Tag Archives: New Museum

Reflections on Ostalgia

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First let’s do away with the problem of the name: “Ostalgia” might mean a nostalgia for East German Communist times, but it is not the proven thrust of the fascinating and diverse melting pot of works housed in the 5 floors of the New Museum through September 25. The works are more ambivalent than that. Similarly, “ost” refers most directly to East Germany, but these works come from artists all over the former Eastern Bloc.

 Three Capacity Men, 2005, by Thomas Schutte with photographs from U-NI-TY, 1991-94 by Michael Schmidt’s 

If one ever thought if was possible to synthesize the works and experiences of artists from the 1940s to now from all of the countries into a coherent narrative without a didactism that overrules the complexity of the situation…well, clearly that is a tall order. Maybe it’s best to leave it as Massimiliano Gioni, curator at the New Museum, says here:

“I had no ambition to tell the truth about the Soviet Bloc. Memory is never reliable, but it’s all we’ve got and this exhibition is about remembering a time and place that is quickly going away.”


Like Younger than Jesus, another show of Gioni’s, the curation somehow sidesteps any guidance. However, in the sprawling, exhausting, bewildering expanse of works that make up Ostalgia, there is certainly a lot of worthwhile art to see.

No. 14 in the ‘Relationship’ series, 1989, Nicolay Bakharev
Bakharev has many photographs in the this show that, like this one, ignored the official ban on nudity.

No. 22 from ‘Ogonyok’ series, 2001 by Sergey Zarva
The artist paints the covers of a formerly popular Soviet magazine, although for him these are relics found in parent’s and friend’s houses as he was born later, transforming the covers into negative, demonic masks.

Julius Koller, U.F.O.-NAUT J.K. a (U.F.O.), 1987

Koller’s work is part of a series called UFO, standing for Universal-Cultural Futurological Operations, among other things, and dealing with a new approach to Anti-Happenings and the Anti-Images. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions. (It baffles me; I just really like the plate.)

The hundreds of works are fascinating overall, both as artworks and in their strong relation to life in the former Eastern Bloc. Each of them and their creators have distinct stories worthy of being told. The best way to get a sense of the many threads is to start on the 5th floor, where a room-sized mural acts as a visual history charting communism’s rise and fall in the Eastern Bloc. Cotter of the New York Times was right to say that what could have been an amateurish survey turned into something more. I honestly can’t wait to go back and have a second chance to delve into these works. And that is the first time I’ve thought that this summer.

The Disappointment That Was Skin Fruit

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Chris Ofili, Charles Ray, Kara Walker, Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Tino Seghal, Seth Price, Janine Antoni, Richard Price, Urs Fischer. It’s a roll call of blue chip artists and by that very merit ought to have more resonance than Skin Fruit, the exhibition currently up at the New Museum, does.

A lot has been made, justly, of the museum using the collection of Dakis Joannou to create a show. After all he is a Trustee of the New Museum–creating a bit of a conflict of interests. Conflict number one being whether to show so much unappealing work; conflict two being whether the show benefits more himself and his cohorts rather than the public. The show is curated by Jeff Koons, who just so happens to be collected by Dakis Joannou, and just so happened to include himself–via the basketball–in the show.

One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985

But let’s put that aside and move on to the fact that between Dakis Joannou and Jeff Koons the worst taste ever demonstrated is on display. Judgment call? Yes, but how they can make artists I like (Chris Ofili, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman) look so bad is beyond me. It takes a special sort of taste: one that prefers feral humanoids liberally sprinkled with fur and confuses brash ugliness with boldness.

To compound the problem, the works were stuffed in together so that it was hard to “appreciate” any of them. If anything, it seemed like a Nouveau Riche Victorian households where costly bric-a-brac crowd the mantle. I mean, if you are watching somebody climb up a crucifix (Pawel Althamer’s Schedule of the Crucifixion), you don’t want to have to weave your way through glass and chocolate structures to get an unobstructed view of the performance. The show was certainly not the best choice for my first art experience back in NYC. I left generally disgusted and more than a bit enraged that the New Museum continues to disappoint. On the bright side, the show ends June 6.

Art Intrusion at the New Museum

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When a banner appears on the New Museum downtown on Bowery from an unnamed artist begging for his work to be shown, there’s going to be some talk. Especially when it is unveiled at a press preview for a new exhibition of young artists. James Kalm has a short video of April 10 detailing the mystery:

Yesterday Hrag Vartanian’s blog posted the supposed identity of the theif, a French artist Marc-Antoine Léval who calls himself The immaterial art emperor and has created such art “intrusions” in the past. As the post explains, Léval claims not to have put the painting there, only the banner. So I have the obvious question: whose painting is it? and another one, has Leval succeeded in his objective? That is, was the intrusion itself art? The New Museum has not commented on the banner, nor have they offered to show the artist’s work.

As a side note, both James Kalm’s Youtube videos and Hrag Vartanian’s blog are fun takes on the contemporary art scene. Happy Tuesday all!