the view from beyond the internet era: the new museum triennial
If you weren’t one of the hundreds of cyborgs jettisoning off the L train to see the New Museum Triennial “Surround Audience,” log off Tumblr, grab your devices, and go.
Can I take a cell phone pic of the art? Of course I can take a cell phone pic of the art. Ryan Trecartin, the hyperrealist/surrealist video artist co-curated this for god’s sake. It wouldn’t shock me if every art piece at the Triennial was jotted down on the Notes app before sublimating through the screen into the real world.
iPhones seem weirdly anachronistic in the galleries though. The Triennial might be the beginning of a new post-ironic movement in art. There’s a creeping tendril of earnestness. It’s growing between the video art and Casey Jane Ellison’s 3-D printed humanoid USB drive, threatening to destroy the facade of DGAF-ness that millenials suckled into the mainstream via their violent insecurity. Simultaneously and perhaps inextricably, there’s an exploratory and self-reflexive sense of newness, like traveling back in time to “primitive” video game art and appreciating its underdeveloped aesthetic while knowing it is destined to evolve.
Take for example, the Oculus Rift goggles. Get in line to watch and laugh as people wander agape attached by a rope to what looks like a fancier 90’s View-Master before strapping the device on your own eyes and venturing into the early early beginnings of virtual reality. You can almost hear yourself telling your caramel/queer grandchildren about the first time you entered the virtual realm in the IRL New Museum in 2015.
Yet there is also art that revels in its own ephemerality like Tania Pérez Córdova’s Meeting a Stranger, afternoon, cafés, a terracotta slab with a tiny embedded sim-card that is less an overwrought statement about fossilizing internet-age artifacts than a self-aware dialectic between ancient permanent materials and their digital impermanent counterparts. The real world leaked in through a crack somewhere in the hardware, and its effect is irreversible.
Strikingly, most artists at the Triennial were able to articulate the ethos of an internet age through non-digital objects—a task which requires a previously unattainable level of scope. Standing atop the mountain of data, artists like Olga Balema were able to translate a sea of immateriality into materials. The result is appropriately disheartening: giant water-filled zip-loc bags clinging low to the floor, filled with rusting steel pipes, slowly eroding. It’s a strange portrait of our era of artificiality, isolation, irony, chaos, the preservation of irrelevance mirroring the impermanence of everything. It’s evidence of human existence, a kind of internet placenta, the first birth in reality after the ravages of the digital.
My favorite artist at the Triennial was Nadim Abbas whose three “Chambers” presented an unsettling interactive commentary on contact, desire, and disease. Each chamber is a miniature bedroom, with two sets of industrial isolation chamber gloves built into the glass: one to reach in, and another…for the space to reach out to you. Referencing the Ebola epidemic, but also intimacy in a militarized state, Abbas elicits complex site-specific emotions which resonate long after.
Dozens of other works warrant mention here, like Juliana Huxtable’s Holzer-esque text-block manifestos, Josh Kline’s apocalyptic Teletubby S.W.A.T. team, and Sascha Braunig’s feminist biomorphic paintings. It is also worth mentioning the high proportion of female artists, trans artists, and multicultural artists in the show. It’s no wonder the alternate title to “Surround Audience” is “Generational Triennial.” The Triennial is a retrospective of impermanence while also inaugurating a new kind of materiality: one that is conscious of all the immateriality that allowed it to exist. It’s the end of an era, and the beginning of something even greater.
