Today marks my second ever trip to The New Museum, a place that I had sworn off after the Inaugural show featuring piles of ply wood and strange "sculptures" of people's keys and odd collages. I think, actually, that's what the show was about - the "collage" and its potential. The potential for Contemporary collaging is apparently to pile crap on the floor and call it art claiming it alludes to some greater societal plight. No, it's just crap on the floor. Whew, I digress...
For the past few months I feel like everywhere I looked there was a tongue menacingly sticking through a wall, an image of a sculpture present at the most recent show at the New Museum, a collection of Urs Fischer's work that takes up the three main gallery floors. The curators are quick to point out that this is NOT a retrospective and it is NOT a survey, it is just some of his most recent work. I suppose the statement is a defense against the incongruity of the pieces on display, a definite challenge that the curators attempted to overcome unsuccessfully.
My expectations entering into the show were admittedly high. Most of the preliminary reviews I read had lauded it as The Show of the Season, something not to be missed. And here is where my obvious disconnect with Contemporary Art presents itself.
For instance, this... bus seat (?) with a model of a cake that hovers beneath a suitcase pushing out of the wall... I am entirely unclear what its purpose is, what even inspired it, how and who and why these disparate elements have come to be all in one place and why that place is the wall of this gallery.
On a different floor hangs this:
Yes, this is a croissant that is suspended from the ceiling at approximate eye level on which is perched a feather bird.
The tongue is in this same room, a hole in the wall that you wouldn't notice unless you thought just maybe that tongue in all the magazines might be hiding inside (which is exactly what brought me over to it). The tongue, I learned, is on some sort of timer or sensor device and juts from the wall periodically with considerable force and lingers only momentarily before sucking back into the wall. It does make you laugh, so I will give it that. The croissant, too, is funny. But is that its intent? Just to make me giggle?
The croissant and the tongue are housed within a room that has been transformed into a rather unsuccessful installation (so unsuccessful that had the curators not told me about it I would have never known). The ceiling had been photographed and then printed into wallpaper making what the curators describe as this "disconcerting hallucinatory experience" that simply isn't true. You read the wall text, you realize you are in an "installation" (the room did seem a little bare) and then you turn around again searching out the evidence of this described wallpapering and then think "is it really that disorienting" and conclude that no, it isn't, and then wonder what the melting piano has to do with it - the wall text claims it is involved somehow, so it must be, I guess.
Arguably, the top floor is more successful, where the first listed chair/suitcase/cake sculpture is displayed. Although, it is not because of that sculpture. Instead, it is a result of the awe-some metal edifices that are placed throughout the space, jutting from the floor and ceiling like stalagmites/tites.
The are breathtaking if only because they are so large. I approached the show rather oddly going to the 3rd floor (tongue, "installation) first, then the 4th (these metal sculptures) and finally the 2nd (more on that momentarily) and so when I rounded the corner and found myself face to face not with a blank room but large imposing metal objects I was surprised.
The curators were far quieter on this floor, too, allowing the work to "speak" for itself (although its unclear what it was saying) and placing in the same space a number of works all autonomous in form and style. Also on this floor was a sculpture called Violent Cappuccino, a skeleton stepping through a cardboard box that has, in fact, been cast from aluminum, covered with a healthy coat of dust. As well, tucked within these metal objects was a melted or deflating street lamp.
What all these things had to do with one another is unclear, except perhaps that they were all by the same artist, and I suppose that is the point - the curators did "warn" us, did they not? "This is not a survey or a retrospective" it is simply this artist's works on display in space. Do not look for the "theme" or any other unifying agent; instead, recognize and respect the work of this artist. Is that not where we are at this point, anyway? The historicizing, the context, the timeline has ended. But to what end? When dealing with work like this it is hard to accept the incongruity, the seemingly unnecessarily odd mixture of items and elements. Especially when much of the work incorporates readily recognized objects in odd scenarios.
The second floor was by far my favorite. Showing a larger scale installation of sculptures, Service a la Francaise is a collection of mirrored boxes with images screened onto them. These images are all items somehow related with French culture: a Rodin sculpture, a funny lighter with a sexy lady on it, a pear, a baguette, some French literature, a cardboard cutout of Ashanti, a Balenciaga high-heeled sandal. It creates an interesting landscape that you must penetrate and investigate. What's more, the technique/materiality is so visually compelling that you cannot help but want to be within the installation looking at the objects, looking at yourself within the objects.
The difficulty becomes when you again encounter the wall text and must cope with the overzealous curator statement: "like a collage unraveling before the viewer's eyes the surfaces of the boxes create an optical maze that renders everything simultaneously immaterial and hyperreal." I suppose, ostensibly, yes these boxes succeed in that... sort of... but, ultimately at this point I feel like Contemporary Art has no right arguing for transcendence when that motivation is clearly no longer present. Moreover, the tendency for the curator to attempt Universalizing the theme or intent is unnecessary. I think at this point we have accepted Art for Art's Sake and there must be trust between curator and intended audience that such an answer is sufficient.
In the end, the show, though fascinating at times, resulted in a general feeling of disatisfaction. I think, perhaps, that I am too much of a Modernist. I want my reference to have resonance, I want form and function, if even minimalist, to be justified, I like theory and ideology, I want some things to be without the corrupting force of irony or quirkiness for fun of being quirky. I am, quite simply, not Post-Modern enough. And I don't know if I care.
