|
|
|
|
|
A Brand New Museum
John Haberin New York City
Jacolby Satterwhite, Leslie Thornton, and Joel Schlemowitz
"This is a new world order. . . . This is a brand new day."
It is also a run of clichés, in the Great Hall of the Met, but Jacolby Satterwhite means them seriously. He takes almost every bit of wall space for four huge projections—including above the cloakroom, itself closed since the start of the pandemic. Maybe museums after Covid-19 will never return to normal, but Satterwhite does not believe one bit in normalcy. As the soundtrack and subtitles continue, you will all be changed. But will you, and what about the museum? Are new media launching a brand new financial model as well? 
It certainly does not leave off with him or the Met. You can practically bathe in MoMA's lobby video, because Leslie Thornton herself did to kick it off. Visitors will see it first thing, too. Together, the two lobby exhibitions raise real questions about how a museum today feels obliged to present itself to the world—and what that means for art. It could almost make you nostalgic for old media, even in the hands of a new-media artist. In the galleries, Joel Schlemowitz makes that combination a mind game worth playing.
No world order
The Met's whole production risks cliché while demanding change. A landscape basks in sunlight or fire. A stately city lies in ruins while refusing to go away. Its glittering highlights accord with its upbeat message, as do sleek bodies, still sleeker outfits, and constant motion. They include dancers and what might be paramilitary on the move. They look like nothing so much as a perpetual commercial, without an ad blocker in sight.
For all that, do not dismiss Satterwhite out of hand, and many do, without so much as looking. This is a tough space for art. Two years ago, Kent Monkman used two equally large murals for the first encounters of Europeans and Native Americans, and visitors pretty much tuned them out, too. They are on their way somewhere else, in a crowded, confusing entrance hall. Not even the 2019 MoMA renovation could altogether redeem its entrance from Yoshio Taniguchi in 2004 and museum traffic. No wonder the new Whitney reserves its lobby for the gift shop, and the Morgan Library reserves its atrium for coffee and pastry.
The Met makes things harder still. It now requires timed tickets—and puts them all but out of reach. Those willing to pay in full can do so online, and it is not cheap. Locals out to "pay what you will," and that includes young people who might form a life-long interest in the arts, must join a line that twists and turns forever. It may seem odd that those coming in from New Jersey must pay a lot, while upstaters do not, but I can hear the Met thinking. No, we cannot eliminate the break for you New Yorkers without losing state funding, but we can make your life miserable in return.
If visitors ignore two carvings in the lobby, a pharaoh in the round and Mayan rulers in relief (both from the collection), they can ignore anything. Satterwhite, though, is not giving up. Online he promises a personal introduction to a global museum—just as Refik Anadol promised an AI tour of the Modern in that museum's lobby. If both are awfully bland, so be it. In practice, Satterwhite almost transcends the blandness. Still in his thirties, he has been mixing media and identities for years.
He let loose on video in 2001 for a created environment with a wild and crazy cast—a lecture hall with clay models for lecturers, monitors for students, and a pulsating soundtrack. Here hell is not other people, but the people telling you so. He appeared in 2013 with black performance art at NYU's Grey Gallery and emerging black artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Just months later, he returned to Harlem for the projects in "Shift." Born in South Carolina and based in New York, he was also ripe for a show of the Great Migration north. He went on to spotlight the male body in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and just this summer in a confluence of art and dance, as well as in the confluence of art and music at Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall.
The extravagance continues, and so does the collision of media, minds, and bodies. The music goes live on weekends. The title, A Metta Prayer, reads like a typo for "A Meta Prayer," a prayer reflecting on prayer. It refers instead, says the artist, to Buddhism and a queer black take on Buddhist art. The soundtrack does insist that all this can change you and cut through your disbelief—much as Samuel Taylor Coleridge spoke of a reader's "willing suspension of disbelief." Now if only I were a believer.
Elevator music
Is the Museum of Modern Art New York's most relaxing, cuddly museum? It still has art that once shocked the world, from Dada to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—and we can debate another time whether and why they no longer do. A rehanging for its 2023 "fall reveal" with rooms apart for black artists and James Rosenquist, with his F-111 covering the walls, does everything it can to restore their shocks as well. Still, not only does it have the best lobby seating in town. It also puts on a show for the seated. A towering, slowly churning projection by Leslie Thornton would calm anyone down.
Thornton's play with symmetry in new media has stood out in the galleries and art fairs. Here she lay down in torrential rains to feel the torrential bliss. At the same time, a scientist was building a device for detecting the antimatter that bathes the entire universe. His plans unfold on a chalk board in what could pass for graffiti art—and in real life as interwoven, lightly colored strips. Rain accounts for a silvery downpour in the top half of her vertically divided diptych, while the science alternates with a darker churning just below.
Neither will change your life or change science. Particle physics is well past the point where the discovery of the muon had a physicist asking "who ordered that?" The hunt for antimatter, important as it is, cannot bring back the urgency of the hunt for evidence of the Big Bang. Still, they do give weight to a steady flow. Without them, Thornton's video might be hard to tell from its lobby predecessor by Refik Anadol. With them, it takes on at least a modicum of structure and mystery.
Still, for all their differences, they are crowd pleasers precisely because of how little they will change your day. Anadol billed his rising, swirling colors as an AI-generated tour of the museum, decades after Harold Cohen and AARON first put AI to work on canvas. Thornton calls her new media HANDMADE. (The scientist's chalk board does have a space for "code.") Apparently art does not need AI for the visual equivalent of elevator music. Maybe AI should try instead for the real thing.
Then again, maybe elevator music, too, is better the old-fashioned way, by hand. Upstairs, Alexandre Estrela salvages plates from a defunct printing press in Portugal for his Flat Bells. As the title suggests, he has found a way to flatten "Tubular Bells." He extends the resonance so that striking the plates rings out like chimes. In between the chimes comes a dull, throbbing musical hum. He supplies seating, too, up in the fourth-floor studio so that you can relax and enjoy it.
The plates also serve as inspiration for a projection as soothing as the audio. They once served for advertising, which Estrela abstracts away—in color on four monitors, fading in and out of black on larger screens, and in blood red on the entire far wall. He sees their patterns as prototypes for twentieth-century design. Does it seem strange that a printing press has become an object of nostalgia? Maybe this is indeed a digital age, but with retro devices and analog memories. Or maybe the shock of the new was the background music to modern life all along.
From the beginning
Joel Schlemowitz starts at the beginning, but not for a fresh start. He loves new beginnings and happy endings, the old-fashioned way, on celluloid. Forget streaming. He is going back to the movies, only that, too, comes with a twist. This is art—where, as ever, things are not always what they seem. Old media get a new look.
Movies have their stereotypical beginnings and endings, but also real ones that theater-goers may never see. No, not chance meetings, cute fighting, and big kisses, but the big count. It may not make it onto the screen, but you know it well—that strip of 16 mm film with the count-down to one and whatever else the producer and projectionist require to get the ball rolling, 
such as the state seals of New York and California. For Schlemowitz, the industry is still bicoastal or even global. His scraps of film have become paintings, and the cameras that produced them have become sculpture. An expert could tell you the make of each and every one, in Europe or America.
His paintings should look familiar and appealing—and not just because of their subject. Their near monochrome in subdued color recalls late modern painting, when such things were all but required, like the black of early Frank Stella and the white of Robert Ryman. So does their grid, a product of the cels in celluloid. These paintings could pass for silkscreens after Andy Warhol, right down to their imperfections, were they not handmade. Text paintings and paintings by number were big back then, too, as with Christopher Wool, and Ed Ruscha made Hollywood his subject as well. Even then, Hollywood had its sign or signs.
These, though, are more faithful than they look. You may take their loose, spare black spatters for signs of brushwork, but Schlemowitz is paying attention to the very dust on found strips of film. They are getting on in years, but not in the sense of old movies. His sculpture is more faithful still to appearances and its origins all the more disposable. He has recreated cameras and other film equipment in cardboard, painted but with the honeycombed insides still showing here and there. Even with them, you may be tempted to pick up the cameras to give them a closer look and to give them a try.
The paintings form a long row on the gallery's walls. Faithful or not, they have enlarged the film much as would a projector. The sculpture looks iconic in a different way. I always wanted to hold some of these models in my hands. But then a back room adds a further twist. Schlemowitz has photographed everything, and it all plays out in an old-fashioned slide show—running continuously, at a theater near you.
They are one last reversal of expectations in a show called "Reversals," written backward to rub things in. No doubt Schlemowitz rubs everything in, as old media become art and art becomes old media once again. Still, like more conceptual art than you may remember, these objects are real, palpable, and a labor of love. I was delighted to see that suppliers still manufacture slides and slide carousels, and so, I think, is he. They allow him as an artist a fresh start. Three, two, one, go.
Jacolby Satterwhite ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 7, 2024, Leslie Thornton at The Museum of Modern Art for a while longer, and Alexandre Estrela at MoMA through January 7. Joel Schlemowitz ran at Microscope through December 2, 2023.