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.