Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century

With the immateriality of Conceptual art poised like a spectral lupine force at the door, the object, formerly proscribed, is presented as an arsenal in the New Museum’s exhibition, “Unmonumental.” These works celebrate the thing liminal, discarded, recovered and damaged. Many of the materials that bind the “Unmonumental” category of practices are evident here: a plinth or strut, delicately or precariously arranged mementos, usually antiquated or weathered; a spray of photographic ephemera, snapshots or spreads of printed matter.

Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman and Massimiliano Gioni are the curatorial trio that conceived the 30-odd artist affair, which is nothing if not consistent in its selections. Something wantonly auspicious hovers over this show, being the inaugural exhibition of the museum’s commodious new building and also the first instalment of a four-part cumulative exhibition. The curatorial premise started with “Object,” filling the floor with sculptures. The walls were next, mid-January, with “Collage: The Unmonumental Picture,” followed in February by “The Sound of Things: Unmonumental Audio” and “Montage: Unmonumental Online,” until the museumcontainer holds all four components simultaneously. And so, “Work in Progress” signs were scattered on the walls overtop splashes of half-executed artworks when I viewed the show in early January, as artists prepared the second module. As a curatorial premise, the show is meant to admit the viewer in medias res, as all hangs in the balance, presenting the art laboratory, apparently full of risks, circuitous adventure and reward.

In order to follow the meandering lead of this improvisational model (and to avoid the droves lined up for the elevators), I took the stairs, and bungled a carefully installed exhibition layout by stumbling sideways into an alcove holding a Carol Bove. Her Driscoll Garden, 2005, is a large wood plank resting on cinder blocks, with fastidiously placed, minimal concrete cubes, miniature Haake Plexi boxes, a spread-eagled lunar atlas, two painfully erect peacock feathers and what was later revealed to me as a Richard Avedon photograph from Vogue. This poised arrangement is a scaled-down material culture exhibition of its own, with sensitivity to placement and implied linkages between its objects: the Avedon three-quarter profile of a woman’s starkly side-lit and elegant coif, for example, mirrors the penumbra of the nearby atlas’s crescent moon.

Berlin’s Tobias Buche is in the Aby Warburg category, pulling disparate images from Spielberg’s E.T., photographs of the 2004 Edvard Munch heist and so on, then mounting them on cardboard tacked to flimsy wooden kiosks. Picking up from Hirschhorn, but discarding the Swiss artist’s bombastic love for his subjects, Buche assembles a broad, tender, gingerly worked-up archive. They are odd and beautifully provisional objects. The work’s evasive content and series of equivalences between low-grade computer printouts of vaguely political personages and snaps of crowds underline the disposable nature inherent in the contemporary proliferation of images and their potential uses for subjective record making.

Isa Genzken’s insouciant trophies also pick up on discarded surplus. They are glittering tableaux of reflective papers, fake flowers, plastic toys, stemware, photographs, splattered paint, foil, mirror—built around pseudo-plinths. This additive process gilds the lily, but, of course, that is the point. The unmonumental caste ornaments the ornament. Because of this, Genzken’s work reflects the tropes of public monuments: central towering elements, floral embellishment, the deposit of mementos by pilgrims and other more irreverent alterations, such as spray paint left by dissidents.

A hinged grouping of white plywood boards evoking a folding deck chair is yet another reworked plinth in Tom Burr’s Recline, 2005. The ad hoc chair is garlanded by a soiled swath of orange and white striped fabric that tumbles flaccidly onto a splayed hardcover of American author Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms—and yes, it is a first edition. This publication’s back cover includes the author’s infamous pout-lipped and sensual reclining portrait, and so a scaled-down version of that terrible child is in repose on Burr’s lounger. The nostalgic and rarified are clearly some of Flood and Company’s guiding lights in their selection.

Claire Fontaine’s CHANGE, 2006, is work that seven years ago might have shut a museum down: a series of 10, incised, American 25-cent coins outfitted with retractable, sickle-shaped box cutters operate somewhat like scaled-down switchblades that could easily sneak through airport security. And Fontaine’s Passe-partout series of keychains, with carved hacksaw blades, bike spokes, Allen keys and bangles, if skilfully applied, could be used to go anywhere, as their title promises. These picks seem likely to defeat the sturdiest of padlocks. The artists behind Claire Fontaine— which is an artists’ collective named for a stationery brand, and not an individual—have created Passe keychains customized for Paris 10ème (with an Eiffel pendant) and Manhattan (with a golden Liberty knickknack). Fontaine’s unmonuments have the excitement of contraband and the thrill of how these objects might be used to dethrone other pre-existing monuments: looting a museum comes to mind as perhaps being an ultimate act of cultural criticism, though not one I’d necessarily endorse.

Huffy Howler, 2004, named for the bicycle that serves as lever to the piece’s violet cake-frosting, cubic castle axis, is an exercise in grotesque, junked-up formalism by Rachel Harrison. The work not only represents but enacts balance, one end of the Howler meanly strutting a printout of Mel Gibson’s mug shot clipped to a slashed swatch of fake fur, the other weighed from a handlebar by black patent handbags. Its historical reference is equally patent and unavoidable: Duchamp’s 1913 Bicycle Wheel. The result is a ready-made anxiety attack that is a further obfuscation of the operation of commodities. This work represents North America’s new horrific: the mesmerizing vomitorium of mass-produced objects that overwhelm their subjects with wanting, without a true tracing of the conditions that produced them and their political effects. The world becomes one big exciting library with the risk of too few insights and just too many things. But Harrison’s work and many of the practices on show in “Unmonumental” do offer a wicked analogue for the current collecting vogue of international economic markets; if investment in commodity stock is unstable, investors instead speculate in artists’ recombinations of these same stocks’ material results: commodities.

There is as much speculation about the New Museum building as “Unmonumental” itself. From the street, it’s a metal-clad, misaligned series of rectangular prisms. Don’t let the press photos fool you: what looks like a sheen of crisp steel angles in print is closer to chainlink fence in life. A sad fact on the outside, the space is a blocky bright white cube inside. Luckily, unlike so many recent big-splash museum renos, these galleries are functional spaces that can accommodate artworks rather than just providing a sparkling crumple of cladding with curb appeal. “Unmonumental’s” exhibition layout makes the very most of this space: by its fourth stage, things are bound to get a bit crunched.

Curators of strong group shows can diagnose growing breeds of practice, and introduce a register of discussion around them, honing the jagged joins of the tabulation, marking peripatetic connections between artworks while allowing them to remain singular and distinct. “Unmonumental’s” itinerant classification has chosen objects of study that are simply too much of the same family, becoming a flat line of formal similarities that are so strong it borders occasionally on the monotone. It’s an equation that grows weary after a floor and a half, which is a shame, since there are some beautiful works. But there is no doubt that the triumvirate is correct in spotting a virulent species, and they present compelling works along the way. ■

“Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century” was exhibited at the New Museum in New York from December 1, 2007, to March 30, 2008.

Mark Clintberg is an artist, writer and independent curator based in Montreal.