Nostalgia For Modern Times
By Ariella Budick

FT
April 15 2009 22:46

‘The Generational: Younger than Jesus’, New Museum, New York

This survey of artists under 33 puts its finger to the pulse of
the youngest generation and finds it very faint indeed. The show’s
overwhelming dreariness suggests that, despite the messianic title,
the coming of art’s saviours is farther off than ever.

‘YE (Pilzschiel)’ (2006) by Mariechen Danz These are the Millennials,
born since 1976 and natives of the digital nation. You might expect
them to be gazing forwards but, with a few exceptions, they are
either afflicted with nostalgia or destitute of fresh ideas. They
seem to have taken to heart the environmentalists’ dictum: recycle,
recycle, recycle.

Cory Arcangel mimics a stereotypical modernist abstraction by
duplicating the Adobe software’s colour spectrum on a large scale. The
upshot is an iridescent blue field, eye-catching but ultimately
dead. Part smirk, part homage, it simultaneously mocks and honours
mystical modernists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Arcangel
seems to long for a time when artists saw themselves as prophets.

Keren Cytter’s film, in which two sylphs taunt a 42-year-old woman
about her shrivelling sexuality, also resurrects a once-invincible
avant-garde.

The characters speak in pseudo-poetic fragments; fantasy bleeds into
reality; narrative halts and doubl es back on itself. Cytter reheats
the terse cuts of Goddard and the self-conscious poetry of Bergman
into a melange of warmed-over appropriation. It’s a stale brew indeed.

Guthrie Lonergan turns his scavenger’s eye to the internet,
mining it for ready-made tedium. He splices together bits of video
in which MySpace users introduce themselves. The material is by
definition boring and repetitive – how many ways are there to say
"hello?" Whatever his point, Lonergan makes it the hard way, subjecting
us to long-winded, haphazardly shot monologues that are less revealing
than enervating.

Elad Lassry attempts to breathe new life into old forms by
appropriating ads from magazines, censoring the product name but
leaving the rest. "His goal," a panel informs us, is "a renovation of
the ancient convention of the still life." A mixture of callowness and
grandiosity derives from that misguided ambition. If the still-life
genre really needed reinvention, Lassry’s limp cabbages would hardly
do the trick.

‘Game Over’ (2004) by Cao Fei Any large group exhibit includes some
dross, but the trio of curators – Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni
and Laura Hoptman – has kept the overall quality pristinely low. This
was not easy: a vast network of experts recommended more than 500
applicants, of which 50 made the cut. I suspect that in sifting through
these mountains of creativity, the curators noticed a few artists who
looked back in irony or rearranged existing material, and immediately
declared it a trend. From then on, it was simpler to cherry-pick work
that conformed to the idea of a generation of borrowers than to explore
the diversity of youth. Or maybe – a far more depressing thought –
Younger than Jesus really does represent the best of the best.

Not everything here is so imaginatively depleted. Cyprien Gaillard’s
mesmerising half-hour video, "Desniansky Raion", is neither original
nor technically virtuosic, but it bespeaks a good eye and a curious
mind.

Gaillard is a kind of aerial documentarian, looking down on the bleak
urban landscape of mid-20th century social housing. It’s a video in
three mournful acts. I: Russian hooligans enact a ritual brawl in a St
Petersburg parking lot. II: A festive light show animates the facade
of a housing estate in France, which then decorously implodes. III:
A little plane, with camera on board, buzzes the Desniansky Raion, a
Stonehenge circle of grim apartment buildings in Kiev. These vignettes
of decrepitude on an imperial scale chronicle the failure of modernist
architecture to deliver on its utopian promise.

The Armenian videographer Tigran Khachatryan enlists the YouTube
aesthetic to comment on the art of social change. He intercuts clips
of roving teenagers with scenes from classic Soviet20cinema, and Lo,
how the disenfranchised have fallen: the seamen in Battleship Potemkin
rose up against their oppressors; the revolution’s aimless descendants
hurl themselves down concrete ravines in fits of giddy nihilism.

Khachatryan and Gaillard make deft use of imagery that looks mined from
today’s immense quarry of amateur video, even when it’s not. They
embody the artist as curator, culling, assembling and trying to
find some sense, however vague, in the global abundance of visual
resources. They share that approach with many other participants. In
a sense, the organisers were auditioning colleagues when they made
their selections – which is another way of saying the curators saw
themselves as artists. I’m not sure the boundary between creator and
curator is one that bears blurring.

The show also draws a different line that seems arbitrary: the one
between generations. To group art by the age of its makers is to imply
that the young have a special relationship with innovation, that as
a group only they can produce a ferment of fresh ideas, unburdened
by habit or received wisdom. In fact, what you get is little more
than a student show, heavy with influence and anxiety. The artists
may feel like they are carving out a freewheeling space in a culture
rigidified by commerce. But the museum has simply trapped them in a
marketing concept.

Runs until June 14, tel +1 212 219122,20