Published in Wallpaper* November 2008
New Yorkers
love to practice the destruction of their city. The Will Smith-fights-vampires
movie I Am Legend showed, again and
again, a desolate Times Square, lions ripping up deer flesh while grasses
whispered in a space currently alive with five-abreast tourists gawking at Sex
& the City ads. J J Abrams’ Cloverfield imagined a monster ripping through the city with the
force of a thousand furies. And the War of the Worlds had Tom Cruise just across the river, watching
cracks in the streets open up for attacking aliens. It’s a post-9/11 condition,
this desire to rehearse, prepare for and control our destruction before it
happens. At the same time, we’ve become obsessed with the Greenmarket, with
eating locally, seasonally, with sustainable futures, with trying to be as
close to a Michael Pollan version – “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” --
of an omnivore as we can. It seems like two completely separate channels, but
three art events this summer only showed that our love for nature and our
obsession with the apocalypse are, in fact, closely entwined.
After Nature is a brilliant show put on by the New Museum,
suddenly a big hitter since the opening of their SANAA-designed building last
December. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni and curatorial assistant Jarrett
Gregory, After Nature uses a
Werner Herzog film and a W.G. Sebald essay as starting-off points for a series
of pieces that explore how the world might be, once nature is something we
remember rather than look forward to. The works span aesthetics and media,
sharing only polemic drive. A tree sawed apart and put back together with
massive brackets and screws by the artist Zoe Leonard makes you realize the
inanity of the idea that nature needs our help to survive, while a piece by
Tino Sehgal in which a series of dancers writhe on the floor -- changing every
two hours with a few minutes of synced-up overlap – is, through its
face-to-face (or body-to-body) communication, about the translatability of oral
history. It implies that, one day not so far away, person-to-person contact
might be the only technology we’ve got.
‘It’s not a
particularly joyful time right now,’ Gioni says, explaining why he wanted to do
such a dark show. After Nature, to him,
‘is a place in the future that resembles where we are now.’
The New Museum
opened with a show called Unmonumental.
That word doesn’t fit for After Nature, but it does for Olafur Eliasson’s contribution to New York’s
landscape, a group of decidedly not monumental Waterfalls installed in four locations on the East River.
Rochelle Steiner of the Public Art Fund, which produced the work, says that the
waterfalls are part of a deeper expression of what ‘nature’ can be. Talking
about the obvious scaffolding that makes up a large part of each surprisingly
spare and mechanical waterfall, she explains that it was part of embracing ‘the
nature of the city.’ The waterfalls aren’t a bombastic attempt at distraction;
their overt machinery and the way in which the one on the East River promenade
is pushed aside by the wind are expressions of the way nature interferes with
New York, and of the way the city’s inbuilt, concrete-and-steel characteristics
are, at this point, just as ‘natural’ to us as trees.
To left field
of these two comes Implant, a show of
plant-based art organized by rising star curator Jodie Vicenta Jacobson the
Horticultural Society and installed at the UBS Gallery. But we’re not talking
pretty drawings of daisies. The work is much deeper, and, often, darker than
that. ‘People don’t really believe it’s an art form,’ Jacobson say of
botanical-based projects. ‘But pretty much every artist has worked with nature
at some point.’ The show includes a photograph by Felix Gonzalez-Torres that
looks like some nice flowers on the ground until you realize it’s a portrait of
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ grave, but the show opens with the
installation ‘Gesture to the Curator’ by Jacobson’s artist husband David
Melrose that consists of a bunch of flowers installed in a vitrine and
refreshed each week the show runs. It’s cheeky, sweet and funny. And the piece
is such an unsubtle jab to the establishment that it articulates just how edgy
and bright this small exhibition about flowers and plants really is.
Aesthetically,
practically, visually, the three shows are completely different. What they
share is a willingness to discuss dark potentialities while reminding us of how
good – and, often, beautiful -- we still have it today.
