Manhattan Syndrome: A Survey of New York Trends, September 2024
Violet Dennison - Damaged Self - Tara Downs - September 6 - October 5, 2024
Sofia Sinibaldi - Souvenirs and Substitutions - Chapter - September 6 - October 12, 2024
Srijon Chowdhury - Tapestry - P.P.O.W. - September 5 - October 19, 2024
Sylvie Hayes-Wallace - Bleeding - Silke Linder - September 6 - October 12, 2024
Win McCarthy - Kingdom Come - Francis Irv - September 7 - October 12, 2024
Teak Ramos - In Traditional Fashion - Ulrik - September 6 - October 19, 2024
Whitney Claflin - Pinky's Where? - Derosia - September 6 - October 19, 2024
Anna Rubin - The Gram - Maxwell Graham - September 4 - October 26, 2024
Matt Browning, Dora Budor, Jerry the Marble Faun, Amina Ross, Kern Samuel, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Maria VMier - Hard Ground - MoMA PS1 - May 16 - October 14, 2024
It's a truism to complain that the arts are currently in a uniquely aimless and uninspired state. Anyone with a moderately cogent knowledge of the art world can plainly see the hollow cycles of forced hype bubbles and superficial novelty aren't producing anything of lasting interest or value. The market didn't seem concerned as long as collectors were willing to buy, but the recent precipitous decline in auction prices may be starting to force even the most shameless hustlers to take a second look at their wares. There's always been plenty of hackwork in art, but we seem to have arrived at a new condition in the sense that the predominant creative lethargy has spread beyond the middlebrow commercial and institutional spheres to what should be the highbrow avant-garde, or, less loftily, young(ish) artists with cultural cachet in the New York art world. Downtown hipsters we call them, "we" being other downtown hipsters, naturally. It doesn't help that the side of the art world holding the purse strings, being wholly consumed with rapacious speculation and/or Hillary Clinton-tier fake leftist rhetoric, has seldom been so uninterested in what's cool, but the problem is more existential: almost nothing now is cool.
Artists have been explicitly expected to represent their time at least since Baudelaire, and they always, have no matter their intentions. As the Pre-Raphaelites represented a 19th century English sensibility, not a Quattrocento Italian one, so Neoclassical painters were no less French (or more Roman) than their Rococo peers, the Renaissance didn't simply reproduce the art from antiquity, and even sci-fi always produces a reflection of the worldview of its time. In the last 150 years that expectation has raised its stakes considerably as every generation is faced with the precedent of earlier breakthroughs and innovations that they're expected to further outdo. What this presumption ignores is the importance of the era itself in relation to an artist that managed something of historical value: Manet, Duchamp, and Johns, to give three examples, were artists whose times gave them the opportunity to accomplish things of lasting significance, and moreover, to emphasize my point, none of their most iconic artworks are self-evidently important. Where, say, da Vinci, Rembrandt, or Picasso were stylists whose distinction is plain to any viewer, a nude, a urinal, and a flag are not inherently impressive. It's only within the situation of the 1860s that Olympia could so thoroughly scandalize the bourgeoisie, of the 1910s that Duchamp could invent the readymade and have it mostly ignored for decades, and of the 1950s that Johns could pick up Duchamp's thread and become a success from the very beginning of his career. (I know Johns wasn't yet influenced by Dadaism when he painted Flag, but that's irrelevant to my point.) This relates to our crisis of cool because an artwork's relevance to the time in which it was made is to a large degree what the word "cool" designates with regards to art, unless you're a vulgar aesthete, and is, I would argue, what in some obscure way determines the lasting value of an artwork to posterity. Thus our problem is one of relevance, in particular art's current inability to generate it.
The artist's injunction to represent their time is also a demand that they represent reality. Not, of course, in the narrow sense of representational art, but as sense phenomena and feeling, a perception of the world not copied by rote from past art but discovered anew in art. Throughout the modern era, art's representation of reality underwent major upheavals in line with the dramatic changes that happened in the world at large. That progress has now slowed considerably but we still expect it, in art as in life, if only because we lack the framework to think of culture in any other way and the intensity of change over the last century has left us unmoored from anything other than that disorienting vertigo. Artists grope for a new lightning bolt of an idea like a urinal or a flag, but those shocks of the new are a thing of the past. Nothing can be particularly surprising when everyone is addicted to Instagram, but our fried synapses still hope to experience something outside of the endless churn of media without knowing what that could possibly look like or what it would mean to represent it. It's relatively easy to broadly generalize about what art in various historical periods accomplished by representing their reality: Most traditional cultures dealt in reverence and religious expression, the Greeks pursued an ideal form of beauty, the Renaissance explored expressive grace and the mathematical rendering of space, modernism attempted the transcendental through a reflexive capture of the radical break with the past, and postmodernism merely acted out a further turn of the screw of reflexivity. Now, however, novelty itself is starting to look like a tired convention and the status of the artist as an inventor has turned into a mannerist gesture. Artists attempt contrived novelties on a micro-scale as a knee-jerk assertion of individuality, but the conventions of signifying newness in art are so well-worn that any gesture of subversion acts like quicksand, the resistance to normalcy only assuring further normativity. What in 2024 could be more expected than a shallow attempt to restart the avant-garde? Bad, brightly colored figurative painting, sure, but that's hardly worth writing about.
This is, so far, the basic state of affairs, and it's not particularly interesting. My subject though, relevant New York artists who know all of this, specifically emphasizes this condition of contemporary art as a sort of finger trap, where a loss of faith in the power of the new does nothing to alleviate the residual desire for something other than forced rehashes of past art. An artist's ability to represent reality is coextensive with their belief that they are able to represent reality, by which I mean only that their creative means are adequate to their subject. In the present, where a steadfast faith in anything is precluded by severe mental illness, anyone seeking to not succumb is confronted with the paradox of recognizing that faith is necessary to carry anything out while also knowing that all belief is purely relative and contingent. The usual solution is narcissism, one's conviction that they are inalienably deserving of every success because they say so and, given our miserable state of affairs, not an entirely unreasonable reaction. Artists, at least good ones, aren't quite so bullheaded, although everyone knows artists are inveterately narcissistic as a necessity of the occupation. What distinguishes artists from the solipsistic loop of tech startup life optimizers and self-help supplement salesmen is only coolness, an indistinct social framework that orients the (downtown hipster) art world as a form of culture and competition.
As I said, neither the market nor institutions care much about what downtown artists are into, to say nothing of less worldly and less self-conscious art scenes not concerned with the New York clout economy. But downtown is where many (most?) of the new things in art have emerged from for close to a century now for whatever reason; the pretension, the pedigree, the attention, the wealth it attracts, the art handling job market for recent art school grads, I don't know. Even after the wake of proper avant-gardism, New York and Lower Manhattan in particular has at least functioned as a cultural avant-garde, staying, as they say, four years ahead of the rest of the country. That's certainly still true, not that there's much competition, but as of late the downtown dominance of the culture has started to feel less fertile, less effortless, more studied and predictable. This is part of a much larger trend, but where coolness once shielded the hip from creative inertia, it seems in danger of no longer doing so, or at least not with the same self-assurance it once had. What "being cool" mainly does is eliminate the anxiety about being cool/relevant by having intuited the outline of the social consensus around coolness, what's in/out but also when and how to preempt what is not yet in, what is out but can be utilized in an "in" way, etc., which is very different from an outsider's attempt to sublimate or disqualify the fear of being uncool. Outsiders can be good artists, of course, but there's a unique license afforded by being an insider who feels at home on the inside. The classic NYC art career formula is to cut your teeth in the scene and skip town as soon as you make it, because once you've made it you're no longer dominated by anxiety about what it is you do. Other artists use this coolness as content in their work, usually with a heavy dose of aloofness, i.e. Duchamp, Warhol, Bacher, Donnelly. What this achievement offers is the chance for an artist to do whatever it is they want to do, unburdened by the worry that they're doing the wrong thing. Thus the question is what artists want to do, and my concern is that, by and large, cool downtown artists want to be cool downtown artists. If there's any trend to discern now it's this tendency towards art-cool reflexivity, a preoccupation with the means of coolness as the thing to be attained, mistaking the attainment of cool as the object of desire rather than a vehicle for exploration. Thus this art, being a document of reality as it should be, tends towards a document of New York itself, a reification of the coolness of the New York artist existing in New York as the form and content of art. This doesn't automatically sabotage the work, not at all, but my suggestion is that this dynamic is a pointed element of an emergent impasse. I've even championed this mode before, and I still think one of the most successfully "new" shows I've seen since I started reviewing was the one titled, appropriately enough, Manhattan. But let's get to the shows:
Violet Dennison - Damaged Self - Tara Downs
Painting is particularly problematic now because the already involuted urge to come up with something new in art is doubled by the far more intense historicized system of influences and references in painting, the anxious self-consciousness of the coded mechanisms that lie in merely picking up a brush, let alone picking a subject. Dennison, having left behind her shower curtains of 2021, has retained her neon palette in a shift to materialist abstraction. In spite of the press release's strained bluster about subjectivity, deconstruction, and preternatural hues, the work is wholly conventional in its nostalgia for a time when a brushstroke was an exciting problem, namely the 1940s. This sort of reductionism is canonized, safe, and unadventurous; the jarring inserts of imagery from shopping websites in a couple of the paintings just proves the artist's repressed awareness that none of this is going anywhere.
Sofia Sinibaldi - Souvenirs and Substitutions - Chapter (Note: Friend Alert)
Running as fast as you can past Mary Stephenson's sickly paintings of plates brings you to Sofi's show, and New York is in full effect: the street, trash, grime, graffiti, scavenging, photos of taxis, copies of copies. Her Wade Guyton-meets-Yuji Agematsu methodology is pretty easy to discern, but aside from a photocopy effect shared with Guyton due to their shared means it's not slavish or derivative, which is no small accomplishment. It looks good, and while in theory I might ask for more than that, comparing it to her Jack Hanley show proves she's made a decisive step forward in the interim. Where that show made me think of shoegaze album covers, this one has moved past that gauzy haze to a more aesthetically oblique, materially grounded, and therefore fruitful exploration of a type of grit that's independent of any nostalgic reference points and not derivative of anything else. Well, aside from New York itself, of course.
Srijon Chowdhury - Tapestry - P.P.O.W.
The return to figuration is a dominant trend right now, but almost all of it is so feeble and half-baked that it's not worth mentioning. Evidently people still buy (and sell) the narrative that every painter's sort of technical, sort of historically-informed, sort of self-expressive, sort of symbolic, etc., grab bag of milquetoast conventions is, well, anything at all, but to me every one of them just screams a recapitulation of contemporary art's inability to justify its existence. While I don't like Chowdhury's painting, he's certainly above that morass because he seems aware of the impasse, is sufficiently conscious of art history, and is actively trying to get out of it; the problem is his exit strategy seems to be taking a lot of psychedelics. His swirly renderings of skin and fabric are clearly derived from repeated heroic doses, as is his attraction to Boschian hellscapes, French tapestry, Islamic ornament, and his choice of subjects: an eyeball, an eyeball in hell, a woman giving birth in an eyeball, naked people in bed, breastfeeding, intricately decorative trees, a guy staring at a waterfall, and Dean Kissick taking a nap. It's kind of interesting how faithful he is to a Diderotian tradition of absorption, which, if I cared to think about probably has some parallels with drug use that could be worth expressing, but for all the palpable tripped-out vibrational intensity that he evidently feels towards his subjects, it's just not very enthralling to the sober-minded. In particular the naked people in bed bring me back to some experiences I had in my teens, an immense existential unease that I once thought was profound but now consider a trite kind of selfish anxiety. That's what this work comes down to: it shows an extreme effort to chemically reenchant the world, which confuses self-absorbed experiences of personal significance with something that matters in the real world. It actually makes me think a lot of Michael Fried, in the sense that his paintings try to recreate a form of absorption through the means of the psychedelic, which is actually a theatricalization of internal experience. That sort of rhymes with David and Géricault having to keep upping the intensity of their subject matter to avoid falling into theater which is, again, interesting, but any art in 2024 that fits this sort of analysis has to be unforgivably old-fashioned. It's a relatively singular effort, but I don't think it works.
Sylvie Hayes-Wallace - Bleeding - Silke Lindner
Somewhat similar to Chowdhury by very different means, Hayes-Wallace deals in personal hermeticism: The show's name seems to have come from working on these pieces until her hands bled, the sizes of the works are based on the size of her head, the surface area of her skin, and the size of her body, and, most obviously, every work is accompanied by an obsessively detailed list of materials, enumerating what every scrap of material in each piece is, often with personal background information. The ostensible content is supposed to be a mapping of interiority and confinement, but just as all of the boxes are more or less the same, a piece of mail from your bank, or your mother's shirt, or lip gloss packaging, or a printed-out Wikipedia article is more or less anything anyone could pull out of their own lives, so there's very little psychology involved outside of the masochism of making them. I might quibble that her endless lists of materials are technically playing pretty fast and loose with the convention that they're exaggerating, in the sense that a painter doesn't list the specific pigments the used and that their friend gave it to them, but what's more glaring is that the works would just be wire boxes with a bunch of tied threads on them without the list there to assert that they're deeper than that. I'm not convinced they are; artistic subjectivity isn't so literal.
Win McCarthy - Kingdom Come - Francis Irv
I haven't actually seen this in person because I saw these shows on the day of the opening and couldn't stick around downtown until 6. It's against my policy to pass judgment on shows I haven't seen in person, but I have to include it anyways because it's the most openly New York-as-subject show in the city right now. The main content is a series of distorted iPhone panoramas of New York scenes: Anish Kapoor's "Bean" under the Jenga Building with the AT&T Long Lines Building in the distance, classic New York apartment building stairwells, and cars, each sloppily pasted onto their mounts to create more texture. There's also some sculptural elements featuring bricks, plastic take-out containers, a cropped photo of an underwear ad, and some sheets in transparent bags. I don't know what to make of the sheets, but the rest makes me think of hanging out on a Chinatown rooftop next to a bunch of worn-down clutter that the super left up there a decade ago. It's all clearly evocative of the cool, aloof NYC feeling that it's going for, but I can't help wondering what it's supposed to add up to. Adequately innocuous photos of New York adequately warped by the camera and the mounting to look cool and grimy, like New York. Again, I don't hate this tendency, but it's a conundrum where the artist cannily avoids any missteps into all the played-out crap in other galleries, so it's better than all of those, but it's also not much more than a stylized evocation of walking around downtown, a subject matter so familiar that there's a nagging sense of insubstantiality. I hesitate to complain or make broad statements about an adequate form that lacks content, because I have no idea how I could definitively characterize the content I find myself wanting. Anyway, I haven't been to the show, so I might not have these misgivings after I've been in the space with them.
Teak Ramos - In Traditional Fashion - Ulrik (Note: Friend Alert)
One of the main weaknesses of contemporary art is the tendency to appropriate content from outside the art itself to lend itself meaning, but to some degree this mechanism seems unavoidable; only certain moments of peak abstraction have perhaps neared a kind of pure self-reflexivity in art, and art's self-identity has become so diffuse that it's just about impossible to make anything without gesturing towards something not-art. Premodern art had conventions for approaching life, like religion, drama, etc., but now there's a sort of implacable discomfort art has towards subject matter in general, something I'm only perpetuating by scrutinizing this New York-as-subject tendency. "The intersection of art and fashion" is one of the most well-worn appropriative conventions, which I'm well-known for not liking. It's usually a classic clout-borrowing maneuver where fashion signifiers are supposed to substitute as art signifiers, but that tends to falter when the fashion perspective fails to grasp the terms of the art world or when the attempt to borrow substance only emphasizes the lack of substance on both sides. Teak avoids this dynamic entirely by not actually engaging at all with fashion as an outside influence to her work; she just so happens to have a skill set and a background more informed by fashion design than art, but the pieces in the show are unequivocally artworks that associate with the material conditions of making clothes, not fashion's cultural clout. The shaped boards read as analogous to paintings and the fabric covering them isn't suggestive of clothing (Something New 07 might be slightly reminiscent of a corset); the material instead works as a tactile/visual surface that adds visual sheen and mediates the ornamental bas-reliefs of the boards, making the decorative carvings opaque and "active" instead of blandly matter-of-fact. The sensibility underlying the compositions is more in line with deconstructed fashion than art conventions: letting the imperfections of the fabric generate their own details, off-centering intricate decorations that would usually serve as edge decorations to emphasize them, the insistence on white fabric as a choice of color as opposed to white as an absence of color, which is well played-off by the colorful benches. All of it reminds me of what I like about classic Martin Margiela, but rather than direct reference it's a shared interest in the approach of tailoring-as-art. I can't pretend I have any other frames of reference beyond my meager knowledge of Margiela, so I don't feel capable of articulating what it is the work does. In other words, it's the most singular show in this series, the one least burdened by a relationship to other art. The result of this is simply that the artworks are an exercise of the artist's aesthetic sensibility, articulated by the means of her working methods, both of which are refined, precise, and distinctive. And that's why it's good! Sometimes it makes me feel crazy when I find myself saying this sort of thing since it's so obvious that it should go without saying, but here we are. I've said in the past that good art can feel so self-evident that it makes you wonder why so much of it is bad, and there's a similar ease in saying that good art consists of an artist finding or dealing with something precise in or through their work. To actually do that is anything but easy, of course.
Whitney Claflin - Pinky's Where? - Derosia (Note: Friend Alert)
In contradistinction to all this talk of a crisis of subject matter, doubly so with painting, triply so with abstract mark-making as painting, Whitney seems to have no trouble coming up with things to paint. At first I was going to attribute it to her being a generation older than me and therefore capable of "doing Krebber/Cologne painting" without coming off as contrived, and that could be part of it, but I think it's even more that she's been painting for long enough that she knows what she's doing and and knows how to have fun with it. Or, to put it more precisely, she's at a place where her way of painting belongs to her, no matter the references you could pull, so she's free to make her own paintings where younger painters worry about coming up with signature tricks to distinguish themselves. Real distinguishment comes from hard work and the accumulation of experience, and Whitney's work has a tendency to deal with that accumulation very explicitly inasmuch that she tends to and cultivates her own personal constellations of reference and iconography. As a consequence she can paste in a part of the Thrasher logo, or paint the Forlini's menu QR code, or the anarchy symbol, or The Sifl and Olly Show, and none of it signifies irony or NYC posturing or randomcore culture-mashing, or anything else that it would imply in another artist's hands. I know she has intricate personal backstories for every element the show, and although I don't know what any of them are, that personal logic drives the work in a way that makes painting feel alive and vital in a way that it very rarely does otherwise at the moment.
Anna Rubin - The Gram - Maxwell Graham (Note: Friend Alert)
Anna has all the signifiers of cool New York art down pat: Two screens, no lights, an affectedly literal press release, a camera on a pigeon flying from midtown to the Bronx and a slow-motion kaleidescope effect on stuff in a Chinatown dollar store. It's aloof and negative, in the sense that both videos self-consciously negate the involvement of the viewer or the idea that these are meant to be watched in the first place. You grasp the idea behind each one in the first moment and in the second the videos look back at you, challenging your attention in a game that you'll always lose. I much prefer an artist intentionally employing the excessiveness of video in a gallery space in comparison to curators at the Whitney that don't seem to have considered that it might be pointless to put 20 hours of video in a biennial if no one watches it, but as excess for its own sake it falls somewhat into signifying coolness to no evident purpose. It's something like a weird 3 hour YouTube video that you click around on for a few minutes, or, more appropriately, the sadistic endurance tests of Warhol's early films and Lutz Bacher's post-Warhol game of artfully manipulating the systems of cool. I love both those artists, but the difficulty that arises is that most of Warhol's films would be home videos if they weren't made by him and featuring his superstars, and likewise many single works or exhibitions by Bacher wouldn't come off well if they weren't couched in the cumulative context of Bacher's overall body of work. On the one hand this might mean that Anna's work will improve with time and what feels like a weakness now will be redeemed by the continuity of what she'll make in the future, but on the other (and this is my general worry about downtown art) this very facility of cool may be so codified that these postures have become a type of empty gesture that's reached the end of its productivity. "Being cool to make art to be cool to," in a word. But isn't that Warhol's formula? The question is if that formula can then take the work somewhere else, and that's what I don't know.
Matt Browning, Dora Budor (Note: Friend Alert), Jerry the Marble Faun, Amina Ross, Kern Samuel, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Maria VMier - Hard Ground - MoMA PS1
Now we come to an institutional treatment of cool artists, which leads to some predictable frustrations. The central thread is the materiality of the artworks, which tends to work in opposition to the curators' attempts to explain the work. Jerry the Marble Faun's sculptures take literally Michaelangelo's seeing an angel in marble, transmuting stones into marvelous dragon's heads and other ornamental hallucinations; but he's an outlier, being three decades older than the other artists. Surangkanjanajai's Polaroids of even more gritty New York rooftops and her signature tubes, here filled with blue paint, are passed over in silence, which helps them to come off as the most coolly inscrutable pieces here, particularly when set against the treatment of the rest. Her tubes work well as lead balloons in group shows, but I wonder what she'd do in a solo exhibition. Maria VMier's bronze door knockers are themselves pretty arbitrary constructions, but they work because, as the PR says, they "invite visitors to bang on the walls of the institution–generating a luster born from accumulated touch," which elides their being heavy enough to smash a hole into the wall. It may be a tepid intervention compared to a Gordon Matta-Clark but it's impressive to get permission to do anything in an institution these days, and I appreciate the gesture of participatory destructiveness. Best of all, one of them had to be put in a plexi cage for damaging the wall too effectively. Budor's work is done the largest disservice by the wall texts, I think, because while I'm sure she could give a useful socio-hermeneutic reasoning behind scraping Lexapro tablets on pieces of sandpaper or a pile of copies of Elsa von Freytag-Lorinhoven's iron ring, the offered explanations only served to confuse me. For instance, the rings are supposed to have something to do with Citi Bikes but I couldn't figure out what. From there, Matt Browning's tall interlocked pieces of Douglas fir have something to do with whittling and his Dr. Pepper reduction has some reason for existing, I guess, but by my count he's had solo shows of this series at at least Gandt, Maxwell Graham, and a church in Rome, and his insistence on repeating them is doing nothing to convince me that I should care. Kern Samuel put together some marked-up fabric, paper, and steel and Amina Ross collected rainwater in glass molds, and while those are vaguely New York organic-thematic, I recall their explanations (I didn't write them down) straying into overreaching for social-allegorical meanings that feel doubly unjustified in such icy company. On the whole the exhibition feels distorted by the rough handling of a too-rigid thesis, straining to justify putting these artists together when they probably would have come together more effectively if the curator let it be a showcase of relevant artists without any particular reasoning. A stronger show would have allowed more freely associative connections from a wider field of artists, like the inclusion of Jerry, rather than scouring for artists with superficial similarities. Not that I blame the curator, museum directors don't seem receptive to anything good anymore.