The Jesus of Generation OMG
Apr. 14th, 2009 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThe Generational: Younger Than Jesus is a group show at New York's elegant SANAA-designed New Museum, a triennial featuring fifty artists from 25 different countries. The show, which opened last week and continues until July (it'll be the first show I get to see at the New Museum; the place hadn't quite opened last time I was in New York), is a survey of artists under the age of 33, the year of Christ's death. Up there on the cross, Christ cried out "Oh my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And some (Jerry Saltz, for instance, taking his cue from a piece by Berlin-based artist Daniel Keller) are calling this "Generation OMG".
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The New Museum's video ad for the show features Post-It notes scribbled with buzz-phrases supposedly characteristic of the below 33 generation: idealistic, multiethnic, post-racial, recycler, Facebook generation, hipster, green, indie, atheist, drama queen, SMS, Harajuku Girls, soulless, stalker, nomadic, manic depressive, ADHD, patriot, fake, individualistic, target audience, peer-to-peer learner, No Logo...
James Kalm has done one of his video reports on the opening, and mentions that the New might be trying to steal some thunder from the Whitney Biennial in this new triennial, trying to harness some of the uptown institution's youthful energy. Like the Whitney, the New show has some artists crossing over from the musical counter-culture; a Brendan Fowler (aka BARR) piece references AIDS Wolf, for instance. And it's good to see my favourite Glaswegian art documentarist Luke Fowler's RD Laing film getting another airing.
Reviewers like Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker and Jerry Saltz in New York magazine seem pretty unanimous that the star of the show -- the Jesus of Generation OMG, if you like -- is gay, Philly-based, RISD-educated Ryan Trecartin.
Now, Ryan Trecartin had one of his insane, Paul McCarthy-ish, Warhol-films-ish YouTube-like (and YouTube-available) psychotic soap operas in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Working there every day as the Unreliable Tour Guide, I soon noticed that the monitor featuring the work attracted a younger, cooler, more respectful crowd than anything else in the show, and there was nothing I could do to distract or amuse them. So I made a circle around it; Trecartin's fast-edited video with its queasily-impressive video effects and its clever scripting couldn't be satirized.
Saltz reports that Trecartin's two-room installation at the New "involves a jet-plane interior, hanging suitcases, and videos of crazy kids of indistinct gender talking about tourism, time shares, and the credit crunch. Seeing it is like being patched into all of the computers in the world at once. Trecartin’s ecstatic poetics of overload, color, and density promise to influence a generation of artists". Serious talk.
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Reviewing Trecartin's I-BE AREA (2007), a feature-length (and crazy-making) video available in its entirety (should you have nerves of steel) on Ubu.com, veteran New York Times art reviewer Holland Cotter emphasized the gay qualities of the work:
"We're in a house of many tight, messy rooms. In the suburbs? Cyberspace? Hard to say. Anyway, it's night. A door bangs open. A girl, who is also a boy, dashes in, talking, talking. Other people are already there, in gaudy attire, dire wigs and makeup like paint on de Koonings. Everyone moves in a jerky, speeded-up, look-at-me way and speaks superfast to one another, to the camera, into a cellphone. Phrases whiz by about cloning, family, same-sex adoption, the art world, the end of the world, identity, blogging, the future. Suddenly indoors turns into outdoors, night into day, and we're at a picnic, in dappled sunshine, with a baby. Then this all reverses, and we're indoors again. A goth band is pounding away in the kitchen. The house is under siege. Hysteria. Everyone runs through the walls."
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(The running-through-the-walls bit is particularly impressive, I have to agree.)
"For queer artists of Mr. Trecartin's generation," Cotter continues, "cross-dressing, cross-identifying and cross-thinking are part of a state of being, not statements of political position. Like the work of John Waters and Jack Smith, his art is about just saying no to life as we think we have seen it and saying yes to zanier, virtual-utopian possibilities."
I get a camp aggression towards normality from the films -- all the characters seem exaggeratedly obnoxious, the settings ugly, heightened from normality into a kind of farce-normality. And yet the pushing-into-garishness of normal suburban ugliness (which happens also formally, on the level of edits and video effects and dialogue) actually becomes weirdly compelling, and suggests a utopia of artificiality, a kind of peacockery of ugliness which becomes a new sort of beauty. I don't think you could really ask anything more of a 28 year-old artist. Hail the new Jesus of OMG!
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The New Museum's video ad for the show features Post-It notes scribbled with buzz-phrases supposedly characteristic of the below 33 generation: idealistic, multiethnic, post-racial, recycler, Facebook generation, hipster, green, indie, atheist, drama queen, SMS, Harajuku Girls, soulless, stalker, nomadic, manic depressive, ADHD, patriot, fake, individualistic, target audience, peer-to-peer learner, No Logo...
James Kalm has done one of his video reports on the opening, and mentions that the New might be trying to steal some thunder from the Whitney Biennial in this new triennial, trying to harness some of the uptown institution's youthful energy. Like the Whitney, the New show has some artists crossing over from the musical counter-culture; a Brendan Fowler (aka BARR) piece references AIDS Wolf, for instance. And it's good to see my favourite Glaswegian art documentarist Luke Fowler's RD Laing film getting another airing.
Reviewers like Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker and Jerry Saltz in New York magazine seem pretty unanimous that the star of the show -- the Jesus of Generation OMG, if you like -- is gay, Philly-based, RISD-educated Ryan Trecartin.
Now, Ryan Trecartin had one of his insane, Paul McCarthy-ish, Warhol-films-ish YouTube-like (and YouTube-available) psychotic soap operas in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Working there every day as the Unreliable Tour Guide, I soon noticed that the monitor featuring the work attracted a younger, cooler, more respectful crowd than anything else in the show, and there was nothing I could do to distract or amuse them. So I made a circle around it; Trecartin's fast-edited video with its queasily-impressive video effects and its clever scripting couldn't be satirized.
Saltz reports that Trecartin's two-room installation at the New "involves a jet-plane interior, hanging suitcases, and videos of crazy kids of indistinct gender talking about tourism, time shares, and the credit crunch. Seeing it is like being patched into all of the computers in the world at once. Trecartin’s ecstatic poetics of overload, color, and density promise to influence a generation of artists". Serious talk.
[Error: unknown template video]
Reviewing Trecartin's I-BE AREA (2007), a feature-length (and crazy-making) video available in its entirety (should you have nerves of steel) on Ubu.com, veteran New York Times art reviewer Holland Cotter emphasized the gay qualities of the work:
"We're in a house of many tight, messy rooms. In the suburbs? Cyberspace? Hard to say. Anyway, it's night. A door bangs open. A girl, who is also a boy, dashes in, talking, talking. Other people are already there, in gaudy attire, dire wigs and makeup like paint on de Koonings. Everyone moves in a jerky, speeded-up, look-at-me way and speaks superfast to one another, to the camera, into a cellphone. Phrases whiz by about cloning, family, same-sex adoption, the art world, the end of the world, identity, blogging, the future. Suddenly indoors turns into outdoors, night into day, and we're at a picnic, in dappled sunshine, with a baby. Then this all reverses, and we're indoors again. A goth band is pounding away in the kitchen. The house is under siege. Hysteria. Everyone runs through the walls."
[Error: unknown template video]
(The running-through-the-walls bit is particularly impressive, I have to agree.)
"For queer artists of Mr. Trecartin's generation," Cotter continues, "cross-dressing, cross-identifying and cross-thinking are part of a state of being, not statements of political position. Like the work of John Waters and Jack Smith, his art is about just saying no to life as we think we have seen it and saying yes to zanier, virtual-utopian possibilities."
I get a camp aggression towards normality from the films -- all the characters seem exaggeratedly obnoxious, the settings ugly, heightened from normality into a kind of farce-normality. And yet the pushing-into-garishness of normal suburban ugliness (which happens also formally, on the level of edits and video effects and dialogue) actually becomes weirdly compelling, and suggests a utopia of artificiality, a kind of peacockery of ugliness which becomes a new sort of beauty. I don't think you could really ask anything more of a 28 year-old artist. Hail the new Jesus of OMG!
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Date: 2009-04-14 02:20 pm (UTC)Typically, he portrays typical American "suburbia" in an exaggerated, comic fashion, and then injects various plot elements that twist the main characters into addressing their places in that world, but they generally don't learn much in the process, and everything goes back to the way it was before.
If you ever wanted to get into Waters, I would suggest starting with Polyester (1981), which kind of bridges the gap between his earliest, most "trashy" work, and the more polished, "audience friendly" (I'm not sure much of his work can ever actually fit that description in a tidy way) stuff with real studio money behind it.
Here are some scenes:
Well worth watching anyway, if only for the minor role of Bobo, played by punk legend Stiv Bators.
Waters is usually too busy going for laughs to ever become tedious. A lot of people treat his movies like art films because they provide perfect fodder for those seeking easy examples of anti-establishment art, but I think that reading misses the point entirely. Waters is far more of a reveler than that interpretation allows for. He simultaneously worships and abhors the shlock of suburbia portrayed in his movies. His movies are more about gleeful fascination than social criticism.