Songs for Sabotage, the fourth New Museum Triennial, is suavely branded as a survey of 26 subversive practices from around the world. The curators, Gary Carrion-Murayari and Alex Gartenfeld, frame the exhibition with an astute awareness of the challenges it faces as an institution that would seem to reify the repressive ideologies it purports to...
Tonight, on the longest night of the year, 13 different venues will play host to the stateside edition of Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno, a massive exhibition of work by the artist John Giorno presented as a work of art by his husband, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. It's an expansion of the show that went up at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in...
As I missed out on international art events this season because New York is so far away, all I could think of was how unlucky their curators are. You work on Venice or Documenta for a year or two or four. You start out researching when there’s a somewhat liberal president in the US and some island off the coast of Europe still considers itself part...
Ethics demonstrated in geometrical order will showcase new works from the artist Erwin Wurm's series One Minute Sculptures, which he's been making for 20 years. The series asks viewers to enact a pose with everyday items for just one minute—this time around he's using midcentury modern furniture. These audience-activated sculptures will also...
Talking to Kaari Upson is like looking at one of her wall-sized drawings. One idea leads to another, tangents splinter down unexpected paths, you travel forward and backward in time simultaneously, and suddenly you're back to the start and a picture begins to form.
The New Museum is 3,000 miles away from Hermosa Beach, California, and a million years away from a memory of meeting Raymond Pettibon in the backyard at a house party where Henry Rollins and Black Flag were emotionally abusing an audience backed straight up against the walls. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful southern California...
Raymond Pettibon's electric union of pen stroke and word has had the Big Apple abuzz since the New Museum opened Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work last month.
Over at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, different kinds of sound - gospel music and speech - inform the American artist Adam Pendleton's exhibition Becoming Imperceptible. The voice of David Hilliard, the former founding chief of staff of the Black Panther Party, emanates from a three-screen film installation Pendleton created as a...
The phenomenal retrospective Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work at the New Museum opens with a wall chockablock with exploding nuclear bombs. Can he top that? Yes, he can.
The enigmatic, fantastically erudite artist Raymond Pettibon takes to Twitter like a bird to sky. My favorite of some fifty tweets that he posted on a recent day offers a reason that Donald Trump can't be the Antichrist: 'Not charming, goodlooking, endearing enuff.' In his art, Pettibon only sometimes addresses topical politics, or topical...
It is a painful prescience that has delivered this visual and linguistic storyteller from the unlit side of our consciousness at this dark dawning of a brave new world; so, as the rest of the frightened ninnies go to culture seeking solace and healing, let us all rather head over to the New Museum to examine the nature of American anger as it has...
In his first solo show in the United States, Cheng Ran has brought a sense of mysticism to the New Museum in New York City. The multi-video exhibit, which was mounted with the support of Hong Kong’s K11 Art Foundation, was shot and edited during a three-month residency at the museum, and spans across fifteen screens in its Lobby Gallery. In...
In his energetic drawings of baseball greats, Hollywood legends, comic book heroes and rock stars, of drug addicts, bikers and gangsters, Charles Manson and J. Edgar Hoover, Raymond Pettibon gives us the full sweep of the American social landscape.Then he detonates it. Compounding his images — urgent, bold, often hallucinatory — are headlong...
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Norton Museum of ArtNo more play. If 2016 endures in American history as a year of epochal disaster, then it will be fair to ask, in the grim years to come: how on earth could artists have joked around so much while the darkness gathered? But in a year whose most debated exhibition came from a quartet of dim New York...
One of the fascinating things about The Keeper, organized by Massimiliano Gioni, with Margot Norton, Natalie Bell, and Helga Christoffersen for the New Museum (July 20 – September 25, 2016), is the sheer number of distinct collections they managed to include in a space that is not particularly hospitable to art. Originally, I went there to...
You call it collecting. I call it hoarding. The New Museum calls it art and has a captivating exhibition devoted to it. Titled The Keeper, the show fills three floors and a lobby gallery with hundreds of thousands of mostly small objects and images gathered, sorted, arranged and recorded by some 30 retentive artists — keepers —...
In this age of ghoulish hoarder reality shows and the canonization of Marie Kondo, an era in which we’ve made a virtue of minimalism and simplicity, of culling for culling’s sake, of organizing and curating (by which we really just mean paring down), The Keeper, the sprawling just-opened exhibition at New York City’s New...
The term 'immersive' is often abused—a fancy-sounding cliché to describe an exhibition that is merely expansive, cluttered, or, as the critic Ben Davis noted, 'full of big things.' Not so with regard to the New Museum’s recent survey of works by the Albanian-born artist Anri Sala. The installations were immersive in the...
The New Museum in New York and the Hong Kong–based K11 Art Foundation announced that they will be working together to establish a New York residency program for young emerging Chinese artists. The three-month program will conclude with an exhibition in the lobby gallery of the New Museum.The two institutions also named the first recipient...
The New Museum — one of the smallest and in many ways still the scrappiest sibling in the bursting family of contemporary art museums in New York City — will expand into the building it owns next door to its Bowery home, doubling its space as it prepares for its 40th birthday next year.
As an artist, Jim Shaw is difficult to classify. Shaw’s practice includes painting, drawing, and sculpture as well as showing his prolific and ever-growing collection of found objects. (His 1991 show Thrift Store Paintings was recently restaged for his recent New Museum survey in New York, The End Is Here.)In 1976 Shaw moved to the...
Not many exhibitions get the welcome that has greeted Anri Sala: Answer Me, at the New Museum in Manhattan. Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic of The New York Times, praised Mr. Sala’s “roiling explorations, mostly in video, of sound, time, color, architecture and the politics of modern life.” In The Guardian, Jason Farago...
If nothing else, Pia Camil’s work makes people smile. Or at least that’s the thought that struck me the other day as my companions and I exited the New Museum carrying a one-and-a-half-foot-tall green letter D and a wooden spoon large enough to serve peas to the Jolly Green Giant, to the amused stares of the people we passed on the...
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had an older brother Paul, a pianist who lost his right arm in World War I. Despite this, Paul Wittgenstein continued to perform, and commissioned celebrated composers to write piano music for one hand. The most celebrated of these pieces is Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, a lush impressionist...