The New York’s New Museum: Future Imperfect

By Mariano del Rosario

If the new MoMA feels cold and square to some, the New Museum of Contemporary Art is cool and hip.

Looming over the horizon of the once infamous and blighted Bowery strip amidst mixed-use lofts, quirky supply stores and SRO hotels (single occupancy only), the new New Museum of Contemporary art, New York, is an ethereal modernist box that exudes brilliance and panache. The seven storey tour de force is wrapped in metal mesh exoskeleton and is, by far, the newest kid on the block.

When viewed from across Prince Street and as far back as Chinatown, it is an imposing monolith that seduces the eye. Upon entry, the transparent glass walls and skylights usher light into the gleaming white cubes, in contrast to the shimmering anodized aluminum skin that absorbs or deflects glare, and produces refraction depending on the weather and the time of day or what you’re on. Designed by the avant-garde Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA with Gensler, New York, the structure looks as if the tectonic plates shifted from under, moving the cubes to the right of center and striking an elegantly delicate balance. Are they shaking things up?

Like SoHo in its heydays that seem eons ago, much can be said of the myths and legends of the historic Bowery from the early farmlands to the pre-digital world of the mob, hobos, counterculture, fringe art, progressive music, literature, and performance theatre. The New Museum’s relocation is a major symbolic shift or change in these turbulent times when funding for arts and education continue to vaporize while art auction prices and hedge-fund management bonuses inflate. Within a few blocks radius, a pocket of alternative spaces and small maverick art galleries from well-financed to shoestring operations thrive by choice or by lack thereof. Soon, the mainstays will be joined by the arriving satellite galleries from Chelsea and Williamsburg. While this is a great development, it is also a harbinger of woe for some long-time residents and artists who are disadvantaged in the bubble cycle at a time when the subprime mortgage crisis and recession in the US dominate the news.

Mark Bradford

If any institution can stimulate multidimensional dialogue and new ideas in line with the vision of the late founding director, Marcia Tucker (1940-2006), it is this museum. Tucker was director from 1977 through 1999 and extinguished anachronistic hierarchy in her work set up from top to rank in file. It can be said, on the evidence, and perhaps presumptuously, that her egalitarian practice was shaped by her dismissals from her former positions as curator and staff at the Whitney Museum and MoMA early on in her career. Always insightful, thought provoking, uncompromising and bold, she brought to the fore artists’ works deemed controversial (i.e., Andres Serrano, Guerilla Girls, Hans Haacke, Annie Sprinkle, 1980s NEA battles, et cetera) or difficult in other contexts —issues of race, gender, ‘in your face’ politics, religion and technology— and challenged limitations and conventional notions of art. Meeting her during a studio visit years back, this writer remembers her matter of fact dictum: “Act first, think later —that way you have something to think about”. And years later, her advice to young artists: “Be irrational, perfect rationality amounts to perfect repression.” Unmonumental espouses this caveat.

Unmonumental is a four-part exhibition of artists that deploy strategies of collage, sculptural assemblage, sound and the Internet. The first two series reinvent Arte Povera, the Surrealist, Fluxus and the Dadaist ideas and concepts of the ready made, found object, fantasy, space, process, and human behavior. The final additions engage the social and the transformative aspects of recent audio and web technology. Owing much to their forebears —Marcel Duchamp, Mimmo Rotella, Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Laurie Anderson, among others— the exhibiting artists who are by no means prodigal offsprings, embrace plurality and difference in a new reality that in and of itself needs definition. It is a notable social and cultural shift, a phenomenon that denotes generational concerns, cycle, impetus and ideological transformation. Such shift is a psychic twist with a global seismic effect on the collective consciousness.

Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn and Los Angeles-based Mark Bradford exemplify “the formal and ideological power of juxtaposing found images to create everything from social and political commentaries to Surrealist fantasies and personal confessions.”

After climbing up the stairwells and reaching the top floor, an extraordinary sense of openness and monumentality began to set in, and the exhibition, spotty to boot, became appropriate and sincere. Sincerity is the new irony of the 21st century.

Having realized the initial undertaking, the New Museum —an antidote to the oversized albeit disorienting spaces— has demonstrated once again its role as a laboratory for cutting edge art, a utopia in a dystopian world, and a place where the raw and the imperfect are inevitable.

The new building says it all. For the museum and its Director, Lisa Phillips, it’s forward into the future.

Mariano Del Rosario is an artist and professor based in New York.