Yes, that memo. About the 90s being back. But rather than romanticize the era by boiling it down to its ephemera (Tamagotchi, Yin-Yang signs, pogs, et cetera), like that Internet Explorer 10 video all up in your News Feed these days, the New Museum pays tribute to the decade by zeroing in on the year 1993, in a new show Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, named after the Sonic Youth album.
It was a politically and culturally-charged year. The AIDS crisis, health care, gun control, poverty, imperialism, and gay rights were hot topics at the forefront of the Clinton-led nation's collective mind. Buzzwords like otherness and difference revolved heavily around identity. In the New York art world, things were inevitably shaken up and flagrantly political, and works rejected commodified art and just got weirder, from the underground to the mainstream. The Whitney Biennial that year, for example, saw less traditional paintings and more installations for the very first time (Matthew Barney's video of himself as a genital-less mythical creature being just one example), by artists that hardly anyone had heard of, but who would make their marks as the progenitors of today's art.
1993 is an expansive show (OC recommends starting from the 5th floor and working your way down) that mixes the work of emerging artists from that year with work from artists who were already established in the Biennial/Biennale pantheon. But do the pieces dialogue directly with one another under a single conceptual umbrella? Not quite. Rather, the works are presented more as time capsule-like artifacts that each entered into the debates of the time in their own way, during the seminal year that 1993 proved to be for New York City.
Through May 26, 2013.
THE NEW MUSEUM
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
MAP
Lorna Simpsons' 7 Mouths
Found Arielle and Maggie!
Felix Gonzalez-Torres piece
Lina Bertucci's portraits of early 90s artists, including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kiki Smith, Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, John Currin, Gabriel Orozco.
Alex in front of Suzanne McClelland's Alright Alright Alright
Robert Wallingford's Prison Window
Works by Nan Goldin
Sue Williams' Are You Pro-Porn or Anti-Porn?
It was a politically and culturally-charged year. The AIDS crisis, health care, gun control, poverty, imperialism, and gay rights were hot topics at the forefront of the Clinton-led nation's collective mind. Buzzwords like otherness and difference revolved heavily around identity. In the New York art world, things were inevitably shaken up and flagrantly political, and works rejected commodified art and just got weirder, from the underground to the mainstream. The Whitney Biennial that year, for example, saw less traditional paintings and more installations for the very first time (Matthew Barney's video of himself as a genital-less mythical creature being just one example), by artists that hardly anyone had heard of, but who would make their marks as the progenitors of today's art.
1993 is an expansive show (OC recommends starting from the 5th floor and working your way down) that mixes the work of emerging artists from that year with work from artists who were already established in the Biennial/Biennale pantheon. But do the pieces dialogue directly with one another under a single conceptual umbrella? Not quite. Rather, the works are presented more as time capsule-like artifacts that each entered into the debates of the time in their own way, during the seminal year that 1993 proved to be for New York City.
Through May 26, 2013.
THE NEW MUSEUM
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
MAP
Lorna Simpsons' 7 Mouths
Found Arielle and Maggie!
Felix Gonzalez-Torres piece
Lina Bertucci's portraits of early 90s artists, including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kiki Smith, Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, John Currin, Gabriel Orozco.
Alex in front of Suzanne McClelland's Alright Alright Alright
Robert Wallingford's Prison Window
Works by Nan Goldin
Sue Williams' Are You Pro-Porn or Anti-Porn?