|
It started a couple of years ago with a handful of thirtysomething artists inviting other artists to their apartments and basement Kunsthalles for seminars and reading series or writing tongue-in-cheek press releases for their shows on the Lower East Side. They had watched other artists push shiny sculptures and pretty-pervy paintings through huge white-cube galleries, with obscene amounts of cash and press coming out the other side. And they had witnessed the impact of all that high-minded political art of the seventies and eighties—that is, precious little. After Reagan came Bush I and II, after Gulf War I came September 11 and Gulf War II. So the artists went local: They turned to their living rooms and trusted friends, and started bands and small presses and planted front-yard gardens together, and let it be.
[Whitney Biennial co-curator Henriette] Huldisch calls all this a philosophy of “lessness,” while [co-curator Shamim] Momin identifies it as a recognition that progress is a sham and, moreover, computer programs and the Internet and time and space and life itself exist as open-ended feedback loops rather than linear stories with clear ends. “Something we found across a range of media and themes,” says Huldisch, “is a tendency toward smaller, more localized gestures, a modesty of material in approach and scale, a non-monumental quality.”
“There’s a certain wariness of grand revolutionary gestures and a great skepticism about the efficacy of art put into the service of a doctrine,” says Huldisch. “It’s not really an adolescent gesture per se,” says Momin, “as much as a rethinking of failed systems.”
-- Carly Berwick, “The Facebook Biennial,” New York
|
