View current page
...more recent posts
"Greater New York" alum: Jesse Bransford
Continuing an impromptu, on and off series highlighting artists from "Greater New York" (2000), in the "subversive just-past" spirit of this press report. Above, a 2001 image by Jesse Bransford titled Hero; below, an anamorphic drawing from his show last year at Feature. In the '90s Bransford mixed Patrick Stewart, Marshall Herff Applewhite, and various Excelsior and/or Constitution-class Federation starships in with his dense layerings of medieval imagery and cabalistic diagrams, and the pop culture element was missed in the 2004 exhibit, which was technically polished and almost willfully mature. This mirror piece, however, is a tour de force: if you gotta grow up (a stretch in this culture, I know) this is the way to go.
"Greater New York 2005" to Revisit Previous Group of Artists
The Museum of Modern Art's alternative space, PS1 in Queens, announced today that "Greater New York 2005" will consist entirely of artists from the 2000 exhibition "Greater New York." "We wanted to see what all our artists were doing five years later," said PS1 director Alanna Heiss, "and frankly we're sick of this 'fresh young talent' paradigm." She says she fears that New York is "becoming like LA, where the scene is centered around artists still in grad school" and protested the "increasing infantilization trend" of the rival 2004 Whitney Biennial. At an impromptu press conference, she read the following quote from a 1987 Dan Graham essay as further justification for the Museum's somewhat unexpected and daring project:
According to [Walter] Benjamin, "progress," the 19th-century scientific and ultimately capitalist myth, is expressed in commodities, fashion goods which "produce a sense of eternal newness." This makes progress a mythical goal, never to be reached, for there is always the new and it is always superseded by the next new. For Benjamin, then, progress is actually a state of stasis. And yet it is this very stasis that makes the recovery of the just-past potentially subversive.Below, images by "Greater New York" artist Michael Phelan, then and now:
Michael Phelan, from the "Driftwood and Dried Arrangements" series shown in "Greater New York" (2000)
Michael Phelan, from the "Bears" series, to be shown in "Greater New York" (2005)