The Ungovernables

THE NEW CAPITAL: A CHEAT SHEET

Back in 1984, the pioneering curatorial team of Collins & Milazzo -- Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo, who were also critics as well as dealers, consultants and, perhaps most importantly, friends and boosters of artists -- organized a group exhibition for White Columns, one of a series of shows they did that helped define the polymorphous postmodernism of the era.

The show was titled “The New Capital,” and included fairly early works by Peter Halley (a fluorescent cell in Day-Glo pink) and Jeff Koons (a single basketball flotation tank) as well as Vikky Alexander, Sarah Charlesworth, Frank Majore, Peter Nagy, Oliver Wasow and others.  

With its vague echoes of Soviet utopianism, the “New Capital” could have been referring to an actual place -- was New York still the capital of the art world? Or had it moved to new quarters? But that wasn’t it; Collins and Milazzo had put a frank label to the curatorial search for new talent, be it metaphorical -- esthetic ideas are a kind of “capital,” after all -- or more straightforwardly pecuniary. These artists were money, the curators were saying. And indeed, over the past several decades, an impressive amount of gold has been spun from this artistic straw.

Today, the “new capital” has moved to the New Museum (where else?) and become more global, newer than ever and, in a classic avant-garde trope, “ungovernable.” The 2012 New Museum Triennial, organized by Eungie Joo and titled “The Ungovernables,” Feb. 15-Apr. 22, 2012, presents works by 34 artists and artists’ groups (50 people in all), born between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. Only three are from the U.S., and many of the rest are little known here.

The title of the show is designed to suggest “unruly natives” as well as “civil disobedience and self-determination.” It “is meant to suggest both anarchic and organized resistance and a dark humor about the limitations and potentials of this generation.”

That’s what the curators say. The critics, always a confounding bunch, should be weighing in on the show at any moment. And Capital itself, well, it has a very calming effect on unruly art. In the meantime, here’s a cheat sheet on the artists included in the show.

Mounira Al Solh (b. 1978, Beirut and Amsterdam) tells fictional, sometimes absurdist, stories of Lebanese immigration through video, installation, photography and painting. She participated in the Lebanon Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Jonathas de Andrade (b. 1982, Recife, Brazil) is a Brazilian video artist and photographer who documents earthquakes, sea changes and other shifting landscapes to examine how cultures interact with the natural world. His installation for the triennial, Ressaca Tropical, pairs 100 photographs of Brazilian homes, landscapes and aerial views of the city with the pages of a found diary kept by a local resident.

Minam Apang (b. 1980, Mubai) draws on mythology from her hometown in northeastern India for her watercolors and pen drawings.

CAMP collective’s Shaina Anand (b. 1975) and Ashok Sukumaran (b. 1974), who live and work in Mumbai, have been in residency at the New Museum since the summer. In this time, the research they’ve conducted on new media and the public programs they’ve hosted have provided the groundwork for their contribution to the triennial.

Julia Dault (b. 1977), a Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based painter and sculptor, is one of the few artists in the exhibition who has shown regularly in New York. Her Plexiglas and Formica sculptures are designed to exist only temporarily, and each is stamped with the time and date of completion.

Abigail DeVille (b. 1981), a participant on Jeffrey Deitch’s former reality show Artstar and one of just four New York artists in the triennial, is hanging a smattering of found objects from the ceiling of the museum. She has said that the installation was inspired by the so-called “mole people” who live in abandoned subway tunnels.

House of Natural Fiber is an Indonesian collective and art space, founded in 1999, that teaches visitors how to brew fruit wine. They then record the sounds made during the distillation process and sample it in electronic music.

Hu Xiaoyuan (b. 1977, Beijing) has shown at Documenta 12, Pace Beijing and the Meulensteen Gallery in New York. The Chinese artist relies upon natural, textured materials like hair, silk, and fur in sculptures and as the building blocks for her abstract videos.

Invisible Borders began in 2009 when 10 artists and writers rented a Volkswagen bus and went on a road trip from Bamako, Mali, to Lagos, Nigeria. The result is a collection of photographs and videos that explores the inherent problems with borderlands and geopolitical divisions.

Iman Issa (b. 1979) splits her time between Brooklyn and Cairo. To the New Museum she brings a series of sculptures that she says are alternatives to unnamed traditional monuments that she grew up around, some of which she has deemed offensive or embarrassing to the Egyptian people.

Hassan Khan (b. 1975, Cairo) had his first museum exhibition in New York last year at the Queens Museum of Art, where he showed a four-channel video of couples fighting, a corporate training session and street scenes from Cairo. Khan also sometimes performs New Wave-inspired music during exhibitions.

Lee Kit (b. 1978, Hong Kong) paints empty imagery -- company logos, song lyrics, patterns -- onto various everyday materials, like cloth, cardboard and pillow cases.

Cinthia Marcelle (b. 1974, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) showed two shorts at the New Museum in 2010 as part of a series on Brazilian experimental film and video. That same year she won the $100,000 Victor Pinchuk Foundation Art Prize, part of which she used to construct an installation of dust swept under a rug that piles up so high in places that it forms lumps and waves reminiscent of a topographical map.

Dave McKenzie (b. 1977) puts objects where they don’t seem to belong, like a statue of woodsman Paul Bunyan in an urban Brooklyn plaza, as an attempt to narrow the distance between things. McKenzie, who himself traversed borders in moving to New York from Kingston, Jamaica, is presenting a new idea in development as part of the New Museum’s “Propositions” lecture series on Apr. 6-7, 2012.

Nicolás Paris (b. 1977), a Colombian architect turned teacher, organized a classroom for lectures and workshops in the Giardini at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Earlier this month he brought this interest in communication and pedagogy to the New Museum for a Saturday morning session of collaborative drawing, discussion and education.

Bona Park (b. 1977, Seoul) has been handing out questionnaires on the personal dining habits of the individuals involved in organizing the triennial -- carpenters, artists, administrative assistants and curators. She then bought groceries based on these responses to hand out during the exhibition. Once passersby begin to question all the matching bags, her performance will be activated as the participants’ behind-the-scenes roles become reversed into stand-ins for the artist.

Gary-Ross Pastrana (b. 1977, Manila) splits boats, propellers and other objects and images apart to create new forms. He has shown primarily in the Philippines, but his appearance at the New Museum is followed by participation in Pulse New York this May.

Pratchaya Phinthong (b. 1974, Bangkok) gained attention in 2009 for an exhibition at gb agency in Paris that featured a Carl Andre-like floor grid of stacks of colorful Zimbabwean currency, which he bought with funds from his previous art sales. For his earlier Missing Objects (2004-5), he made small object vignettes representing various friends scattered throughout Europe. He has collaborated with fellow artist Dahn Vo, who is also featured in the Triennial.

Amalia Pica (b. 1978), an Argentinean artist based in London, was included in the 54th Venice Biennial as well the 2010 Aichi Triennial in Nayoga, Japan. Pica makes installations incorporating sculpture, photocopy, drawings and slide projections which explore the universal nature of systems of communication and measurement.

Rita Ponce de León (b. 1982) was born in Peru but lives and works in México City. She creates whimsical drawings, captioned with text like comic strips and often featuring imagined characters who function as modern super heroes.

The Propeller Group was founded in Saigon in 2006 by Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976, Saigon), Matthew Lucero (b. 1976, California), and Phunam Thúc Hà (b. 1974, Saigon), and is currently based between Saigon and Los Angeles. Working with local and international film, television, music and artistic producers, the group creates collaborative video works and short experimental films that combine imagery and subjects from popular and high culture. They have done short, animated “Commercials for Communism” and rented out a billboard in Ho Chi Minh City and posted “non-commercial” images in public space.

Public Movement (Founded 2006, Tel Aviv), which is headed up by Dana Yahalomi (b. 1982, Tel Aviv), bills itself as a “performative research body” that stages political actions in public spaces, many of which make subversive references to traditional Israeli culture, such as folk dance or national military service.

Gabriel Sierra (b. 1975, Colombia), who designed a space at the 2008 Sao Paolo Biennial, also outfits objects, crafting socks for the legs of chairs, slipping a dollar bill between the two halves of an apple, or creating a series of political stickers with slogans like “Still-life since 1492” and putting them on pieces of fruit that he distributes to viewers.

Rayyane Tabet (b. 1983), who was born in Lebanon, studied architecture at Cooper Union and is currently pursuing a MFA at the University of California, San Diego. His installations incorporate everyday objects, from soap to mattresses to suitcases, to create surrealist spaces, and he was awarded the 2011 Sharjah Biennial Prize.

Slavs and Tatars (founded in Eurasia in 2006), is an art collective that primarily works in print media and ephemera, which they distributed in conjunction with lectures and performances. They bill themselves as a “faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin wall and west of the Great Wall of China,” and they use language and biting humor to communicate their dubious relationship to modernization, which they consider a tool of Westernization. They have published several books which incorporate archival and experimental research, texts and design.

Pilvi Takala (b. 1981) is a Finnish artist who lives and works in Amsterdam, and her work was featured in the 2008 Berlin Biennial as well as the 2005 Istanbul Biennial. She frequently stages “interventions,” sending performers dressed up as Snow White and other characters into public venues with the aim of blurring the divide between “fiction” and “real life.” 

Mariana Telleria (b. 1979), who lives and works in Argentina, claims she began her career at the age of three, painting a dollhouse in nail polish and exhibiting it behind a sofa in her living room. She lists Magritte and Michel Gondry among her influences, and her installations comprise surreal re-imaginings of quotidian objects and domestic spaces, that look as if she had built them from her own dreamscapes.

Wu Tsang was born 1982 in Massachusetts, and he now lives in Los Angeles. Since June 2011, he has been in residency at the New Museum, and he recently staged a performance in conjunction with Performa ’11. The basis of his project for “The Ungovernables” is Full Body Quotation (which was also his contribution to Performa), in which he and a group of performers create a “living sculpture” -- a choral performance of voices sampled from transgender cinema.

José Antonio Vega Macotela (b. 1980) divides his time between Amsterdam and México City. He was the co-editor of the publication Multiple Media 2 in 2008, and his notable works include Time Divisa (2006-2010), a multimedia project featuring a ceramic tile relief installation that replicates the main wall of the Santa Martha Acatitla prison in Mexico City, where he visited with 365 inmates and captured their dialogues on camera for an accompanying video titled The wind blows where it wants to.

Adrián Villar Rojas (b. 1980), who repped Argentina at last year’s Venice Biennale and who has been in residency at the New Museum since February 2011, does enormous cracked-clay sculptures that stretch from floor to ceiling. They are usually created in situ and destroyed at the conclusion of an exhibition, living on only through archival footage such as photographs.

Danh Võ (b. 1975) is a conceptual artist who was born in Vietnam, grew up in Denmark and now lives in Berlin. In his work We The People, he hired a team of craftsmen to make a "fragile, deconstructed" Statue of Liberty by replicating the copper skin that covers her steel armature. He has drawn attention to social institutions with actions that have included organizing an exhibition of works by well-known artists in his parents’ house, and marrying and divorcing several people, adding their names to his but not sharing lives.

South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere (b. 1984) is the 2010 recipient of South Africa’s biennial MTN New Contemporaries Art Award, which identifies the country’s most noteworthy emerging artist, and his work was included in the 2011 Lyon Beinnial. A former member of SA’s Gugulective art group and current member of the Dead Revolutionaries Club, he creates multimedia installations incorporating painted walls, video, print and performance.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977) is a British artist of Ghanaian descent, and her paintings are predominately figurative and based in raw, neutral colors. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, and her work has been shown in the Gwangju Biennial, the 2006 Seville Biennial, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Ala Younis (b. 1974), a Kuwaiti artist and curator, is now based in Jordan. She received her degree in architecture and she traditionally works in installation and video. Her work was included in the 2011 Istanbul Biennial.

Compiled by Rachel Corbett, Emily Nathan and Walter Robinson