The New Museum Triennial 2021

 The death of painting takes up enormous space in the history of 20th-century art. Obviously, the idea that painting as a practice will ever wholly die, is an absurd thought. But as a painter who has endured the past decade, which moved quickly from empty abstraction to repetitive and morally righteous figure painting, I have been anxiously and excitedly awaiting its death. And I couldn't be happier to report that it's death has finally arrived. 

Personally, I've always been skeptical of the New Museum. In recent years it has been the home base for politically motivated art despite being regularly subjected to criticism for union-busting and paying its employees poverty wages. Putting its hollow intentions aside, I have often left their Triennials feeling depressed, weighed down by the heavy and unrelenting politics, which serve as a constant reminder that the viewer is failing to create a more equitable society and that the artists on display are more morally righteous than they are good craftsman. After seeing the 2021 triennial, I am happy to report that the New Museum has changed its tune.... slightly.

There are a few standout works. The first piece that greeted me upon exiting the elevator on the top floor (which I feel is the natural entry point for the show), is a work by Gabriella Mureb. The sculpture is simple, a stone being punched repeatedly by a mechanical metal arm. It is a fruitless, empty, and absurd gesture.  I would hate to bog down this very simple and elegant gesture by projecting boring truisms onto it, but I can't help but feel like, in the shadow of 2020, and approaching an unsolvable climate crisis, this stone is extremely relatable. One could even say that 'it's a mood'.

Another piece that stands out is a video, by Haig Aivazian, about the electricity crisis in Syria. It flits between meme-y animations, iPhone videos of Syrian political unrest, informational videos about gas lamps, the history of electricity, and the practice of decapitating whales in order to harvest the oil inside. Stylistically, with its fast cuts and collage of internet ephemera, it feels reminiscent of most other mediocre video art these days. But this piece stays on topic, it isn't meandering, but it isn't dictatorial either; the video left me understanding its topic, without knowing exactly what opinion Aivazian wants me to have.  With the added meme humor and corny informational videos, it's funny, enjoyable, and feels very true to the experience of wandering through the internet and being met with go-fund-me ads about political crises, memes, and loosely related Wikipedia articles. 

The third piece that communicates the mood of the show is a piece by the artist Rose Salane. It takes the form of investigational minimalism, a-la Taryn Simon, displaying a series of framed pieces of paper, hung in a perfect grid. Inside each frame, are cheap rings found by people who walk the beach with medical detectors. Each ring has a series of facts displayed below it,  assessing its meltdown value, weight, and other benign material facts. As part of the factual information like weight and material, the artist displays psychic readings of each ring. Salene brought the rings to a local mystic and recorded the psychic's predictions of the owner's past life. The predictions were obviously embellished by a hack psychic but were entertaining nonetheless. And the deadpan humor of putting fake psychic readings next to the indisputable facts of an object felt very true to life.  I feel that this piece worked well with the stone, in that, in a very serious and stoic fashion, the work describes an absolutely absurd and meaningless process. Although I feel that this piece does a lot more than just create an absurd and humorous situation, within the context of the Triennial, it works well to illustrate the overall mood of the show.

Noticeably, and for the first time in what feels like a long time, paintings are scarce in this show. For the most part, they are drab, earth tones, minimal, boring, empty, and contribute the least to the energy of the show by a long shot. While they visually match the intimate kinetic sculptures - made of machine parts, raw steel, and wood - they lack the energy and conceptual strength that the sculptures capture. The aesthetic sensibility of the show felt very 70's as a whole, a historically terrible time for painting. When I prefaced this review by saying that painting is dead, it is not because painting made some kind of grand resurrection at the Triennial, or even had a dramatic downfall. It is merely because as a painter it is a medium I pay the most attention to, and brightly colored painting has inarguably ruled the past two decades. This show represents paintings' long-awaited retreat from the spotlight. It's a slow, subtle, quiet retreat, but paintings' presence is hard to miss nonetheless.  This show is a glimpse at what the art world may look like post painting. Personally, I am happy to see sculpture start to have its moment. 

As a whole, most of the work is pretty bad, and it still has the MFA-like feeling of most museum emerging-artist survey shows, including the previous few Triennials. But in this case, the work is trying to have a little fun. Not a ton of fun, but a little. I feel compelled to touch on the other obvious themes that ran through the show, as they too represent a break from the recent trends in sculpture; there were lots of motors attached to various things, and very small, intimate sculptures, as well as works that touched on the climate crisis; but all of these themes feel trivial, compared to the overall attitude of the show. Although the show touched on various political issues, its approach was less abrasive, more absurd, and contained plenty of existential dread, which felt...weirdly refreshing.