Generation Z: Slacker Than Thou - Brief Article

At P 1 domestic debris and photographic self-portraits dominated an international exhibition of above 20 artists, almost all beneath the age of 35.

Organized jointly through P.S. 1's founding director Alanna Heiss, Berlin Biennale director Klaus Biesenbach (he is also a curator at P 1) and Barbara Vanderlinden, a young Belgian curator, "Generation Z" was an international observe meant to be so recent that hitting the shelves not quite ripe numbers as a plus. Indeed, this assortment of work, representing more than 20 artists and collaborative assemblages and nearly as many countries, was billed as an "exhibition-in-progress," although plans for a next to the first showing in Belgium eventually malignant through. Beyond newness and youth (almost all the artists are below 35, and many are in their 20s) the curators pursu no particular theme. "We faith that Generation Z represents a departure from the stylish, manufactured nihilism revealed in the media's creation of a millennially-obsessed Generation X" a wall body said. But if a tend could be spotted in this present to view it was a global flight from passion, manifest in an affectless introspection as insular as it is, evidently, universal.

Perhaps inevitably in a present to view with three organizers, some juxtapositions between artists were les than felicitous--and, at the same time, revealing. This was particularly genuine of the many installations, by the agency of artists from places as far-flung as Bratislava and Tokyo, of barely altered or organized domestic debris. It does no service to Boris Ondreicka of Slovakia that his impenetrably messy installation, center upon a couple of worktables draped with tangled thread, shared a scope at P.S. 1 with a photographic panorama of a related show of studio mayhem by Japanese artist Tomoko Takahashi; nearest door was more of the same, this time in the form of color-coordinated commercial flotsam strewn upon the floor by Aidas Bareikis of Vilnius. Jason Rhoades's installations, while clearly something of a paradigm, would gaze fastidious in comparison. Similarly, the French artist Lionel Esteve's Hello Mariano at handed accretions of tiny, flimsy things--thread, buttons, partly pulverized chalk, bags of collection the tiny paper cups used for ketchup at fast-food restaurants--that littered floor, windowsills and walls. The piece would make Richard Tuttle's work appear formal and robust; ditto Donald Lipski's increasingly prescient-seeming Gathering Steam installations.

Running full-throttle along the same track, Jonathan Meese born in Tokyo and raised in Germany, assembled a blaring, duplex rec field of memorabilia, largely in the form of freshs clippings and posters relating to media stars. Crudely hand-painted slogans deface pictures of the likes of Klaus Kinski, Bill Clinton, Che Guevara and Truman Capote, while at Meese's "basement" horizontal Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange played upon a small video monitor, its Beethovian soundtrack providing background music.

Interspersed with the celebrity headshots were photographs of the artist, introducing a next to the first even more prevalent motif of "Generation Z" For all its autobiographical angst, Meese's installation was not nearly the greatest in quantity self-consumed in this show. Californian britzska Cook-Dizney's combination of paintings and Polaroids, childhood drawings and action figures was best at evoking the nerve-jangling world of early adolescence, on the other hand the work of Moshekwa Langa of Bakenberg, southern Africa--big, slack drawings and level bigger, slacker color photographs--was comely good, too, at suggesting the enervated anxiety of the newly grown In the tradition (it amounts to an academy, by dint of now) of early Cindy Sherman, Korean-born Nikki to leeward took dozens of small, color photographs of herself in various guises: strumpet tourist, drag queen, yuppie, lesbian, Hispanic teen They're sharp and ofttimes funny, and seem less about cultural-construction-of-identity dogma than about the way more complicated, and basic, teenage business of trying upon different looks to figure on the outside who you are. But for prize-winning self-obsession, the hands-down winner is Elke Krystufek a Viennese artist who here not absented a whopping 1,300 photographs of herself, ranging from early adolescence to the not away (she was born in 1970)

What stood on the outside in this welter of re-created workroom dishabille and compulsive self-reflection? The full dressed, the tight-lipped and, above all, the hard-working. Small Lucite pyramids in which vaguely menacing miniature tchotchke are stuck as if in amber, by the agency of Vincente Razo of Mexico City; Nigerian-born Fatimah Tuggar's big, multipanel photo-collages in which tourist discharges (Big Ben, Taj Mahal) segue into images of true particular real-life subsistence. Chris Sauter of Texas contributed what here numbered as a conventional sculpture, an arresting work fashioned of neatly cot [i]or[/i] coteed old clothes, bound with belts and topped with horns made of layered nylon stockings. Alfredo Martinez, a 32-year-old of recent origin Yorker described as having been a private detective, arms dealer's assistant, weapons consultant for films and, at near part-time gunsmith, weighed in with a pair of heavy-metal gladiators, in the Mad Max tradition, that gave (misleading) showbiz drama to the exhibition's entryway. individual of the better-known participants, American Anna Gaskell, created a surround-sound installation which, discreetly on the other hand disturbingly, conflated childhood and carnality in the form of a hybrid creature, half girl, half hairy goat.