Exhibition Review
The Ungovernables: 2012 New Museum Triennial
Curated by Eungie Joon
“The 2012 New Museum Triennial will feature thirty-four artists, artist groups, and temporary collectives—totaling over fifty participants—born between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, many of whom have never before exhibited in the US.”
“The exhibition title, “The Ungovernables,” takes its inspiration from the concept of “ungovernability” and its transformation from a pejorative term used to describe unruly “natives” to a strategy of civil disobedience and self-determination. “The Ungovernables” is meant to suggest both anarchic and organized resistance and a dark humor about the limitations and potentials of this generation.”
“The Ungovernables” is an exhibition about the urgencies of a generation who came of age after the independence and revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Through both materials and form, works included in “The Ungovernables” explore impermanence and an engagement with the present and future. Many of the works are provisional, site-specific, and performative reflecting an attitude of possibility and resourcefulness.”
*From the 2012 New Museum Triennial Press Release
Although Materiality is not an official theme of this year’s New Museum Triennial, the investigation of physicality, perception and their potential to affect and be affected by the artist and his or her practice is prevalent throughout the show. From one floor if the museum to the next, viewers are presented with a variety of somewhat incongruous installations that explore the exchange between artist, material, space and time. I was actually a bit surprised to find that nearly all the pieces included in the show had some object or material oriented focus, some more than others obviously, and those are the pieces I will be focusing on for this review.
The top floor of the show is devoted almost entirely (except for a giant stack of currency from Zimbabwe, banded and organized by denomination) to a photographic installation by Jonathas de Andrade titled Ressaca Tropical (Tropical Hangover). In what is best described as a timeline, Andrade uses sequential, dated pages from a diary found in the trash, juxtaposed with dozens of photographs, unrelated in the sense that the text and images were not produced by the same person, or for the purpose of existing as a single piece of work. While not groundbreaking in any sense, this presented an interesting exercise for the viewer, who is has the freedom to associate the photos and text freely, within the physical constraints set by the artist’s placement of these two elements in relationship to one another.
The 4th floor of the museum is quite striking upon entry. A gigantic, decaying structure dominates the room, it’s form somewhat militaristic, or imperial, but wholly unidentifiable in terms of function. Apparently this is kind of the point. The piece, by Argentinian sculptor Adrian Villar Lobos titled “A Person Loved Me”constructed from clay, wood, metal, cement, Styrofoam and burlap, is an effort to juxtapose “monumentality with transcience.”
The wall text elaborates Villar Lobos’ approach, “the work depends on cracking surfaces, suggesting the inevitable failure of the object, of meaning, and the guaranteed transformation of all objects and ideas back to dust. Though the scale is unreadable, the operator and function incomprehensible, we sense failure, obsolescence, decline and ignorance.”
The result is exactly as the artist intended, and brings to mind the decaying (or soon to be) industrial and military-industrial machinery that has dominated domestic and international production for almost a century. What will these machines look like 200 years in the future? The anthropological element of this work is also quite interesting, as viewers are clearly attempting to “place” the structure in some context of contemporary use, while the thing itself looks more like a relic from a past civilization.
Once past that giant thing, viewers find one of the more visually appealing works included in the show (which is also included in several other shows around the glove simultaneously). Dahn-Vo’s “We The People” is a pounded copper replica of the “skin” of the Statue of Liberty, divided into several pieces and exhibited in fragments. Vo’s realization when conceiving of the piece, that the statue’s exterior skin is only as thick as two pennies, prompted his attempt to “present the monumental as unmonumental, and the familiar as unfamiliar.” By removing the content from its common form Vo “emancipates ‘liberty enlightening the world’ from her symbolic burden, releasing the interiority of the surface, matter and energy that constitutes from.”
This piece caused me to think of a passage from Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” in which he discusses a different way of perceiving objects as related to the their social, ideological and metaphysical existence…
“You could imagine things, second, as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects-their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence”(5)
Perhaps it’s simply because the installation itself is so visually striking, or the concept that drives it, either way, I found this piece relevant in the sense that it opens a new kind of thinking in which the parts don’t exist for the sole purpose of constituting the whole, but rather for the purpose of liberating the whole from it’s traditional function.
These two pieces also caused me to think quite a bit about Bill Brown’s analysis of Ajun Appudarai’s “The social Life of Things” and his questioning of methodological fetishism in “Thing Theory” as well…
“These are questions that ask less about the material effects of ideas and ideology than about the ideological and ide- ational effects of the material world and of transformations of it. They are questions that ask not whether things are but what work they perform- questions, in act, not about things themselves but about the subject- object relation in particular temporal and spatial contexts.”(6-7)
This idea of “subject-object relation” is integral to the two works.
Down another set of stairs viewers find Julia Dault’s “Untitled 20 (1:00pm-5:00pm February 5th 2012). In what is basically an arrangement of plexiglass, formica, Everlast box wraps and string Dault explores the “subjectivity of the artist through labor.” The installation is dependant entirely on the “conditions of a space, the strength of the artist at the time of execution and uncontrollable accidents determined by the materials.” What really contextualizes the piece is the title, which gives viewers insight into the production of the work.
I loved this piece, although not at all attractive in an aesthetic sense (to me at least), the notion of creating a work based almost entirely on elements which are normally hidden from viewers, like time, is pretty forward thinking. It brings to mind the often overheard modern art criticism (last time I heard it was at Damien Hirst’s “Spot Painting” retrospective)
“I could have done that in 5 minutes”
Well fine, Dault made this piece in 4 hours, does that give it any more or less value?
Another thing I really like about this piece is that the materials are right there, not cloaked, manipulated in some way to flex the artists ability to make “x” look like “y,” rather the focus is on “x” and how it moves, what happens when it’s bent, folded, tied with string.
One more floor down and I found my favorite piece(s) in the show, Jose Anotnio Vega Macotela’s “Time Exchange.” In collaboration with three different prisoners (whose crimes and sentences are not revealed) in Mexico City, Macotela organized a series of activities in which time and energy was exchanged mutually between himself and these three men. While not visually remarkable, the notion of this exercise is fascinating, materializing time both through exhibition and the act of creating the works themselves. For Time Exchange 302,307,332 and 341-348, Macotela corresponded with “El Payasito”
“In exchange for recruiting Macotela to try and free him, El Payasito drew each footstep he took while covering all possible trajectories inside the prison. He drew a black footstep every time he encountered surveillance.”
Presented to viewers are two stacks of paper, one, the court documents used to free El Payasito, and the other containing all the drawing of footsteps that were produced inside the prison.
In “Time Exchange 321” with “El Kamala”
“Macotela found certain merchandise items and smuggled them into the prison, In exchange, El Kamala mapped the flow if 100,000 pesos inside the prison”
Displayed is a pile of ziplock bags containing “undisclosed materials” and a diagram drawn by El Kamala in which each transfer of money in the chain is represented by a fingernail clipping. The result of these convoluted processes is an obvious, yet somewhat abstracted materialization of time that questions traditional notions of art making, who is an artist and collaboration.
The body of work presented at this year’s New Museum Triennial is relevant to several of the themes and ideas we’ve discussed in the course so far, context, “thingness,” energy and the ideology or socio-political life of an object among others, as well as touching on some of notions that we have yet to explore, like process, time and space as qualifiers or as defining the thing itself.