The series of three group shows, collectively entitled “Events,” that The New Museum is staging this winter—of which Fashion Moda’s is the first—raises at least two interesting problems that may or may not be related. The first is about the liveliness, and continuing viability, of well-established alternative spaces. The second concerns the more wide-ranging issue of curatorial responsibility; the meaning of certain kinds of display.
To quote from the press release: “The New Museum has invited Fashion Moda, Taller Boricua, and Collaborative Projects, three New York based independent artists organizations to each select, organize, and install an installation/exhibition at the Museum. . . . Events is the first exhibition at The New Museum completely organized and installed by artists groups. Each group will take over and transform the Museum’s space according to its own character and esthetic interests.” There is of course nothing unusual about an organization inviting a guest curator to develop an exhibition. Nothing unusual, and nothing unhealthy either. Most art organizations run the risk of becoming stale, especially if they’re committed to perpetually seeking out new work; a fresh eye can only help. What is unusual, however, is the wholesale surrender of control to an outside group—not just of the selection of work, but of the installation as well.
The clue to understanding this unwonted submission lies in the identity of the honored guests. Each is a small, publicly (but minimally) funded organization. They all operate, by choice, on the fringes of the New York art world: in the ghettoes of the South Bronx, Spanish Harlem, and the Lower East Side. Each has a political program, no matter how vague, that caters to the idea that art should be as available to the poor and disadvantaged as it is to the middle classes. Most important, each is run by artists, as a service to their peers. In short, each is potentially ideal for fundraising—except for one crucial fact—none has a respectable institutional base. This is an important criterion to those who award grants, because it means that they have no guarantees that money will be spent in a responsible manner. And so a marriage is proposed: The New Museum gets greater credibility in terms of “innovative new art,” while these three groups get greater exposure to an audience that would never dream of taking the subway from Manhattan to the South Bronx.
Not a bad exchange, except for the nagging suspicion that as a result one is paying twice for the same thing—cavil, perhaps, but it’s one that is raised only because of the entirely specious claim that The New Museum is not merely another alternative space, but a museum, which, in presenting this series, is acting as all museums act, drawing in a lot of disparate information and processing it through a central bureaucracy. The New Museum is a museum in name only; it is without even the rudiments of a collection, and in this case the material is presented free of the synthesizing effort usually associated with the curatorial profession. Despite this the Fashion Moda show was invigorating, and threw a different light on the usual curatorial conventions. All manner of things were thrown together, seemingly without care, but in fact with a great deal of attention. Some of the work looked like art, while some of it tried very hard not to. Some of the work was made by people with art training, and some by people without it; often there was no telling which was which. A few of the pieces looked slick, or silly, but enough of the work rang true to make the show a success.
Much of the pleasure lay in the display, the creation of a spectacle of discourse. Disparate things were placed next to each other with casual abandon, with abrupt changes of style, context and scale; there was the expectation that the pieces would connect, but mostly there was only movement, and pretty snappy movement at that. Individual items were decontextualized, uprooted and shown to have little inherent meaning beyond the expression of a momentary joy or a private rage. Simple cultural artifacts were rendered stylish; one moved from graffiti to an oil painting borrowed from a famous-collector, from plaster casts of anonymous neighbors by John Ahearn, to a huge wall papered with photographs of jazz musicians by Ray Ross, from little jokes to long narratives, from objects on the wall to objects in the room. The show was not so much about individual works as about a style of presentation, of cross-references, of rhythm.
So in spite of certain misgivings I was pleased to have seen the show. It gave Stefan Eins, Joe Lewis, and William Scott, the directors of Fashion Moda, a chance to distill their activity, to come to grips with the meaning of their own organization. Moreover, it gave them a chance to make their contribution to an ongoing debate concerning the way art, and our lives are controlled by the conventions through which they are represented.
—Thomas Lawson
