Courtesy the artist and Sekkima Jenkins & Co., New York

Mark Bradford, "Mithra" (2008). Mixed media, 70 x 20 x 25 ft.

March 2009 Reviews

The Double Club

The Order of Things

Keltie Ferris

Nayland Blake

Trenton Doyle Hancock

Mika Tajima

Anne Truitt

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Phillip Allen

Native Land, Stop Eject

Katja Strunz

Andy Warhol Leandro Erlich Lynn Hershman Liam Gillick Rirkrit Tiravanija Angela Bulloch John Cage Investors Indulge Appetite for Luxury

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As election euphoria momentarily halted the growing hysteria around the financial meltdown, three shows opened across the US that proposed an alternative modus operandi for art and exhibitions in the midst of a deflated art market. Each posited art as a socially engaged practice rather than an object of desire, marking a return to the prevalent ideals of the early 1990s.

For "theanyspacewhatever" at the Guggenheim in New York, Nancy Spector selected ten artists closely identified with critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics (as mapped out in his 1998 book) to collaborate on an exhibition that reflected what Spector calls the "postrepresentational" art of the ’90s. In New Orleans, the newly inaugurated biennial "Prospect.1" involved 81 artists in a city-wide exhibition responding to the post-Katrina social and geographic landscape, riffing off the community-oriented social practice that curator Mary Jane Jacob championed in her 1993-94 public art project in Chicago. Meanwhile, in California, "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now" at SF MoMA charted the evolution of audiences being implicated in the completion of an artwork, acknowledging experiments in broadcast media, Web 2.0, and performance, as much as sculpture and installation.

While none of these exhibitions prioritized work actually made in the ’90s, all strongly reflected the legacy of postglobal, late-capitalist cultural thinking that emerged during that decade. At the same time the exhibitions revealed a professional conflict as to what exactly constitutes relational and social art. In 1995 Benjamin Buchloh wrote that the 20-year distance from the heyday of Conceptual art both enabled and "obliged" a consideration of the work in a broader context. He went on to say that to historicize practices it is important to clarify the conflicting positions and examine motivations behind diverse strategies. While we are now similarly distanced from ’90s modes of production, the three exhibitions in question reveal only tentative stages of clarification.

With Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Angela Bulloch as three of the 10 participants, "theanyspacewhatever" played out as if the audience were being made privy to a reunion between friends. Rather than showing pivotal works from the ’90s, the exhibition presented new pieces that remixed the signifiers of each artist’s practice. Bourriaud’s text posits that relational art is about prompting congenial public interaction, and the show duly reflected this notion; works accumulated around the appropriately "in-between" space of the spiral rotunda. By including a lounge for watching documentaries of the artists and friends, and a revolving hotel suite available for nightly rental, the exhibition was a CliffsNotes to conviviality, creating a retrospective of artists’ concepts rather than of key works.

"Prospect.1" flew in international artists including Robin Rhode and Cao Fei to make temporary interventions in New Orleans’s landscape (the show also utilized the city’s museums and cultural centers). Proving the downsides to the frequent-flier artmaking circuit, many of the commissions did not directly engage with local issues, as epitomized by Leandro Erlich’s purely formal gesture: a paned window fixed precariously atop a ladder, placed where a house once stood in the Lower 9th Ward. The social responsibility of art was clearly not an imperative, and the emphasis on cultural tourism as a form of regeneration left the biennial appearing cosmetic, although there were some exceptions, such as Nedko Solakov’s epic narrative relating recent floods in Bulgaria to Katrina. Ultimately it was the incidental experiences of discovering New Orleans while hunting for the work that proved most stimulating, with the proximity of local initiatives presented alongside the biennial projects lending the impression that the event did have potential for long-term resonance in the city.