“Surround Audience” – New Museum Triennial 2015
New Museum (235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002, USA), Feb 2 – May 24, 2015
It is not in the nature of biennial or triennial exhibitions to offer a clear picture so much as a wide-eyed survey under an overarching theme. The New Museum Triennial hopes to present emerging and topical art in a predictive manner which other museums are unable or less inclined to offer. The Triennial’s deeper significance lies largely in its afterglow—in encountering work by these artists elsewhere in subsequent exhibitions and as their practices continue to develop. Its present tense should be an alert, stimulating look at current artistic production and its provocations.
“Surround Audience” featured some 51 artists from different countries. This slightly awkward title is perhaps an apt one to express the state of digital culture and the growing sensation of individuals or users as objects, their own agency becoming less distinct as that of greater powers—or technology itself—subtly encroaching; in exploring the effects of technology, the theme leant towards affect. A plethora of works in very diverse media included those which were decaying, performative, animated, painted, carved, folded or photographic, conveying if nothing else the multiplicity and fraught nature of the environment curators Lauren Cornell and artist Ryan Trecatin sought to address. 30 pieces were commissioned (for example, from Nadim Abbas, Martine Syms, Casey Jane Ellison, Sascha Braunig and Juliana Huxtable), or came from residencies hosted by the museum. The installation across multiple floors and in the stairwell (which housed a single sound and light piece by Ashland Mines, “promise of echo” 2015), foyer and lower level was certainly complicated, at times uneasy. Repeat visits improved the experience of this dense exhibition, the better to single out particular works in the crowd.
“Surround Audience”, exhibition view at the New Museum. Courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley.
This triennial was met with the sorts of questions to which such shows should be accustomed: could the arrangement of the works have been better? Was it well-enough researched? Did the commissioned works adequately reflect the theme of the show and take into account their audience? Was there too much emphasis on labelling (each piece had a lengthy introduction)? Were the works aesthetically strong? Was there a lot of basic appropriation? And what of the international breadth of the artists chosen; was it token? More specifically, some remarked on the lack of ostensibly “digital” or internet-based works; but to expect a majority of these would be in a sense to deny the prevalence of digital culture, as if it remained an isolated strand of daily life with an attendant artistic form.
“Surround Audience”, exhibition view at the New Museum. Courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley.
Josh Kline, “Freedom”, mixed-media installation, 2015. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York. Special thanks to Contemporary Art Partners.
While certain pieces drew predictable notice—Frank Benson’s “Juliana” sculpture (2015) of the artist Juliana Huxtable, and “Freedom” (2015) by Josh Kline, wherein life-sized riot police figures with Teletubbie faces guarded a synthetic video of Obama delivering an alternate inaugural address—less was said about a number of works sharing an anachronistic, surreal character. Shreyash Karle’s satiric Museum Shop of Fetish Objects series was one, displaying (in the manner of a curio cabinet) objects which converge on a dry critique of contemporary Indian society and misogyny in the Bollywood film industry. Strange gear carved from wood, cast in silicone or beaten from metal sheets included “Penis making apparatus”, a “Pregnant Head”, “Ladies Hanger” (a clothes hanger with a pair of protrusions added to help the garment hold a “female” shape), “Cleavage Plates for Idol Worship” and an orange silicone “He-she object”—a dildo on one end and a hollow tube on the other. Not far away, an installation by Eva Koťátková entitled “Not How People Move But What Moves Them” combined collages with a series of sculptures made form metal bars and in absurdist shapes designed to restrict or encase the body when “worn”; among these were cage-like shoes and a seat with metal frames to hold the legs. Both installations also included collage and drawing, and asserted a performative approach—with alternative “devices”—in a context reflecting the kind of digital distraction which prioritizes less physical modes of attention and participation, absorbing the body, and instead pursues ease, portability, accessibility and lightness in its apparatus.
Shreyas Karle, Museum Shop of Fetish Objects, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Project88, Mumbai . Special thanks to Project 88.
Shreyas Karle, “He-she object”, silicon, dimensions variable, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Project 88, Mumbai. Special thanks to Project 88.
Eva Koťátková , Not How People Move But What Moves Them, mixed media, 2013. Courtesy the artist; Meyer Riegger, Berlin / Karlsruhe; and hunt kastner, Prague. Additional support provided by the Czech Center, New York. Special thanks to hunt kastner.
A memorable stop-motion video piece by Peter Wachtler follows a pair of old fashioned crutches wired clumsily together. Like a pair of legs, they move forwards in a fraught, straining half-step against a thick, dark background while a monologue appears in subtitles below “I left trouble behind…I do whatever I want… I’m the BEST. Yes. ME”. A strong narrative work rendered poetic and lent pathos by the anthropomorphic movement of an object, “HCL H264″ shares something with the animations of Jan Švankmajer. Both artists have created brief, highly textured works in which objects or supports take on a life of their own, relating miniature tales through movement infused with a resilient frailty and a strange power inherited from the unseen hands that position them. Wachtler’s video delivers, too, the sense of allegory which attends surrealism—a mode Jörg Heiser has described as “borne out of a throbbing discontent with systematic forms of repression.” Also part of “Surround Audience” were two sculptures of wiry, flesh-less figures wrapped in bandages (“B” and “D”, both 2014) by Renaud Jerez which conveyed a similar sense of injury.
Peter Wächtler, “HCL H264″, single-channel video, black and white; 8:26 min, 2012. Courtesy the artist; Lars Friedrich, Berlin; dependence, Brussels; and Reena Spaulings, New York.
For this viewer at least, these works stood out in the Triennial’s crowd. In a similar vein, one might also point up Eduardo Navarro’s “Timeless Alex” (a performance piece with a tortoiseshell costume scaled up to human size), Shelly Nadashi’s large puppet installation and paintings by Firenze Lai in which heaving bodies illustrate awkward emotions. Considered loosely together, these works advance a sense of peculiarity, surrealism, frailty, slowness and satire relative to human affect—traits which were less predictable for this exhibition, and which furnish productive critiques for its thematic territory.
Firenze Lai, “Tennis Court”, oil on canvas, 101.6 x 76.2 cm, 2013. Private collection. Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, China. Special thanks to Alan Lau.
“Surround Audience”, exhibition view at the New Museum. Courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley.
