reviews unmonumental
UnmonUmentAl:
the object in the 21st centUry
new museum, new York
1 Decem ber – 30 m arch
Even before the opening of the New Museum’s new building, the title of its inaugural exhibition was going to be
taken either as a deliciously inadvertent joke or a deliciously intentioned one. And either way, it was headed for
the cultural water cooler. The mythic status of the New Museum precluded anything but monumentality for its
new Bowery home.
Apparently it wasn’t a joke. Despite their best efforts, curators Richard Flood, Massimiliano Gioni and
Laura Hoptman have crafted an exhibition so stubbornly unmonumental that the sheer quantity, unconventional
length and playful scale renders it flagrantly epic. In their statement for the four-phased exhibition Unmonumental,
the three curators claim that this new millennium is marked by the destruction of monuments and icons, and they
use this assertion as motivation. While you might agree with their claim, it’s a broad generalisation. Our century’s
violence is not atypical. What makes the contemporary climate different from before is a pervasive cynicism
– there is no need to destroy icons, because the icons are myths.
The three curators solicit their artists to utilise the rubble that remains and, according to their statement,
‘start picking up the pieces and rebuilding this world from scratch’. But instead of their optimism, what Flood, Gioni
and Hoptman have coalesced is not so much a rebuilding as a memorialising – yet the results still gratify.
The intricate sculptures in Unmonumental territorialise the open floor plan of the museum, spilling
throughout the three galleries. This is an exhibition of such stylistic cohesion – perhaps too much so – that some
critics contend it’s dull. It does easily slip into monotony. But delineation is in the details.
There are artists who exhibit obvious influences. Shinique Smith’s bales of used clothing are striking for their
similarity to Christian Boltanski’s epic Holocaust clothing installations. Martin Boyce’s fluorescent skeletons are
beautiful and faintly figurative, suggestive of what would happen if Dan Flavin decided to arrange his monuments
askew in space, rather than on a wall. Sometimes self-conscious, sometimes ambivalent, the remaining artists
borrow from Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Dada and Duchamp. They appropriate the readymade, the handmade,
the remade, icons, culture and collage with a skilful do-it-yourself ethos.
Rachel Harrison’s sculpture Huffy Howler (2004) is indicative. It is among a group of virtuosic works that
bitingly interrogate celebrity and consumerist fantasy. Cheap handbags filled with rocks hang from the Huffy
Howler’s handlebars, while a blown-up publicity still of Mel Gibson looking pretty in Braveheart bangs is flagged
from a long pole off the bicycle’s frame. The piece scorns hypocrites – in this case, the very sexy and heroic
Hollywood leading man we all used to believe in, pre anti-Semitic remarks. Collages and drawings of similarly
shallow pleasures cover Elliot Hundley’s Proscenium (2006). John Bock has translated the psychology of popular
culture into landscapes of refuse. His Untitled (2007) combines a photograph of Kate Moss with an egg carton,
an empty can of spray paint and fabric, among other objects, humorously underscoring the artificiality of beauty
standards and the sloppy seconds of rabid spectatorship.
‘Sloppy seconds’ brings to mind the only piece that’s especially irritating: Harrison’s other sculpture, This Is
Not an Artwork (2006). The piece is pointless. If it’s not art, then why is it here? Such cheeky wit was innovative for
John Baldessari 30 years ago but is played out now. Her stickers would be put to better use decorating my own
shitty Ikea furniture.
Unsurprisingly, in a show so dense with sculptural accumulation, what is truly unmonumental is the most
simple. Elsewhere, Gedi Sibony’s unadorned discard is beautiful and poetic, even inspiring. In the context of this
show, his installation The Circumstance, the Illusion, and Light Absorbed as Light (2007) is effectively harrowing.
With a sheet of twisted plastic appearing like it just drifted into place on its own, the installation envisions a future
where inanimate objects become human in a landscape devoid of them. A similar but humorous fatalism imbues
Anselm Reyle’s Pflug (2002). It supposes that just by painting an irrelevant relic fluorescent orange, it will acquire
new meaning. It’s still irrelevant, it just happens to be orange now and maybe a bit sexier.
Unmonumental is an exhibition of junk skilfully manipulated into meaning. It exploits the premise that what is
most telling about human nature is not the polished monuments, the photographs framed or whatever manicured
representation is chosen, but rather what is wasted, left behind and forgotten, whether simply a gossip magazine
or a sense of political urgency. Though the works on display here are not monuments in the traditional sense of
the word, the artists assembled for this messy group exhibition nonetheless have cobbled together monuments
– monuments that speak to who we are, or maybe who we wish we weren’t. David Everitt Howe
Artreview 148
march_REVIEWS.indd 148 5/2/08 13:41:43
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