Let's be real: 2012 started and I was kinda disappointed. I was ready for a rock-star year, right out the gate. But that's okay, something that I thought would bring me great sadness, delivered upon arrival: My birthday.
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| Birthday mail! |
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| Megan & I |
Celebrations began at The Back Room.
A 1920's prohibition themed bar, where they served alcohol in teacups:
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| The Back Room |
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| Birthday shoes |
For my Global Art Production class, I had to attend The New Museum Triennial, The Ungovernables.
Here's a write-up I did about two works:
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| Adrián Villar Rojas,’ A Person Loved Me (2012) |
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| Dark Day (2012), by Abigail DeVille |
The Good, the Bad, and the Exceptionally Indifferent
Walking into The New Museum is like walking into a trap. After being carted into the fluorescent elevator, an extreme pang of anxiety rushes over you as you begin your slow ascent through the floors of cold concrete and depressing cavernous spaces. The feeling of depression is only mimicked by the artwork being consumed by the walls in the exhibition The Ungovernables. The show passes as some sort of inside joke between younger artists, where childlike compositions are only convincingly impactful when you realize that you are in a museum and not in a maximum security, solitary confinement. Two works stuck with me after leaving the exhibition as exceptionally good and bad.
Dark Day (2012), by Abigail DeVille, originally struck me as a fantastic piece. I wanted to shoot myself into the bowels of the work, swimming through the layers of discarded furniture, mattresses, fabric and debris. The diorama was enveloping, with an infectious parallel between the suffocation of a disappearing star into the throat of a black hole in space. After my initial romance with the work, I started to realize the piece actually had more connection with a black hole than previously thought: the metaphor is bullshit, because it is not there (or at least so convoluted that it disappears, just as a black hole is invisible in space). DeVille uses her accumulation of junk to construct cosmologies of existence, which contain a dense accumulation of meaning that is completely vague. Perhaps the work is a comment on the ninety-nine percent. However, DeVille’s suggested monument to systematic displacement and the commodification of space is sucked dry by the collapsed star metaphor, leaving us with the feeling of falling into a black hole and wanting to forget about her room strewn with construction paper and oil crayon scribbles.
After being assaulted by a black hole, I was crushed by Adrián Villar Rojas,’ A Person Loved Me (2012). At the outset, I wanted to hate his childlike rendition of a Star Wars robot. However, after spending time with it, I began to feel a pull of nostalgia and wanted to bond with the work in film, video game, and literary references. A monument to devastated machinery, in a world saturated with the synthesized and mechanized experience, the lesson learned goes beyond aesthetics and breaches into failure, decline, and a warning to mankind. As the description suggests, the work is “an artifact from the future,” which instills the “representation of collapsed eras and ideals.” The piece goes beyond the triennial, consuming an outdoor space, which continues the objects transformation back to the dust of the earth. I think Rojas’ piece exemplifies the impermanence and engagement of the present and the future that The Ungovernables is meant to evoke as an identity for a mass culture.
Leaving The Ungovernables was like being able to breathe again. Perhaps it’s The New Museum that is suffocating, or maybe it’s the over-charged, under-realized works inside that feel like they are strangling all of your oxygen. I still feel like I am not invited into the joke, but in the end, I don’t really want to be.
Walking into The New Museum is like walking into a trap. After being carted into the fluorescent elevator, an extreme pang of anxiety rushes over you as you begin your slow ascent through the floors of cold concrete and depressing cavernous spaces. The feeling of depression is only mimicked by the artwork being consumed by the walls in the exhibition The Ungovernables. The show passes as some sort of inside joke between younger artists, where childlike compositions are only convincingly impactful when you realize that you are in a museum and not in a maximum security, solitary confinement. Two works stuck with me after leaving the exhibition as exceptionally good and bad.
Dark Day (2012), by Abigail DeVille, originally struck me as a fantastic piece. I wanted to shoot myself into the bowels of the work, swimming through the layers of discarded furniture, mattresses, fabric and debris. The diorama was enveloping, with an infectious parallel between the suffocation of a disappearing star into the throat of a black hole in space. After my initial romance with the work, I started to realize the piece actually had more connection with a black hole than previously thought: the metaphor is bullshit, because it is not there (or at least so convoluted that it disappears, just as a black hole is invisible in space). DeVille uses her accumulation of junk to construct cosmologies of existence, which contain a dense accumulation of meaning that is completely vague. Perhaps the work is a comment on the ninety-nine percent. However, DeVille’s suggested monument to systematic displacement and the commodification of space is sucked dry by the collapsed star metaphor, leaving us with the feeling of falling into a black hole and wanting to forget about her room strewn with construction paper and oil crayon scribbles.
After being assaulted by a black hole, I was crushed by Adrián Villar Rojas,’ A Person Loved Me (2012). At the outset, I wanted to hate his childlike rendition of a Star Wars robot. However, after spending time with it, I began to feel a pull of nostalgia and wanted to bond with the work in film, video game, and literary references. A monument to devastated machinery, in a world saturated with the synthesized and mechanized experience, the lesson learned goes beyond aesthetics and breaches into failure, decline, and a warning to mankind. As the description suggests, the work is “an artifact from the future,” which instills the “representation of collapsed eras and ideals.” The piece goes beyond the triennial, consuming an outdoor space, which continues the objects transformation back to the dust of the earth. I think Rojas’ piece exemplifies the impermanence and engagement of the present and the future that The Ungovernables is meant to evoke as an identity for a mass culture.
Leaving The Ungovernables was like being able to breathe again. Perhaps it’s The New Museum that is suffocating, or maybe it’s the over-charged, under-realized works inside that feel like they are strangling all of your oxygen. I still feel like I am not invited into the joke, but in the end, I don’t really want to be.
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| The elevator at The New Museum. (Green's my fav color) |
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| Subway art |
Sunday brought the Superbowl of events for me: The Oscars.
[See my previous post about my thoughts on who would win]
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| Casey printed ballots. I was 12 out of 24. Embarrassing. |
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| This was an exceptionally boring Oscars. Champagne was needed. |
