The thing about the New Museum triennial is that after reading the sixth wall text you’re like, “Ugh, I get it.” This is something you say out of exasperation. As Stalin famously said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Every artist has to top the previous in tackling capital S Serious topics. In its scope, which is international, you actually end up being overwhelmed. Many of the artists involved are showing in a U.S. museum for the first time yet they aren’t granted the blessing of individuation.
Each piece has to be explicated by text “packed with artspeak,” as Brian P. Kelly of The Wall Street Journal put it in his review. None can be enjoyed on its own merits. This piece represents the erasure of indigenous peoples; this one is about the revolution going on in Lebanon; this one is about the way trees are suffused with horror on account of them witnessing the transatlantic slave trade (Cynthia Daignault’s As I Lay Dying (2021) series), or something like that. Idk. After a while, it all becomes a din. A buzzing, sonorous sound of excavated issues and trauma dumping.
The 2021 Triennial, titled Soft Water Hard Stone after a Brazilian proverb, runs until Jan. 23 and features forty artists whose work is generally gorgeous. The issue I have with the show has little to do with the actual work and more with how this union-busting institution presents it. The scope of the work presented gets blurred by how vast its issues run. Whatever the last sculpture is addressing is of no consequence, so it seems, of the one that precedes or proceeds it. If capitalist colonialist pilfering of land and resources were to cease today, then almost everything presented here would become obsolete. Why is there no linear effort to connect the dots between these struggles? Each is like Atlas carrying the weight of the world upon his shoulder. My friend Eli, an artist whom I saw the show with, said the New Museum is the most “woke” of the museum’s and thus is the most critiqued as well. This sounds about right, but how can you not hold a heavy lash when the formerly underground space, which is now extremely commercial and sans its former convictions, has transmogrified itself into a licking our self-inflicted wound ward at the clown hospital?
But enough about the ethics. I’m no Platonist. I’m strictly an aesthete. In this show, the poorly placed wall text rules all the art. Its plaques—not any artist—are the star of the show. When I downloaded the labels from the QR code, it amounted to 61 pages. Who has the energy and, the show seems to ask, who cares if it looks good if its got a winning message behind it? This one is about the poor treatment of Uyghurs, this one is about Palestine, this one is about some other god awful shit that I agree ought not to happen but can’t be fixed by a conceptual objet trouvé valued at more than my annual salary—or what I’d imagine my salary would be if I weren’t unemployed. My favorite piece was a short film from Beirut’s Haig Aivazian called “All Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes.” A video essay, it’s part Arthur Jaffa part Adam Curtis. It’s composed of found clips that depict “cycles of conflict and resistance,” as the text states. I watched its 13 minutes in whole from an uncomfortable seat that looked like it was rendered to resemble the border wall. Even when you’re trying to relax, you’re not allowed to feel alright.
Despite this whopping critique, I like what I got to see. There was an easy Dan Flavin rip-off. A Félix González-Torres riff, by Jeneen Frei Njootli (Fighting for the title not to be pending (2020)), I did find intriguing, which appears throughout the museum like a motif, and a large-scale painting, one of the few works on canvas, titled Strobe (2021) by Ambra Wellmann. Its 30-feet stretch along the wall; it features faceless figures of spectral proportions floating above a, “scorched earth” as the plaque puts it. Everything looks good. A sense of humor is rare, but I found it in Blair Saxon-Hill’s Emergency Contact (2021), which contains puppet-like figures made of found clothing and accessories. Despite the grief and grievance, the show features much that will provoke, evoke, interrogate, and most importantly, stimulate. The stuff mostly looks good. Not everyone is a winner, but much of what stands out is excellent.
Verdict: **** / *****