and each other, around the edges of the interiors of their lives; conceding their significance to the inanimate objects that represent them.

Finally, and most tellingly, are Bonnard’s paintings of himself from the very final years of his life. Each of the medium sized paintings features Bonnard cropped just below the shoulders, staring back at the viewer. His sunken features and upturned eyebrows punctuated by the mottled, dysfunctional mess of his hands. He is a pathetic creature. These paintings lack the color variation so predominant in the rest of the show, mainly comprised of fleshy tones in pasty pink and sallow yellow. Bonnard’s pained face fades into the color of the background as though he is disintegrating before the viewer’s eyes. In the context of these paintings this show seems less about Bonnard’s last move toward sumptuous, overwhelming abstraction than it is about his feelings as a man at the end of his life. His beloved wife gone, his resources waning, his health failing, he painted his life as he saw it—as a unity of ordinary things estranged from, and blurring into themselves and then, into non-existence. The work is hard on the senses for its assertive abstraction and movements toward immateriality, but keep your eyes on the canvas and you’ll see Bonnard’s ability to immortalize his own decline in a way that stands outside of time.

Defining Absence

Yoshitomo Nara
February 28 – March 28, 2009
Marianne Boesky Gallery


I’ve been wondering for a little while now why Yoshitomo Nara’s work is so unsettling. Large cartoon paintings of little girls with jelly bean heads, sculpted bob hairdos, and oversized eyes hardly seems like subject matter that should evoke uneasiness. They look more like the diary drawings of an eight year old girl with all their variations of sass, boredom, violence and silliness, than the latest additions in the career of a middle aged Japanese man.

The front two rooms of the gallery are filled with drawings and paintings large enough to fill a mantle piece, small enough to fold up and put in your pocket, and everywhere in between. The drawings are more active with evocative text like, the massive “Rock’n Roll The Roll” in lipstick red graffiti featuring a lumpy headed girl with hips angled out strumming her little figure-eight shaped guitar. The tops of her eyes slanted down and her frowning line mouth half open indicates her aggressive concentration, while action lines and musical notes project out from her. Coffee table book sized drawings in pencil feature girls in plain outlined square dresses with half circle poesy collars and blank backgrounds. They arbitrarily sit in a chair, wear a round nose and whiskers, and stare from underneath a heavy shock of long line hair with words like “Creep” and “NYC” around and on them. In poster sized acrylic paintings the girls are cut off just below the white collar and stare silently through vacuous circle eyes of blue-grey or emerald-gold or stick out a pink tongue from a disk slot mouth under the curved lines to indicate closed lids. The back room is even more off-putting with two cobble wood shingled turret cottages, one filled with colorful stuffed animals and a roof pointing up through the ceiling, the other broken or burned off at the top housing a small living space with a tiny desk, drawing materials and radio/cd player. A painting fills the back wall of the stuffed animal cottage looming over the interior space like an alter the toys worship and in the other small drawings, stuck up haphazardly, seem like the products of the non-existent occupant.

Despite the variety of poses and the subtle variation between size, detail and action, these little girls always have one thing in common: their monumental absence. The exhibition feels like a voyeuristic peek into a culture of little humanoid creatures who could be gone for an hour or forever. They stare at us through images made mostly of simple lines that indicate feelings but their eyes, actions and dwellings are empty of anything but semblance. The rooms of the show are sterilized, desensitized, filled with sentimental objects that have been stripped of their sentiment. It makes me uneasy but intrigued by both the creatures themselves and what Nara might be saying about our ideological, image hungry culture through them: in the absence of something real in life, emotion or depiction what is there? Does it do us harm or pleasure?