04.11.2010
P.S.1
Despite being a wing of MoMA, the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is not exactly at the heart of New York visitor attractions. It is ignored by most tourist guides and left off the lists of essential tours given by friends. Its main advertisement is the MoMA ticket, with a map on the back and offering free admission for anyone willing to cross the Hudson into Queens and visit the 19th-century school building housing one of the oldest contemporary art institutions in the United States.
Although they may be outside the “circuit” (and perhaps because of this), three recent exhibitions have recently flickered onto the radar. Not because they are spectacular in themselves – they were after all sharing New York with exhibitions like the fabulous Kandinsky retrospective at the Guggenheim and the blockbuster show of Tim Burton works at MoMA. At P.S.1, they in fact share the space with the Argentinean artist Leandro Erlich’s installation Swimming Pool, a mural by Chitra Ganesh and photos by Robert Bergman, a recently discovered, well-admired portraitist. What is interesting about them is that all three exhibitions are based on somewhat recurrent themes, and that, presented together under the same roof, they create an opportunity to think about curatorship, exhibition layout and even the role of an art exhibition.
1969 (showing until April) is the biggest of the three, occupying the entire second floor of P.S.1 with works made in that same year – together with a collection of contemporary readings of the period. The exhibition includes works from the MoMA collection (paintings, drawings, photos, videos and installations) by Richard Avedon, John Cage, Walter De Maria, Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Joel Shapiro, Nam June Paik, Richard Serra, Andy Warhol and many others. In principle, the curators had no other selection criteria than the year itself. And what ends up working as an involuntary curator, creating another theme, is the spirit of that period: like everyone else, artists also wanted to change the world.
One aspect that attracts attention, for example, is the space given over to the deadlocked negotiations between MoMA and the Guerilla Art Action Group. The group’s manifesto lobbied for a more democratic, more open museum, with no admission charges, exhibiting new artists, and with artist representation on the board. The letters from GAAG and MoMA’s replies are displayed side by side.
The journey through time also includes a re-hang of a 1969 MoMA exhibition, Five recent acquisitions, bringing together five works that became part of the MoMA collection in that year: works by Larry Bell, Ron Davis, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman and John McCracken.
On the floor above, the opposite can be seen: the 100 Years exhibition (also showing until April) surveys the much longer period of a century. But it is concerned with one single form of art practice: performance. An art that is impermanent, that is recalled through the records that remain after the event. In this space, art that is not made to last has paradoxically lasted a century.
P.S.1 has made use of the records to mount this retrospective. The walls have been filled with more than 200 posters, photographs, press clippings, videos and photocopies in which one can see artists like Yves Klein, Yoko Ono, Matthew Barney and Tilda Swinton. There is also a corridor with a section entitled 45 Years of Performance Video, dedicated to collection of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), an NGO working with art and video.
These records also became a stage set – because the exhibition was organised in conjunction with the Performa 09 biennial, whose closing ceremony was held in the exhibition space, with live performances by several artists.
The third exhibition is Learn to Read Art (now closed), a view of the independent New York bookshop and publisher Printed Matter, based on its catalogue. Founded in 1976, the institution concentrates on using the channel of book distribution to spread art throughout the world at accessible prices (although this accessibility is quite relative in some cases). In this context Printed Matter is still today an alternative form of showing art without involving museums. But, working on the outside, it has ended up returning to the museum (museums, in fact –similar exhibitions are showing in Europe).
The exhibition involves more than 100 artists. Most of the works consist of printed material, such as books, albums, magazines, postcards, fanzines and leaflets, by figures such as John Baldessari, Larry Clark, Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince and Christopher Wool. But as a rule Printed Matter uses any cheap means of reproduction as a platform, and so the show also has room for other forms of print, such as photography, stencil, screenprint (by Josh Smith) and even skateboards by Liam Gillick, Ari Marcopoulos and Mark Gonzales.
P.S.1 has, in short, brought together under the same roof an exhibition in which the year of 1969 was one of the curators, an exhibition of a century of art not intended to last, and another about art made to evade exhibitions. Three paradoxical exhibitions with something of the improbable. Individually they would be stimulating, Side by side, they offer no answers. But they do ask the right questions.
Photos:
© 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London
© 2009 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Summer Kemick. Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
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