Charles Ray, “Family Romance,” painted fiberglass and synthetic hair, 1992-93 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Friday – Sunday through May 26, $12-$16
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org
Where were you in 1993? Thirty years ago, we were toiling for the Evil Empire, hoping that the Rangers would win their first Stanley Cup in more than half a century, seeing Springsteen on tour without the E Street Band, and looking for a new apartment after having just gotten married. But in general, 1993 found itself in the midst of a rather nondescript decade highlighted by the tempestuous presidency of William Jefferson Clinton and perhaps best exemplified by the Y2K nonproblem. The New Museum turns its attention on that one specific year in “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.” Taking its name from the 1994 album by legendary New York underground giants Sonic Youth (the album was recorded in 1993), the show gathers together works created around 1993 by a rather distinguished group of artists, including Matthew Barney, Larry Clark, Martin Kippenberger, John Currin, Nan Goldin, David Hammons, Todd Haynes, Derek Jarman, Mike Kelley, Annie Leibovitz, Elizabeth Peyton, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gillian Wearing, and Hannah Wilke. There are many stand-out pieces, from Robert Gober’s “Prison Window,” wonderfully placed near an “Exit” sign, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled (Couple),” a string of lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling, and Lorna Simpson’s “7 Mouths,” consisting of close-ups of seven mouths on photo-linen panels, to Devon Dikeou’s lobby directory boards, Charles Ray’s “Family Romance,” depicting a naked fiberglass family of four, all the same height, and Paul McCarthy’s “Cultural Gothic,” in which a man seems proud that his son is doing a goat. And visitors get to walk on Rudolf Stingel’s carpet on the fourth floor and in the elevators.
Pepón Osorio, “The Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?),” detail, mixed mediums, 1993 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
However, the show is not quite the time capsule curators Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari sought; not all of the work is actually from 1993 (Sarah Lucas’s simple but elegant 1991 “The Old Couple,” Jack Pierson’s 1991 four-letter, multicolored “STAY,” Kiki Smith’s 1992 life-size bronze “Virgin Mary,” Andres Serrano’s 1992 prints from the Morgue series), while others deal with events that occurred prior to 1993 (Lutz Bacher’s “My Penis,” in which William Kennedy Smith repeats that phrase over and over in a six-and-a-half-minute video loop; Glenn Ligon’s “Red Portfolio” references a 1989 direct-mail letter from Pat Robertson). Some of the older works, especially those not by New Yorkers, might have first been shown in New York in 1993, including at the Whitney Biennial, but it doesn’t feel all of a piece, the specific groupings making more sense to art insiders than to the general public. Still, “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” is a fun sampling of the art of the early ’90s, even if it doesn’t make any grand social, cultural, or political statements.