New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
NEW YORK MINUTE
Sixty Artists on the New York Scene
Curated by Kathy Grayson
Initiated and supported by DEPART Foundation
Presented by Stefan Simchowitz
MACRO Future, Rome
September – November 2009
New York Minute features sixty artists in and around New York City who capture the drama, danger, speed and savvy of the vibrant and diverse art activities happening in the city today. This exhibition brings together for the first time ever a complete survey of the multiple exciting new tendencies coming out of New York City and its extended networks. Capturing the best practitioners in each diverse area of exploration and bringing them together in a logical and collaborative way, this exhibition will have more bang for it’s buck than any recent survey of new American art. New York is exploding with new talent and though not every single one of these artists live in the city, every single artwork nonetheless contains the immediacy and energy packed into a New York Minute.
The expression “a New York Minute” refers to the speed that New Yorkers react to stimuli, with a bit of hurriedness or impatience and a bit of ingenuity and savviness thrown in. Johnny Carson once described a New York Minute as being the time it takes “From the lights to turn green, till the guy behind you starts honking his horn”. During the late 1980s crime wave, David Letterman defined a New York Minute as the length of time it took to be mugged in New York City. Or to quote The Eagles: “In a New York Minute/Everything can change/In a New York Minute/Things can get pretty strange.”
With that in mind, these sixty artists show a rapid and resourceful response to current cultural events and issues specific to their generation. Mostly emerging artists and young artists living in downtown New York, this exhibition surveys some of the leading tendencies in new art making such as: updating action painting and abstraction with the toughness of the streets, synthesizing low pop culture into handmade heartfelt hybrids, taking conceptualism to new and absurd ends, organizing into collectives and bands and taking all your interdisciplinary art on tour, and bringing downtown punk attitude to assemblage, collage and sculpture.
One faction of this group uses the dark energy of the streets to make frank, confrontational punky poppy projects whether collage, performance, music or sculpture. They love the danger and lawlessness of the city and make gritty shitty artworks that capture the condition of being young in the brightest, baddest city in the world. Artists working in this mode include: Dash Snow, Kembra Pfahler, Dan Colen, Terence Koh, Nate Lowman, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Ben Cho, Lizzy Bougatsos, Aurel Schmidt and others.
One more colourfull but related camp favour prismatic pigment explosions and sincere humane synthesis over the dark side of the room. Coming from Providence, RI energy and San Francisco energy that privelege handmade, homemade and found materials over the slick and sly, their works radiate an interconnectivity and communal attitude mimicked in how they often organize into collectives and bands. They use graphic and comic influences along with low-brow pop power to breed new beings and radiant animals. Artists working in this mode include: Chris Johanson, Jim Drain, AVAF, Paper Rad, Takeshi Murata, Misaki Kawai, Jules de Balincourt and others.
The sheer variety of this new energetic art making defies pressing and releasing so the best conceptualization of this show is that all the included artists are indeed in lived reality a tighly-knit group of interconnected and collaborating artists. All these people have exhibited together, partied together, dated, studied together, or painted together at the very most at two levels of removal from each other.
This exhibition will feature large-scale collaborative installations, site-specific murals, specially designed sculptural components, integrated lighting projects, and it will all share a stage where the work will be activated. Different performances bringing a live version of this slice of New York City life will bring to life and to heart the projects in the room. More is contained in a New York Minute than in an hour of conventional life, and more will be packed into this exhibition than a conventional museum or kunsthalle could contain!
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome
New York Minute, Installation view, Macro Future, Rome