“Songs for Sabotage,” the New Museum’s 2018 Triennial, tethers fresh artists to stale palaver. The work of the twenty-six individuals and groups, mostly ranging in age from twenty-five to thirty-five, from nineteen countries, is formally conservative, for the most part: lots of painting, and craft mediums that include weaving and ceramics. The framing discourse is boilerplate radical. The show’s catalogue and its verbose wall texts adduce abstract evils of “late capitalism” and (new to me) “late liberalism,” which the artists are presumed to subvert. “Art is a part of the infrastructure in which we live and, if successful, might operate as propaganda,” Alex Gartenfeld, the show’s co-curator with Gary Carrion-Murayari, said at the press preview. (If art is propaganda, propaganda is art—and we live in Hell.) In principle, the show’s aim reflects the New Museum’s valuable policy of incubating upstart trends in contemporary art. But it comes off as willfully naïve. Nearly all the artists plainly hail from an international archipelago of art schools and hip scenes and have embarked upon normal career paths. Noting that they share political discontents, as the young tend to do, is easy. Harder, in the context, is registering their originality as creators—like bumps under an ideological blanket. But there’s insight to gain about emergent sensibilities in world art, without hustling everybody toward illusory barricades.
Handwork seems back in, for one striking thing, and innovation seems out. Small tapestries in cotton, linen, and synthetic threads, by the Russian Zhenya Machneva, depict obsolete factories, abandoned heroic statuary, and other remnants of lost Soviet grandeur. With lovely, soft textures and a palette given to muted blues and grays, are the works nostalgic, or are they sardonic? I can’t decide. Machneva, born in 1988, bears watching. So does the Peruvian ceramist Daniela Ortiz, who incorporates plenty of verbal and symbolic agitation—for example, against the colonialist legacy of monuments to Christopher Columbus—into her satirical, terrific painted pots and figurines, but with a charm that quite disarms militancy. Ortiz epitomizes a way in which artists can’t help disappointing ideological allies, and may even qualify their own intentions, by wandering after their muses off-message. Her work ends up suggesting a protest mainly against disembodying technology, rather as the late-Victorian Arts and Crafts movement reacted against industrial culture. It exalts less the urban revolutionary than the cottage artisan. This seems to me an authentic though ultimately futile response to the vaporous omnipresence and instantly disposable excitements of the Internet.
The show’s two best artists, by my lights, are painters: the Kenyan Chemu Ng’ok, who is based in South Africa, and the Haitian Tomm El-Saieh, who lives in Miami. Each evinces an independent streak that is at odds with the vision of “collectivity” promulgated by the curators. Ng’ok does take on social content, celebrating a custom in which women braid one another’s hair—an elaborate, at times painful, but intimately bonding activity—and referring to riotous student activism. But her feeling for her subjects only initiates the commotion of her style. Ng’ok has developed a confidently ebullient Expressionism of layered drawing—faces and figures teeming laterally and in depth—and of flowing brushwork, in deep-toned, plangent colors. She’s not propagandizing; she’s painting. Even more impressive is the abstractionist El-Saieh, who appears not political at all. He may owe his inclusion in the show to a dazzling olio of identities: the son of a Haitian and Palestinian father and an Israeli mother.
El-Saieh’s three large acrylic paintings, including one that is eight feet high by twelve feet wide, suggest from a distance speckled veils of atmospheric color, predominantly gray and white, red and blue, or green and yellow. Up close, they reveal thousands of tiny marks, blotches, and erasures, each discretely energetic and decisive. The accumulation mesmerizes. Grasping for its coherence is like trying to breathe under water—which, to your pleasant surprise, as in a dream, you find that you can almost do. In the catalogue, the critic Rob Goyanes writes that El-Saieh has derived inspiration from Haitian traditions of vodou trance-induction and percussive music. That sounds right. Less persuasive is Goyanes’s view that the works “evoke the ghostly symbolic order of late capitalism”—if that even means anything. But something about the present world has proved congenial to this artist’s startling revitalization of abstract painting. There will be more to see and to know of El-Saieh in the near future. He’s a comer.
One artist in the show might appear to endorse the curators’ fondness for propaganda, but Claudia Martínez Garay, a Peruvian based in Amsterdam, pretty much drowns it in irony. For her jazzy pair of mural-size reliefs, “Cannon Fodder / Cheering Crowds” (2018), she mounted, on one wall, cutout paintings on wood of historical activist imagery, most of it obscure to me but including the Black Panther (from the movement, not the movie). The opposite wall holds a jumble of overlapping, elegant geometric abstractions, also on wood. A wall text explains that the latter repeat the shapes in a collage that Martínez Garay made of news clippings about the Shining Path, the Maoist insurgency in Peru that began in 1980 and has declined since splintering in 1992. The point alleged is that the artist critiques modernist abstraction as having been propaganda for—I don’t know, maybe middle capitalism. But the colorful, sheer fun of the work raises doubts. What I take away is that the promotion of revolution and the departure from figuration in art amount to alternative strategies of visual seduction, booby-trapping intellectual programs with gratuitous pleasures. Why do political partisans ever place faith in fine art, which has proved incorrigibly hedonistic for, to date, thousands of years?
Geographic diversity is the show’s strong suit. Artists other than those I’ve mentioned are Algerian, Brazilian, English, German, Greek, Indian, Mexican, Norwegian, Philippine, South African, and Zimbabwean. There are six Americans. But an unmistakable cast of sameness reigns. It’s the archipelago: a global collectivity, indeed, but not so much one of partisan solidarity as one of shared information. Artists anywhere today will be conscious of what’s being done everywhere else, with discernible consequences for the directions they choose to take and those they reject. Internationalism is no utopian idea now but a workaday given. A nice-sounding correlative is that provincialism is dead, along with the formerly leading roles of metropolitan centers. But physics gives us a word for evenly distributed energies: “entropy.” The “Sabotage” organizers imagine a global convergence of leftist rebels. I see local traditions dissolving in a soup of fungible sophistication, administered by functionaries who include frequently flying curators. The truest political dynamisms today involve people who, among their other defining conditions, neither attend nor have kids in art schools: a populist resentment of élites and a craving for hard-knuckled authority.
Art can be only art, though it may afford promontories on anything in the world. One such vantage point, to which I returned when revisiting the show, was that of Wong Ping, a droll and melancholy digital animator from Hong Kong. In a primitive visual style and with chipperly voiced, subtitled narration, he spins fables of men brought low by their vanities. A catalogue essayist, Yung Ma, asserts that Ping reflects “the increasingly strained relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China” and “the ongoing struggle to overturn misogynistic hegemonic culture.” Be those things as they may—hard to judge on such indirect evidence—Ping manages both to sicken and to enchant with scabrous images and hypersensitive moral dither. In one story, a tree on a bus fails a test of conscience involving a pregnant elephant and a cockroach. (It’s complicated.) The moral strikes me as the most apt—and truly sabotaging—message in this Triennial: “To all righteous thinkers, perhaps it is worthwhile to spend more time considering how meaningless and powerless you are.” Well, and then maybe snap out of it! But there seems scant reason to trust the counsel of anyone who has not had and, yes, spent time considering that feeling—it’s certainly common enough to touch, if not to unify, most of the inhabitants of our unquiet planet. ♦
