What's New in New York Art?

0:01I came away from the show in general a bit worried actually there's a question that the exhibition poses around the limitations of certain kinds of connections. And it did make me think about how tight and maybe even airless are some of these circles of ideas and these discourses.

0:21I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:30We're in the hot dog days of August, awaiting the new art season to kick off in September. In the meantime, I thought we might take the temperature of art in New York, looking at two big museum shows that opened earlier in the year and that seek to highlight new voices from the city. So we will be talking about Greater New York, the important show at Moment PS1 in Queens that comes once every five years. This time out, it has over 53 artists and collectives from the Big Apple stretched across several floors of the museum and is certainly worth checking out before it closes its several months run later this month.

1:07It's gotten generally very positive reviews. We'll see what we think. and the other show we're going to be talking about is the seventh AIM biennial at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. It's called Forms of Connection and features art by the last two classes of the museum's Artist in the Marketplace program. That's a year-long career accelerator and professional development seminar that takes on 14 artists based in New York each year. So it's a good chance to see what styles and themes emerging artists are looking to now to be taken seriously. There's been quite a lot of angst recently about art in New York, and this is our chance to see how healthy it actually looks, and also to see if there are exciting new figures to watch emerging from the mix.

1:52With me to get into it is Danielle Jackson, the critic, writer, researcher, teacher, and returning Art Angle guest who is working on an article about the AIM Biennial for Artnet News. Hello, Danielle. Hi, Ben. So I know a little bit about what you think about the AIM Biennial. I think we should start there because it's the one that people might know less. We went up there together. Maybe to get us going, just give people a sense what it feels like and what you thought about it off the bat. First impressions. So the theme or the question of the Biennial is around forms of connection and whether the institution itself can serve as a place to connect various populations, to connect artists, to connect to local audiences, in particular publics that may not be thought of as art-going publics, I imagine, is some of the subtext there.

2:41And by extension, the work feels very much oriented to community practices. As you walk in, you see three somewhat life-size papier-mâché sculptures by Piero Penizzotto, which depict a teacher and their students. And you'll also see a scene of a bus stop and you'll find other sort of like local familiar community settings. Just an initial introduction of the show. As you move through it, I believe you see kind of crystallization of a number of ideas that have taken hold with artists who have either positioned themselves or their work as being outside of normal art discourses. And that arises in ideas like cyanotypes and photorealistic painting, domestic interiors, these sort of ideas, which we can talk about later.

3:30But I felt that this show really kind of organized all of these ideas into one nugget, which may, you know, invite some questions around what does that mean for a program that is thinking about how to position artists in a larger marketplace? So let me just ask you right off the bat, you're up in the Bronx. You mentioned the uneasiness with the museum. That struck me immediately. They have a quote on the wall about the museum, despite being a complicated place to hold space, is important to me. And yeah, I think the Penny Zotto work underlines that it's about community. It's a very celebratory, like holding space for communities kind of vibe.

4:08Yeah, I mean, I would say my connection to the Bronx is that I moved there about 15 years ago to start this organization that trains photographers and photojournalists and filmmakers. And it was a very immediate kind of hyper-local understanding of how residents in otherwise residential neighborhoods connect to art institutions. And so to your question, is there tension or what have you with the Bronx Museum? I would say no, except that it's important to understand that it's one of these institutions that, if I recall, was formed out of demands, you know, in the 60s and early 70s that there are culturally resident museums and universities and community colleges and this sort of thing.

4:48and sometimes the local idea of what art should be represented in those spaces is not the same discussion as what you would see in the contemporary art world and I think this show actually tried to throw both of those ideas together it's sort of a reflection on you know maybe decade plus of these sorts of social practice and other expanded practices that attempt to work with people and think about people. Yeah, actually, it's interesting because the Piero Penizzotto is an artist that he shared with the greater New York, which we'll talk about later. And so I think, although, you know, there's a specific thing in the Bronx about trying to represent the Bronx community and feel resonant with that, there is this general conversation around museums and art in general that is trying to split the difference between some kind of like edgy, you know, avant-garde, not really the word anymore, but, you know, kind of individualistic art practice and community-based work.

5:46And I see that as a tension in both these shows. And we can get into it. Were there any works that you particularly connected with in this show? Yes. I enjoyed Jordan Cruz's Opportunity for Stillness, which is a park bench that has been cast in red wax from the kind of votive candles that might be found in a kind of internal domestic altar, a common practice in the Bronx. And you also see these candles outside in certain situations as well. And it's a very bright red, which to me signaled kind of playfulness, but also a kind of emergency flare. And it's shaped, it sort of appears to be melting.

6:26So there are two kind of divots in it. And I think it's changing shape over time. We've had a very hot summer at times. It's interesting you connected with the material. That's very interesting to me because I would say maybe a pet peeve of mine in these shows, and since this is a show about professional practices worth flagging, is there's this kind of like because I say so symbolism that you get a lot where it's like artists working with personally charged materials, personal archives, or like found stuff from the street. And then the label will come in and tell you it's like a construction net.

6:59So it signifies confinement. And I always am like, well, does it though? I mean, is it really, does the work say that? Or is that just your personal association? So it's interesting that you as someone who's in the neighborhood kind of actually did connect with the candle reference immediately. I'm just mentioning that it told me that it's about the votive candle, but you know, it's a park bench. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it's a park bench, which would be recognizable to anybody who lives in New York. It is an example of the way that certain ideas are becoming collapsed. So the domestic, but it's also a very clear signifier of New York City life.

7:36And I did feel that throughout the show, and this was one example, that there's sort of this overlay, as you say, is because I say so, that this is about, I think in this piece it said like spiritual care and ritual. And to me, it meant something totally different. Yeah. It's like an interesting object. Right. It's an interesting object. It's life size. It's melting. It's red. It sort of popped. It's very clean. A lot of the work in the show is very rough hewn, right? And even though it's sort of melting and changing shape, I found that to be an interesting kind of intervention into this object if it's very familiar.

8:10Yeah, it's changing shape, I should say, in a way that it doesn't immediately say to me like it's melting. It's actually kind of an enigmatic. It looks like there are waves going through it or something. It's kind of an altered but found form. And yeah, I thought that was compelling. I guess I liked the work that's back-to-back with that by an artist named Chiarita, The Messenger's Pew, 2025, which is a found piece of furniture, as I understand it. And then I think this artist always paints on found objects from the street. Yeah, a lot of found objects in both of these shows, a lot of scrappy stuff.

8:46But this is a pew. It has an image of a sort of naked figure on the back of it, facing away from you. It has a Bible set on the bench. And you can kind of tell that the bench was a found object. And I just thought that the work had a lot of pathos. I liked the way it was painted. I thought there's something to this style of working with found stuff that transcended just a kind of scavenger aesthetic. I don't know. Did you connect with that piece at all? You know, it felt familiar. And I'll go back to the point I made earlier. This show felt like the crystallization of the key touch points that a lot of young artists, I think, are relying on again and again.

9:28And so for me, the pew, the Santa Biblia evoked Southern ritual spirituality, which is another of the core themes. I came away from the show in general a bit worried. Actually, there's a question that the exhibition poses around the limitations of certain kinds of connections. And it did make me think about how tight and maybe even airless are some of these circles of ideas and these discourses. courses. What do you mean connections though? Community connections? Well, no, the connections of these artists, as artists are emerging and relating to one another, sharing ideas, circulating ideas, circulating themes, circulating ways of working.

10:09I feel like the show checked all the boxes of what I've come to expect to see ways in which I'm seeing young artists kind of work and the kind of like found assemblage and calls to church culture and religion and the mention of the grandmother, you know, like there were just so many of these examples throughout the show that felt limiting to me in a way. And it made me wonder about how artists are thinking about how to position themselves in their work. What I think what I came away feeling very strongly is what started as counter hegemonic and experimental practices. And I have here examples of AIM biannual catalogs going back to the nineties, what we're like.

10:46Daniel does the homework. Exciting and kind of new ways. It's now becomes totally codified, right? It's totally codified that you've got to make a very realistic drawing of a worker. You've got to bring in found materials. You have to develop some sort of claim about a relationship to the natural world that maybe has a little bit of moral superiority to it. I also found that the shows, in thinking about the institution's connections to its publics, thought about the works reflect an idea of the everyday or the ordinary that is being defined in a particular way now that is different from how it might have been defined 10 years ago or 20 years ago, right?

11:25Today, the everyday or the ordinary means an ordinary person, ordinary people as audiences, but it might mean the use of natural materials, whereas maybe 10 years ago, it might have meant encounters with commercial culture, consumer culture. Yeah, like the everyday could mean tedium. The everyday could mean family. I think about the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart and like aliveness to life. Here, it means a sort of like quasi kind of spiritualized redemptive connection to community nature and tradition is what I feel from the show yeah which when you say airless to me it kind of like it's very difficult to criticize this stuff because this is continuous recourse I have noticed in this show which is it's like people really entering the discourse and the highest levels it's like I took this thing from my family and here I am honoring them like everything looks like kind of an altar or ritual space.

12:21And it's kind of like, like I said, with the, because I said so symbolism, that's this kind of circle you're talking about where it's like, well, is there any room to have other readings of it or develop? Or other ways of thinking about the same set of ideas, right? Yeah. I mean, I'll say just before we move on, I'd say a painting that I didn't connect with at first, but kind of grew on me was this artwork by Leek Young Kang, who's from Seoul but lives in Brooklyn. And it's called A Map of Invisible Dimensions Nuts by 2025. And that's referring to the Egyptian goddess Nut. And at first I didn't connect with this.

13:01It's kind of black and gray, a very enigmatic, weird, symbolic space with little hints of red. I couldn't really connect the mythological narrative to the image. Myth, by the way, various references to myth. also another trope that you get kind of a simple way to ground yourself in something bigger than the art object. But I don't know, something about this, and I think the fact that it's little intention with some of these themes, you know, it seems to be referencing world cosmologies and the abstraction of it. And I think the artist actually has a pretty interesting symbolic vocabulary. So it's a good lesson that first impressions aren't always the right impression.

13:41This particular word grew on me as I thought about this show. I also like Sang Min Lee's Nostalgia Without Memory, which are sort of sculptures that are hanging from the ceiling and they look like mobiles. They're made of printer paper and rebar. This was another example, though, where the language around the work, well, I mean, you know, I think it referred to cultural survival and these sorts of things, felt a bit shoehorned into the themes that were already established by the organizing principle. They're kind of delicate looking. And again, it's another example where you see the rough hewn and the handmade and, you know, recirculating found materials through printer paper and making it look like it's something from nature.

14:23But I did appreciate this sort of convex shape. Well, I think we should move on to Greater New York. It's interesting. Some of these themes will recur, but at the same time, some of them will be a little different, which shows you that there definitely is something in the air at the same time that there are curators trying to mix things up. This show I did not go to you with. We went independently, so I really actually have no idea what you think. What did you think of Greater New York? How does it feel? Oh, you know, I thought there was a lot to ponder. I mean, multiple critics writing about this show.

15:01Yeah. And to me, it just shows me that it's a time of angst in New York. Like, just immediately took the show as a referendum. It's a chance to say New York is back. That, like, people are saying art in New York is dead. And that there's a lot of scrappy vitality in this show is how people were approaching it. And I'm not sure I totally agree with that assessment myself. Although, you know, I like this show better than some other big surveys I've seen. But I am a little unresolved about it overall, though. Yeah, I came away with a few thoughts. I felt aware of the show or the artists in the show addressing themes that they understood to be important, but perhaps didn't have a lot of direct experience with or didn't have experience with at the time of industry or surveillance or even media history.

15:50So I thought about what it meant for a younger generation to interpret the recent past and to interpret these kind of forces in culture that are persistent and still with us, but have changed. And they kind of have to reach back and think about it, but they don't really have the firsthand experience necessarily in the way to draw out what I would find important about those topics, for example. Okay, give me an example. So surveillance, if we think about Wynne McCarthy, Cameron Neal, Vijay Mascherani in a certain sense in the video, okay, where he's wearing the contraption on his head. I don't think I even saw that part of the video, but that's fine.

16:30Those were long videos. Yeah, it felt rotoscoped. So yeah, I mean, I got this sense that there's a bit of a projection about what it was like to use a landline telephone or what it was like to encounter a police photographer in the street. And the way that sometimes these experiences are depicted or what is important about those experiences doesn't quite land with me is what it was actually like to kind of encounter those things. Or, for example, something like Wyn McCarthy's works with the reflective dishes that look like satellites, but they... Yeah, they're sort of sculptural, sculpturals of like convex mirrors.

17:08Yeah, it felt like in some ways disconnected from a history of artists who had been thinking about surveillance. It felt like a kind of entry into saying, oh, you know, we're surrounded by cameras. This happens in Vijay Mascherani's work too, which is a good place to start. and in some ways I'm actually encouraged because I've seen through working with students and seeing other performances, I'm thinking particularly about a show by Raja Feather that I saw last year. Like there is a generation of people who kind of came up after Snowden, came up after wiretapping and their interpretation of surveillance is about social media and citizen journalism and what have you.

17:46This does feel like an attempt to recover some of the surveillance infrastructure. Like it's an acknowledgement of surveillance infrastructures in a way, but in a way that feels like it's starting a few steps behind where we left off when artists were kind of thinking about that more. Yeah, well, this is a big hobby horse of yours, you know, is that the historylessness of the present. I know that's something you think about a lot. It's like how the digital present has kind of eaten people's historical memories. There's like very little understanding of even the recent past with new artists.

18:25I wonder if there's just a little tension in the show between this attempt to address, you know, the frighteningness of the present and all the disruptions of the present that appears in the text around the show. And then this kind of recourse to these kind of funky, tactile, scrappy, scavenger, street scavenger language, which, you know, is almost deliberately removed from any kind of sense of the most unnerving parts of the contemporary tech and surveillance landscape, repressive apparatus, and so on? Well, I'll make two points. The first is, I found it interesting that a number of artists seem to be committed to working within very rigid, well-established systems, particularly all of the works around categorization and taxonomy.

19:11One of my favorite works actually was by Akira Ikezoe. I really appreciated this oil painting of hundreds of small symbols that he has categorized going across. It works horizontally and vertically. So, you know, there might be ways of thinking about a stick or ways of thinking about a face, or I think it's called pareidolia, right? When you see a face and objects or ways of thinking about a round shape, you know, it might be an egg, it might be a work of art, right? Much of the other objects in that room required stepping back because they were large scale. So you did have to step forward into this work and really spend time with it because the individual shapes and the taxonomy are maybe two inches tall.

19:52Although that I would say is generally the case. It's like everything's fussy and small. And like there are very few, you know, things that you watch in and you just have a gestalt experience of them. This is immediately like. In this show you think. In this show, in both shows really. I think maybe that's why the bench stands out to you because it's just you immediately see like this clear form that's been warped a little bit. I mean, that's just not the vibe. Everything is like tiny little things. I think that Ikezoe, this kind of hieroglyphic painting is, yeah, a really interesting way in. And it's worth mentioning, I think it resonates a lot right now because it takes the language of painting and then enters into these conversations about systems and information.

20:37There's also an artist who was in the Whitney Biennial. So something about this artist people consider to be very now. And I think that has to do with some kind of triangulation between craft that is painting and this sort of evocation of a data sphere that's bigger than that. So it's kind of like using craft to bring these larger systems into human reach somehow. That's very much the vibe that people are looking for is some sense of like human experience in a world that's dehumanizing rapidly. The reason why this show has resonated with people is because I think it generally works on that wavelength where it's like about a street level look at a city that feels maybe like it's operating by logics that no longer feel particularly vital from the human level.

21:29I think you get that throughout. But I think it's interesting that the way to achieve that is through all of these taxonomies, right? So you have photographs of, for example, like Fields Harrington's collection of bicycles, or you've got Rachel Hanlon's pictures of rear view mirrors or this sort of thing. These are works I don't find particularly strong, which doesn't have to be an issue. I think the way that they're presented individually, you could collage something like that. There's another way to work with that material. but it's they're presented very linearly and very like each bicycle is a discrete object in a frame i think why the return to all of these systems i wanted to ask you as the resident photo expert because that's also the case of maria angeletti's men at work which is this slideshow of photos she took over 10 years of construction workers she asked them to smile is there a name for this kind of photography where it's like just, they're less photographic objects than like catalogs of personal observations.

22:30It feels very post iPhone as a photographic discourse, right? Your experience of them as photography kind of involves you projecting and identifying with just the amount of time that it took to accumulate a personal archive of photography. Is that the name of it? I think the merit that we're supposed to think about in that work is that some of these practices were sustained over time and it's not about the quality of the picture which is unfortunate i actually think like again it's sort of like starting a couple steps back from other ways of engaging is that because you think the aesthetic photo is connected with advertising is it part of this kind of like trying to remove ourselves from the technological world i don't even think it's that i don't much high speed imagery that it's too beautiful and compelling no i mean i we will get to that i do have thoughts on that but no i mean i think it's like what's the kind of standard from the perspective of the curator's perspective?

23:23Is it just an encounter with difference? It's like a woman photographing men. You know, I think it could go deeper in my opinion. Like, okay, what about these pictures of workers? What is it that they're here in New York? So I was thinking in terms of artists who are drawing upon media from the past, I generally know how a newspaper worked from 1920 or 1909, right? Style of journalism has changed, but I know how to open it. I know how to follow an article in the columns. I know how to follow it through, right? But I get the sense with some artists, like they don't know what it was like to get a three-way call on a landline.

24:00That's kind of been lost, right? So for a long time, I think you had a connective thread that media makers could generally understand how something worked, how something functioned, and what the experience was of encountering it. And now I see where there's sort of this like imagination or projection of, oh, it must have been like this, or it must have felt like that. It's not grounded in experience. That's not necessarily to blame. It actually just speaks to how quickly technology is changing, you know? So like I had a student last semester say that Substack was different than blogs because Substacks are about personal writing, which meant they didn't know the blogs were about personal writing.

24:39And all of this is only like 15 to 20 years. That's not very old, right? So to your point about like the history of this, yeah, we're in this place where there's so much of everything. There's so much change. It can be very hard to grasp what an experience with or an encounter with media or art was like. And how do you land at a reference within that? We were talking before about ChatGPT, right? It brings up examples. It's not necessarily exhaustive. It's not necessarily authoritative. are artists approaching references that way as well they're sort of landing on certain things or without having a full picture of where it's placed within a larger history there's just very little art history evoked it's like very much like people starting languages their own languages from the beginning and sort of in some ways i mean i think there are political reasons that identity is so present in in these works because they really are a lot of them invoke personal experiences, personal traumas, history of migration.

25:39Although I think we're maybe moving to slightly more social projects instead of specifically about people's personal history, always in this show. But I do wonder, I mean, if just like the reference to the personal comes to stand in for history, you know, where it's like history begins and ends with the self. Can you name an example from these shows? Let me tell you an artwork that I like from the show. I think Kristen Walsh, if I had to pick one artist from both these shows who I think is a big new voice. I would say it was Kristen Walsh. She makes these machines. They're kind of ambiguous machine tableaus.

26:18They're very shiny, which I just flagged because that's unusual in these shows. There's a lot of like dull looking objects and they evoke different things. There's one in this show that evokes It's like an elevator going down into the ground, and it's like the apparatus on top of the elevator that's the subject of the sculpture. I believe these are found materials, but they're transformed and polished into this object, and they have little moving parts that are hidden but kind of move around like magic. And I just think, to be fair, that this benefits a lot from contrast. Like I said, I think there's this scavenger thing.

27:00My first reaction to Greater New York, Danielle, was I was like, we cannot go on in this vein forever of unmonumental stuff. I think we've been in this for so long where the vibe seems to me to be essentially stuff that looks like it's on the verge of having some kind of intention. Like stuff found on the street made in the little monuments and stuff. I think there's some argument to be made that that has to do with real estate in New York, that artists in New York can't make big ambitious work and they're working with stuff from the street. I know students have told me that, but it's really just this fact that it's on the verge of intentionality.