Reviews Roundup: Younger Than Jesus

Faye Driscoll, "Loneliness," 2006, Video

The Generational: Younger Than Jesus
The New Museum
April 8 - July 5, 2009

"The show is low-budget bubbly fun, for the most part—and noisy, what with all the videos and sound pieces. ... Gone are the days, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when deconstruction-smitten academics and artists toiled to share their discovery that media and institutions are—get ready—manipulative. Viscerally sophisticated young artists are more interested in playing with materials and contexts that are purely gratuitous, or, at least, too anarchic or too desultory to be marshalled for or against any commercial interest or political tendency. ... Remember Gilda Radner’s character Emily Litella, on the old 'Saturday Night Live,' who chirped 'Never mind' when misunderstandings that had sparked her angry rants were pointed out to her? Thinking of that joke helped me focus on a quality of whipsaw humor that is rife in 'Jesus.' Call it 'never-mindedness,' a sort of booby-trapped cocksureness, foreseen by Nirvana. ... ...four decades after the first portable videotape recorder became available, video has become a studio tool that’s as second nature as pencils. Little by little, it has stolen fire from film, photography, theatre, concert performance, painting (with projections as murals), drawing (with animation), and, of course, television, exhaustively unpacking the history and the semiotics of the home screen." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker

"The show suggests that ideas about culture, ethnography, anthropology, and sociology, YouTube and Facebook, and science and documentary film have all become more important than October magazine postmodernism. Sociology is the new black. None of these artists is trying to advance the teleological ball or invent new forms. They’re investigating the whole world, not just the art world. Their work is less about how we affect time and people than about how time and people affect us. ... That’s a welcome switch from the super-self-conscious, highly educated, insular art of the recent past. The best artists in 'Younger' turn their gaze from their own belly buttons to gaze at other people’s belly buttons. ... 'Younger Than Jesus' indicates that the alchemical essence known as the sublime, the primal buzz of it all, is no longer in God or nature or abstraction. These young artists show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the sublime; life, not art, has become so real that it’s almost unreal. Art is being reanimated by a sense of necessity, free of ideology or the compulsion to illustrate theory. Art is breaking free." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag.

"The organic, permissive vibe, projecting a core idea that the Museum is listening to the young, makes Younger Than Jesus feel like a laid-back parent, a cool dad. The work and the way it's put together is emphatically inconclusive, comfortable with the fruit of its own sophistication and conviction while entirely lacking in lessons or spittle-spattering theoretical bluster. ... These young artists are not raging, freaking out or self-destructing, because there's no cell they can't get out of. For all its pleasures, the measured coziness of Younger Than Jesus is synthetic and temporary." -Bones/Village Voice

"Big-statement surveys generate big expectations: they will tell us what and who is hot, important, exciting. What we get in this case is a serious, carefully considered show, but one that, apart from a few magnetic stand-alone entries — a killer video by Cyprien Gaillard, an animation by Wojciech Bakowski, a madcap Ryan Trecartin installation — feels awfully sedate and buttoned-down for a youthfest. ... ...even with the introduction of some new names, 'Younger Than Jesus' feels familiar, like a more-substantial-than- average version of a weekend gallery hop in Chelsea and the Lower East Side, right down to the token Asian and African imports. ... ...raises the question of whether any mainstream museum show designed to be a running update exclusively on the work of young artists can rise above being a preapproved market survey." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes

"Guilt-free voyeurism and exhibitionism are common threads among the works by 50 international artists born after 1976 (hence the title reference to Jesus, crucified at 33). No surprise here. This crowd grew up in an era where it’s perfectly acceptable to share the most intimate or mundane details of your life on the Internet. There’s not much rebellion in 'Younger Than Jesus.' This cyber-savvy generation instead remixes vast quantities of visual information from all kinds of sources to construct its own reality, all to spirited effect. ... Many of the artists have an affinity for videos that either dwell on images of ultimate doom or move at time-warped speed while playing thumping music." -Katya Kazakina/Bloomberg

"The New Museum itself is nothing more than a giant Xbox, and the art within it arranged without any sense of individuality or distinction. ... The art itself ached for anonymity and the cover of the crowd. Many of the conventions of World of Warcraft are observed, especially role-playing and costume. ... What's remarkable about this show is how neat and clean everything is, even the innumerable AbEx ripoffs by artists too skill-deprived to name, as primly displayed as those of a fourth-grade classroom. ... I have never seen a show like it before. It is antiseptic, safe, death to hierarchies of taste and distinctions of talent, and yet determined to neutralize our eyes with an overload of useless information." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet

"...when, exactly, did it become mandatory to display contemporary art in high volume, whether in shows like this one or at art fairs? When did Costco become the template? ... ...there's the New Museum's SANAA-designed edifice, which, as everyone in the art world knows, has horribly proportioned galleries. Ordinarily a minus, the spaces flatter the work; after all, if the museum's interior makes it look like an amateur institution, you're less likely to notice the amateurishness of the art. ... ...when people confuse innovation with youth, it's not because of any factual symmetry, but because they want their emerging artists pink-cheeked and easy on the eyes. For a cattle call like this one, veal is preferable to beef. ... If their work is distinguished by anything at all, it is a resolve to simply cope with the situation rather than challenge it, and the strategies they've adopted to do that run a gamut from intriguing to annoying. ... 'Younger than Jesus' proposes that the only sustainable model for culture going forward is one that runs on a hybrid drivetrain. That's hardly a new idea, but for all of its faults, the show undeniably crackles with a quality that recent Biennials have sorely lacked: Electricity." -Howard Halle/TONY

"The New Museum turned 32 this year. And as Massimiliano Gioni, its director of special exhibitions, himself only 33, suggested at the press preview for 'The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,' the museum has more than a bit of self-consciousness about age—specifically, its transformation from young upstart housed in a crumbling Soho warehouse to an institution entrenched in a chic stack of concrete blocks. ... ...like the stereotypical kid of the millennial generation, 'Younger Than Jesus' is globally focused, pushy beyond its abilities, and eager to draw attention to itself despite a deficiency of substance." -James Hannaham/Village Voice