Artists Leap Into the Moment
“Living Room,” 2008, drawn animation and wire, by Jeanne Verdoux. More Photos >
“La Lutxona” (“The Go-Getter”), 2007, an embroidery by Blanka Amezkua. More Photos »
Sometimes an art exhibition is just an art exhibition. If its focus is contemporary, it is also a mass of symptoms that reveal strengths or failings of the current art world.
“How Soon Is Now?” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts is almost nothing but symptoms reflecting almost nothing but failings. Yet this show of amateurish and derivative work by 36 emerging artists also says a lot about the competition among art mediums, the latest trickle-down trends in art making and the shortcomings of higher art education. In answer to the show’s catchy title, for many of the artists here, “now” may never come.
“How Soon Is Now?” is the 28th version of the annual culmination of the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace, or AIM, program. It is held twice a year with 18 participants per session and is followed by a summer exhibition of work by the previous year’s participants, who are chosen from about 600 applicants by a review panel of museum staff and AIM alumni. There is no age limit, but artists must live in the New York metropolitan area and truly be emerging; they cannot have gallery representation. While they are participating in AIM, they cannot be enrolled in a degree-granting B.F.A. or M.F.A. program anywhere or in a similar “professional development program.”
The show is a cacophony of mediums, materials and styles. The only relief, initially, are a few paintings or painting-like objects. In this rather undifferentiated morass of feints at video, photography, sculpture and above all earnestly political, identity-based Conceptual Art, the paintings spring out like little oases of personal thought, concentration and effort. Some nonpainting efforts come into focus with time, but the first impression is a telling lesson in why painting doesn’t die; it is at the very least a good way for young artists to grasp the kind of density of expression that any art medium requires. (It helps to remember that most of the first generation Conceptualists were educated and began their careers as painters.)
Giuseppe Luciani for example, uses oil on canvas to encapsulate the mundane views of backyards and buildings outside his Brooklyn apartment; his tough little compositions broadcast radiant color and brusque surfaces. They are stylistically similar to the work of better known contemporary painters, especially Sarah McEneaney, despite Mr. Luciani’s statement that he is deliberately working in an “anachronistic” style. Blanka Amezkua appropriates the female protagonists from Mexican comic books, converting their fierce images into large, robust embroideries that exude a fiery formal wit without being overly beholden to Roy Lichtenstein. Negar Ahkami’s quirky fusion of figuration, feminism and Islamic patterning needs development, but it still stands out, as does Cosme Herrera’s ambiguous landscape on routed and painted wood.
Perhaps an overfamiliarity with Conceptual Art and especially the theories it inspired can leave young artists with no sense of how to make an artwork that holds together as an experience. You can sense the lack of connection to either materials or self in their statements, which appear on the wall labels beside the work. They mix overblown, one-size-fits-all artspeak with quite a bit of wishful thinking about their work’s impact, as if they could control the meaning or effect of their work. Different artists claim that their efforts “contend with codes of power, authority, race and class,” “question man-made constructs,” “challenge the anthropological categorizations of early photography” or “reveal the latent power of the public’s collective intelligence.” A few statements manage to locate the art in the vicinity of the artist’s life. “My work focuses on Pakistani-American social and cultural customs and growing up in a working class Muslim family,” one artist says, a reminder that art comes from highly specific contexts. Unfortunately these words accompany a completely generic work involving the hair of the artist and her mother.
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