Last Thursday, at about four in the afternoon, I was standing in a sub-zero freezer with Klaus Beisenbach. The director of MoMA PS1 was halfway through giving us a personal tour of the gallery's current exhibition, Expo 1: New York. The installation we were standing in was Your waste of time (2013), by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, and I was genuinely freezing. The rectangular room is filled with man-sized shards of ice that had detached themselves from Iceland's largest glacier, Vatnajökull. A glacier, which, as the installation recreates on a micro-level, is melting at an increasingly alarming rate.
The exhibition's larger theme, Klaus explained, is ecology, and specifically, the damage caused and questions raised by Superstorm Sandy last year. "Three years ago, I thought you couldn't do a show about ecology that wouldn't be embarrassing. But now, I feel this urgency," said the curator. And in many ways, the exhibition's message is a political one. Fifteen percent of Rockaway residents displaced by the storm did not return to the area, Klaus pointed out as we stopped by A Refusal to Accept Limits, an installation that looked like a ruined city covered over with toxic-looking gold leaf.
Gold is one of several motifs that connects the show's multi-disciplinary works. You see it in the wheat fields that photographer Agnes Denes planted and documented at a Battery Park landfill in the 80s; on the torch of the Statue of Liberty in Steve McQueen's hypnotic video footage of New York City shot from an orbiting helicopter; and in Pierre Huyghe's crab tank. (More on the crab tank: The installation is home to a gang of cannibalistic arrow crabs and a single hermit crab living in a gold shell. If the delicate ecosystem within the tank changes even slightly, it will become the exclusive home of the gang of arrow crabs. Klaus: "Sick, right?") Gold, in the exhibition's narrative, is symbolic of chemical contamination; it's a warning sign. But it also comes to represent something precious.
Faced with the real and present threat of ecological disaster, the exhibition's stance is one of "dark optimism." On the second floor, a self-contained exhibition of Ansel Adams prints serves as a reminder of what's at stake. "They're so detailed you think they can't be real," Klaus said in front of one of Adams' mind-blowing images of America's national parks—protected areas which the photographer's work played an active role in establishing. The unexpected Adams room is a breath of fresh air amid the doom and gloom. But "you only deserve to be optimistic if you do something," said Klaus. The exhibition, as Adams' images illustrate, is, at root, about "how creativity can change the situation."
From now until August 4th, PS1 is hosting a series of events in a specially designed "school," an amphitheatre created by Argentinean artist Adrián Villar Rojas. The space looks equally like an ancient temple from an Indiana Jones movie and a post-apocalyptic cavern. Taking the exhibition brief to the next level, the lecture series invites artists to communicate their own brand of activism in their own medium. "Usually, I would tell you to be quiet as we approach the school," said Klaus, "But I think the artist who is teaching today decided to do a DJ set! So it's fine." And then we walked into the arena as Fatima Al Qadiri blasted what she called "the soundtrack to a future apocalypse." More on that later...
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The exhibition's larger theme, Klaus explained, is ecology, and specifically, the damage caused and questions raised by Superstorm Sandy last year. "Three years ago, I thought you couldn't do a show about ecology that wouldn't be embarrassing. But now, I feel this urgency," said the curator. And in many ways, the exhibition's message is a political one. Fifteen percent of Rockaway residents displaced by the storm did not return to the area, Klaus pointed out as we stopped by A Refusal to Accept Limits, an installation that looked like a ruined city covered over with toxic-looking gold leaf.
Gold is one of several motifs that connects the show's multi-disciplinary works. You see it in the wheat fields that photographer Agnes Denes planted and documented at a Battery Park landfill in the 80s; on the torch of the Statue of Liberty in Steve McQueen's hypnotic video footage of New York City shot from an orbiting helicopter; and in Pierre Huyghe's crab tank. (More on the crab tank: The installation is home to a gang of cannibalistic arrow crabs and a single hermit crab living in a gold shell. If the delicate ecosystem within the tank changes even slightly, it will become the exclusive home of the gang of arrow crabs. Klaus: "Sick, right?") Gold, in the exhibition's narrative, is symbolic of chemical contamination; it's a warning sign. But it also comes to represent something precious.
Faced with the real and present threat of ecological disaster, the exhibition's stance is one of "dark optimism." On the second floor, a self-contained exhibition of Ansel Adams prints serves as a reminder of what's at stake. "They're so detailed you think they can't be real," Klaus said in front of one of Adams' mind-blowing images of America's national parks—protected areas which the photographer's work played an active role in establishing. The unexpected Adams room is a breath of fresh air amid the doom and gloom. But "you only deserve to be optimistic if you do something," said Klaus. The exhibition, as Adams' images illustrate, is, at root, about "how creativity can change the situation."
From now until August 4th, PS1 is hosting a series of events in a specially designed "school," an amphitheatre created by Argentinean artist Adrián Villar Rojas. The space looks equally like an ancient temple from an Indiana Jones movie and a post-apocalyptic cavern. Taking the exhibition brief to the next level, the lecture series invites artists to communicate their own brand of activism in their own medium. "Usually, I would tell you to be quiet as we approach the school," said Klaus, "But I think the artist who is teaching today decided to do a DJ set! So it's fine." And then we walked into the arena as Fatima Al Qadiri blasted what she called "the soundtrack to a future apocalypse." More on that later...
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