A Guide to the Unmonuments of New York
By Henri Ennui
In a century defined by the twin horrors of (a.) terrorism and (b.) the memoir Eat, Pray, Love,
our continued existence as a species is tenuous at best. Into these
precarious times dances a sprightly new breed of artist. Clad only in
American Apparel leggings and a deep V, this new anti-hero functions as
a Duchampian dumpster-diver, sifting through the wretched refuse of our
teeming shores for something suitably shabby. In the wake of the new
New Museum's monumental exhibition Unmonumental, I set out to find the hottest, youngest, and most emerging artists working in this new mode.
It was on a warm summer afternoon in Soho that I stumbled upon
artist Joe Rizzo working on one of his pieces. Rizzo is best known for
his renegade site-specific installations on crowded street corners and
his numerous violations of the New York City Building Code. In what is
an increasingly prevalent tendency among this new generation of
artists, Rizzo resists defining his practice in established aesthetic
terms. When pressed to comment on his work Rizzo only shrugs and states
enigmatically that he works in "construction."
Rizzo's new piece would eventually consist of an unspecified number
of glass shards arranged in a paint bucket. However I was struck by the
fearless honesty with which he initially set about, first trying to jam
a large sheet of intact glass into what was obviously an unsuitably
small container, and only later, after an agonizingly slow process of
almost stupefied deliberation, smashing everything with a hammer. It
was a "performance" both ritualized and unscripted that posited the
Artist as Naïve Fool. And while the final piece bore traces of violence
and nihilism, Rizzo's final decision to install the piece curbside on
garbage collection day highlighted its precarious status as objét.
Next it was off to the Lower East Side where what may well have been
a young emerging artist had recently installed a witty rejoinder to
Sarah Lucas' 1994 Au Naturel. The artwork consisted of a
faded foam mattress on which two pieces of particleboard and a flannel
blanket acted as crude stand-ins for female and male genitalia,
respectively. Themes of presence/absence seemed to literally waft
downwind from this piece while the mattress itself bespoke a
(his/hers)tory all its own.
Later, while playing the flâneur in the meatpacking
district, I was suddenly confronted by a disheveled character pushing a
shopping cart and muttering obscenities. Widely recognized as an
unrecognized genius, this was none other than acclaimed outsider artist
"Marge" transporting her latest piece, a subversive assemblage of
high-brow, low-brow and uni-brow references. Using the shopping cart as
a vessel, Marge had deftly repackaged Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipse
as a cheap commodity. Folds of felt, á la Robert Morris, rested on the
handle coupled with a black hooded sweatshirt evoking the work of
Nayland Blake. A wry text element told me to "SHOP ONLINE." In Marge's
hairy hands, the spiritual efficacy of Minimalist sculpture had been
transformed into fodder for an ever-voracious shopping container--a
searing critique of the commodity fetishism of canonical art history.
The 'other' has long been a subject of serious artistic inquiry.
Situated on the outskirts of normativity, the marginality of the
'other' challenges dominant tropes of 'oughtness,' while acting as a
foil to alpha-narrativity. 14 year-old emerging artist Timmie (in this
field you must discover emerging artists before anyone else
does) captures not only the profound alienation of today's globalized
world, in which hierarchies are blurred and collective identities
challenged, but does so with a material--sports balls--that
simultaneously evokes a Derridean sense of play and critiques
notions of American masculinity. While one football is left alone to
explore the limitless horizon, the others are collected in a veritable
homoerotic congeries. Freighting the installation with even more
significance is the fact that the term "balls" is American slang for
the testes. This work is a deft nod both to Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle, and Nicolás Guagnini's 77 Testicular Imprints,
as well as to these artists' testicles themselves--which are at all
times both unified with their bodies, yet separate, dangling in a
liminal space.
Piggybacking on the current MoMA exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,
art collective ALLSTATE INTERIOR DEMOLITION (AID) presented its own
deskilled version of the prefab home on a side street in Soho. In this
ambitiously abject project, AID deliberately used such cast-off
elements as clunky plywood scraps and rusty cast-iron rollers to poke
fun at a rhizome of outmoded architectural notions, from environmental
sustainability to responsible design. Erected just south of Houston
Street, the resulting modular structure sits at the point where Little
House on the Prairie intersects post-Koolhaasian "Junkspace."
Only time can tell how history will judge us. But if these pieces
attest to anything, it is that America not only produces the most
garbage of any nation; it also produces the most provocative and
conceptually rigorous garbage of any nation. And that's something we
can all celebrate.
Henri Ennui, © 2008
Henri Ennui is a collective based in Brooklyn.
