“Greater New York,” the title of MoMA P.S. 1’s every-five-years roundup of local art, has come to sound like a wish, not a statement of fact. Since the show’s first appearance in 2000, the city’s gallery population has exploded. But abundance has settled into blandness. A tour of Chelsea these days can be a deadening experience. Art neighborhoods that might once have offered alternatives, don’t.
How did this happen? You can point to the fact that art neighborhoods have fewer and fewer artists; they’ve been priced out. You can point to the hype around painting, specifically abstraction, that has encouraged the equivalent of a fancy airport art for newly rich collectors. You can point to a constitutional laziness that is always pulling the art establishment toward what’s easy to chat and write about.
“Greater New York,” now in its fourth edition, has its share of abstract painting, but cannily weaves it into a larger story, one that goes beyond a fixation on form to focus on ideas that tie art and artists to life. With a multigenerational team of organizers — Peter Eleey and Mia Locks of P.S. 1; Thomas J. Lax, associate curator of media and performance art at MoMA; and Douglas Crimp, a professor of art history at the University of Rochester — the show steps away from its founding premise of newness, the idea that it would be a quinquennial update on the metropolitan market. The 158 artists on the roster range from 20-something to 80-something; a few are dead. The notion that an “emerging” artist has to be young is discarded. Older artists newly in the spotlight, or back after a long delay, qualify. And history works in two directions. Art from the 1970s and ’80s is presented as prescient of what’s being made now, and new art is viewed as putting a trenchant spin on the past.
As its title indicates, “Greater New York” is also about a city and specifically a city where artists have always made their way under stress. Just inside P.S. 1’s front door is a group of photographs documenting physical changes at the institution since it opened in 1971 in a former public school in a Queens neighborhood offering cheap rent for artists. The pictures are on permanent view but a young artist named Park McArthur, born in 1984, has added one more. It’s a 2015 shot of P.S. 1 — now MoMA P.S. 1 — flanked by a glass high-rise and condominium complex in progress, and half-obscured by a street banner reading: “Make It Here. Long Island City. Make It Yours.”
[...] In images of a cosmic otherness, Huma Bhabha takes a mock-primitive tack, and Rina Banerjee goes for exotic gorgeousness, a choice also made by Raul de Nieves in an all-beads avatar figure, and Ignacio González-Lang, who turns a Ku Klux Klan robe into Latino fiesta-wear.
