An installation by Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker at the exhibition "Uncertain States of America."
"Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium"
remains through Sept. 10 at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson,N.Y., (845) 758-7598. Starting in the fall, it will travel to the Reykjavik Art Museum in Iceland and the Herning Art Museum in Denmark.
via NYTimes:
Art Review
Endgame Art? It's Borrow, Sample and Multiply in an Exhibition at Bard College
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: July 7, 2006
Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.
THE world is ever with us, and perhaps never so much as now. Reality presses in from every side. Peace, tolerance, environmental awareness and even disinterested common sense are in scarily short supply. The future of the planet has never looked more uncertain, nor has America's role in that future seemed, to many, to be more fraught, shortsighted or self-centered.
So hopes understandably rise at the prospect of an art exhibition with an ambitious, resonating title like "Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium." Equally enticing, the show, at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College here, has been put together by outside agitators from "old Europe." It originated last October at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, where it was organized by Gunnar Kvaran, the museum's director, working with two high-profile critic-curators: Daniel Birnbaum, director of the alternative space Portikus in Frankfurt, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Swiss co-director of exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
The curators have had the courage of their convictions. They have limited themselves to a manageable head count and focused almost exclusively on a single generation. All but a few of the 48 artists (including three two-artist teams) in the show were born in the 1970's, the children of older baby boomers.
In all, this exhibition seems primed to tell us something very specific and useful. It does and it doesn't. It is one of the most flawed successes, or interesting failures, that have appeared of late.
It coheres to the point of redundancy yet, as noted by a young artist I ran into at the show, the works don't really seem to engage one another, to talk among themselves. It reflects young artists' interest in all kinds of realistic styles — as well as reality itself — yet seems pulled down by a complacent, in-crowd hermeticism and a weird emotional deadness.
The show has an endgame, end-time mood, as if we are looking at the end of the end of the end of Pop, hyperrealism and appropriation art. The techniques of replication and copying have become so meticulous that they are beside the point. This is truly magic realism: the kind you can't see, that has to be explained. It is also a time when artists cultivate hybridism and multiplicity and disdain stylistic coherence, in keeping with the fashionable interest in collectivity, lack of ego, the fluidity of individual identity. But too often these avoidance tactics eliminate the thread of a personal sensibility or focus.
I would call all these strategies fear of form, which can be parsed as fear of materials, of working with the hands in an overt way and of originality. Most of all originality. Can we just say it? This far from Andy Warhol and Duchamp, the dismissal of originality is perhaps the oldest ploy in the postmodern playbook. To call yourself an artist at all is by definition to announce a faith, however unacknowledged, in some form of originality, first for yourself, second, perhaps, for the rest of us.
Fear of form above all means fear of compression— of an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible. With a few exceptions, forms of collage and assemblage dominate this show: the putting together (or simply putting side by side) of existing images and objects prevails. The consistency of this technique in two and three dimensions should have been a red flag for the curators. Collage has driven much art since the late 1970's. Lately, and especially in this exhibition, it often seems to have become so distended and pulled apart that its components have become virtually autonomous and unrelated, which brings us back to square one. This is most obvious in the large installations of graphic works whose individual parts gain impact and meaning from juxtaposition but are in fact considered distinct artworks.
