[caption id="attachment_2316" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Lauren Cornell"][/caption]
WHITEWALL: You and your fellow curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman, used an alternative curatorial model to inspire The Generational: Younger Than Jesus. This involved your soliciting recommendations for artists from a social network of art historians, artists, critics, etc. How did you decide to use this model?
LAUREN CORNELL: First of all, we wanted to explore a new model for research. In the 1990’s there was a model for biennial curating in which the curator would go globe-trotting around the world trying to meet with various artists. We organized the show on an 18-month timeline, so we had limited time as well as limited resources. We thought about what might be an efficient, new model that could help us reach artists all over the world within this time frame. Artists, curators, and art historians working in local contexts all over the world can reach people, and have more expertise than we would if we just stopped in like tourists. This inspired our model of reaching out to people and having them give us recommendations. All of these recommendations added up to around seven hundred portfolios and became the core research for the exhibition. The quality of what we received was really high and that was partly what inspired this two-catalogue model: one catalogue that reproduces five hundred portfolios of the artists, each one page per artist, and the second which accompanies the exhibition. We really wanted to show the research because it was excellent and exciting. But we also thought it was in keeping with this new model if we were transparent about our connections and how we found the work.
WW: The Artist’s Directory, the catalogue of five hundred recommended artists, is a unique way for people to look at the show as well as your curatorial process and choices, allowing them to consider the choices that you made. With this catalogue, were you aiming to stimulate this discussion?
LC: When we first conceptualized the idea of having that catalogue I was nervous and self-conscious because our choices would be thrown into relief. People would be able to see the pool of artists we had chosen from and evaluate our decisions. But then I realized that this was a positive, exciting thing. One of the main purposes of curating is to open up conversation and this exhibition certainly does that. I think that the catalogue adds to this discussion. I know that other curators are already using it for research.
WW: This exhibition focuses on a specific generation, the so-called Y-Generation, those who are younger than 33 years of age. How do you think the exhibition might be viewed differently by people within that “Younger Than Jesus” generation, such as yourself, as opposed to those in other generations?
LC: This show was partly inspired by the fact that so many other cultural practitioners are trying to capture Generation Y or the generation born after 1976. They want to describe it and bottle it, largely so that it can be marketed to. We wanted to take this same generation and look at their art, as well as look at the idea of generations in art. Art history is carved up into periods, so generations are a kind of default way of understanding art. We wanted to apply this concept to the emerging generation and see if it held. When we set out, the idea of generations in art was really a question and a problem, but also a reality - we look at the world through a generational filter. I myself have never identified as a Millenial, or even a member of Gen Y. I think many people who do fall within this age bracket feel uncomfortable with these labels. That was something that we were really conscious of, and it is one of the reasons why we organized a show that has no stable or coherent picture of what a Gen Y artist is like or has to say. The show has an endless and conflicting number of world-views, political positions, and practices. We wanted a show that revealed this variety on purpose, in order to throw off any kind of potential to capture or bottle this generation.
WW: How do you think the birth of the Internet affected the art of the “Younger Than Jesus” generation?
LC: I curate a monthly event series at the New Museum called the New Silent Series. The “New Silent” takes its name from the generational theories of Neil Howe and William Strauss. According to them, the “New Silent” is the generation born in the year 1996, and for that generation, the internet and network technologies are a complete given. I was born on the Gen X/Gen Y cusp, so I only really began to use email when I was in college. For the Gen Y who are a bit younger, the internet was more integral to their development. So there is this range. The other thing is that you can’t talk about people’s experience purely in relation to age. Geography and culture also shape people’s relationships to, and access to, technology. In the show you see a lot of different kinds of perspectives on technology. Some artists are interested in the innovative potential of the internet and how it has challenged and transformed our culture and our relationships. You see that in Ryan Trecartin’s work. His works reads generationally to people who are older than him, because they see a landscape and relationships between people that are totally inflected by digital culture. I think ultimately for Ryan this is positive. There are a lot of concerns and anxieties that run through his films, but the people in them are fully embracing the culture around them. Then you also see people who are more critical, like the collaborative AIDS-3D who have a piece in the show called OMG Obelisk, which parodies the innovation-worship that they see in society. The work consists of a mock shrine that has OMG (short for Oh My God) hatched out of text message communication in place of where a god should be. Another trend involves romanticizing obsolescence. A lot of these artists feel the speed with which things go out of date. What they do, and what art does on a larger level, is slow things down and pull things out of context to really consider technology: what it means, what it meant to them growing up, and what its broader implications might be. For instance, Cory Arcangel has two works in the show that play off of modernism because they really push medium specificity to an extreme. One of the pieces is based on a plasma screen and the other is a piece that deals with Photoshop. Both look specifically at the possibilities and limits of those two: one, a broadcast technology and two, a graphics program. Plasma screens are now the way to show video work, in homes and in galleries, but they will obviously go out of date soon. When I started as a curator, I was not literally working with one-inch tapes, but they were around and I was working with VHS and DVD. In the plasma screen piece, he’s looking at how plasma screens are vulnerable to burning. If you leave an image on a plasma screen for long enough it will burn into the frame. For his piece, he burned his name, the gallery name, and his contact information into this plasma screen, and that’s the whole piece. The Photoshop piece is this large-scale abstraction. The process for the piece is in the work’s title. It basically describes the few clicks he made for him to make the piece: he opens Photoshop, goes into the color palette, goes onto a particular spec and it opens up the default possibilities for blue. And that’s what the piece is: he’s showing what blue in Photoshop is. He’s slowing those things down and looking at how they’ll become obsolete soon, but also looking at them for what they are now.
WW: There are four prominent themes that are said to have emerged from the show: a romance with technological obsolescence, picturing the future, a return to abstraction and a shared negotiation of globalism. Why do you think the “Younger Than Jesus” generation is interested in these specific themes?
LC: In the 5th floor space we have a timeline of events that marked the lives of people in this generation. We reached out to all the artists and asked them to suggest political and media events from their lives and then we supplemented this with events that we felt were also significant. What comes out is that these artist’s lives are marked by the globalization that has taken place in the last two decades, and how this has been shot through with the dominance of the American media. People all around the globe cite “Star Wars” or Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as formative moments for them, and when these are shared moments, they lead to similar artistic interests. We wanted to see if there was anything that binds this generation together, and this narrative of globalization, or the negotiation of it, really does. I would say that imagining the future is something that everyone does—particularly young people. We highlighted it because there’s been a lot of speculation that this generation is really optimistic and do-it-yourself. But we also wanted to point out that they’re really anxious, apocalyptic and skeptical as well as optimistic about the future We wanted to point to this trend because, as someone who is thirty-one, I find a lot of people who are older than me who ask me if my peers are political and comment that it seems like people don’t protest anymore. I thought it was important to point out that younger artists are political but that their politics looks different to those of the baby boomers.
WW: Do you feel that artists in the “Younger Than Jesus” generation are responding to similar themes in different ways because of their cultural upbringing? Do you see more of a global cultural identity due to the blurring of cultural boundaries from globalization?
LC: In my essay I refer to this writer, Kwame Anthony Appiah. He is notable for presenting the idea of “cosmopolitanism,” which is based on the idea of being a global citizen. Cosmopolitanism suggests that in the world today you belong to your local context, but you also relate and negotiate your identity on a larger, global, international scale. That is the way that I see all of us working now. Every artist in the show is responding to a particular art historical, personal and cultural context. But they’re also part of a larger global conversation about art and about culture. You can see this in their work. As director of Rhizome, where I constantly see artists working with the web, I get to see artists carving out international communities through the web. The ease of cross-cultural exchange is something new and with it come new tensions and questions.
