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Estrangement and Community
John Haberin New York City
Greater New York 2021 at MoMA PS1
"Greater New York" takes its title seriously. It may have cut back, to around fifty artists on half of just two floors of MoMA PS1, but it is still thinking big and still about New York. It seeks to reflect the pace and scope of an ever-changing city.
That is not the city of the guidebooks, although the show opens with a quote from Samuel R. Delany, who titled his personal history Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. When it turns to Times Square, in photos by Robin Graubard, it is to remember a seedier crossroads in a crime-ridden decade that scared more than a few tourists away. Nor is it, too, the city of high finance and privileged tastes. Like New York itself for Delany, it asks to "bridge social worlds." It favors art that "cuts through the hierarchies," and it expects artists to take that mission personally. It sees them as expressing their "felt relationship to the city." 
Now in its fifth edition, it is more multicultural than ever as well. Many of its contributors have come from afar, out of countries from Vietnam and Japan to Argentina and Brazil, only to remain torn between a sense of estrangement and community. Many more identify with both New York and their family's place of origins—only rarely white America. Many, too, are old enough to remember when the city made almost everyone feel the dangers. And that is all well and good, as insights into art and urban America, but it leaves them sadly out of touch with the present. "Greater New York" may be greater in its ambitions, but bigger is not necessarily better.
Waging old wars
Estrangement can be fun. Think of René Magritte and Modernism's mind games—or the disorienting imagery in painting today. "Greater New York" 2021 opens with t-shirts made in China, their collective text an incoherent found poetry. The group behind it, Shanzhai Lyric, also has a room of counterfeit goods from Chinatown. More t-shirts turn up later with Lachell Workman as a black mass on the floor and in a slide projection, where they look uncomfortably close to headstones. Jocks and casual dressers everywhere can rest in peace.
Nostalgia can be fun, too, and long overdue. Alan Michelson supplies the show's other welcome, in the two-story room spanning the basement and a mezzanine above. His video looks back to New York as a Native American homeland, with a riverbed rich in oysters. This is a layered history, with commercial ships moving slowly and ominous across the screen, beneath a transparent ground of small stones. It is layered, too, in adding a soundtrack of native dances. What was lost cannot be regained, but it can be celebrated.
Already, though, art feels strangely out of touch. Michelson scores big, for all his anodyne message (yeah, oysters!), and he is not the last here to remember indigenous peoples. What, though, does a pile of unimpressive goods, like a garage in need of housecleaning, say about exploited workers and trade with China? So much else, too, seems just as obscure and just as hectoring. BlackMass Publishing devotes a side room to a "study hall" for its own product. You had better do your homework, on behalf of the artists.
"Greater New York" began more than twenty years ago now as a challenge, in what was then P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center. Where the 2000 Whitney Biennial sought a snapshot of the present, New York's leading alternative arts space promised the future. It promised. too, to return every five years, by which time the future will have changed before one's eyes. Now, though, surveys of emerging artists are as routine and overblown as many a New Museum Triennial, billed as a "generational." So is a dedication to local artists, thanks to the Bronx Biennial and "Open Call" at the Shed—and so is a focus on global diversity, as with the Asia Society Triennial. What then is left for "Greater New York"?
In response, it makes a game effort to go greater still. It had already used its third edition to pair contemporary artists with others, presumably, more worthy of MoMA. And then, in 2015, "Greater New York" gave up on the future all but entirely, along with the present. It directed its nostalgia not at the community, but at a city in crisis thirty years before. Delayed for a year by Covid-19 like so much else in art, it now picks where that story left off, as if nothing has changed.
Half a dozen artists have already died, four of them in the previous century, as if zombies were emerging artists. Many more dwell on those very same years to this day. Still, this "Greater New York" is not just playing it safe, whatever you may have read in The New York Times. As curators, Ruba Katrib, Serubiri Moses, Kate Fowle, and Inés Katzenstein take up the struggle on behalf of politically engaged and unfamiliar artists. They can point with pride to the rediscovery of Paulina Peavy, a painter who made her mark in an international exposition of 1939—and obsessed to the end with UFOs and the bright earth tones of Mexican murals. All too often, though, they are waging old wars long after the foot soldiers in art and on the street have fought and died.
Days of rage
This is not the greater New York you know—although it could be the city you once knew if you were young and angry in the days of rage, starting in the 1960s. Here the Young Lords still patrol the Puerto Rican community, as they once did with Raphael Montañez Ortiz, in photos by Hiram Maristany, who had just turned twenty. Diane Burns still strides across empty lots while reciting her nasty Alphabet City Serenade, and Graubard still heads from Times Square for the "young punks" of the Lower East Side. Curtis Cuffie creates his doll-like sculpture for an East Village performance of the 1990s. Luis Frangella paints David Wojnarowicz at an abandoned west side pier, but Peter Hujar slips in as well before his death from AIDS. Patrick Warner and Ilka Hartmann photograph Allen Ginsberg and other poets of his time like presiding deities.
It could instead be the New York you can only scorn or wish that you could know. Kayode Ojo gets a glimpse of parties at the Whitney. On video, Regina Vater scrounges for "luxury garbage," while aspiring terrorists occupy an Upper East Side apartment for Marie Karlberg, debating how to channel their rage. Urban debris can be suggestive at that, as realtors move in and buildings crumple. Athena LaTocha turns it into a coal-black mural, along with dirt from Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, while photos of rocks by Shelley Niro are all she has to show for a Native American resting place. Dolores Furtado makes paper pulp look like crumbling rocks in Dissolution, while mechanical tumblers churn the slime for Steffani Jemison, a black artist with concerns for dissolution and succession.
Are they merely digging up the dirt? The terror is there for Doreen Garner, with spiked bedsprings suspended like a summer hammock or instrument of torture, as Lucy's Agony. More often, though, they might as well have left the city behind. Yuji Agematsu sets out shelves of debris as if it were precious objects, while Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa sets out a single brick on a shipping pallet. E'wao Kagoshima relies on doodles to evoke the East Village in 1976, and Milford Graves offers little more for his work in the Black Arts Movement and free jazz scene (although a Tribeca gallery, with assemblages and mixed media, shows just how wild and crazy he could be). More squiggles from Emilie Louise Gossiaux bring her closer to her dog but not much else.
They might have left their cultural diversity behind as well. Silvery photos by Rotimi Fani-Kayode and more colorful ones by Diane Severin Nguyen amount to vaguely comforting abstraction, as does video by Raha Raissnia and "flicker film" by Carolyn Lazard. The blandness is more obvious still in painting. Nadia Ayari Tunisian has her night-blooming jasmine, Sean-Kierre Lyons his forest of unicorns and black flowers, and Tammy Nguyen her vegetation. Andy Robert sinks the Harlem Renaissance into hazy abstraction, while the "Neo-Mexican" painting of the 1980s by Julio Galán comes down to coarse illustration and free association. Ahmed Morsi may be beating a dead horse, but at least he leaves it to die in a subway station that Giorgio de Chirico might have admired.
The best approach may be not to worry about the details of "Greater New York." Rush through it, stroll through it, or wallow in it, as your eye and interests command you, much as the artists wallow in their instincts and their memories. Let estrangement merge with community. So what if G. Peter Jemison moves from Jim Thorpe to Mickey Mouse on used board and paper bags, for Indians Have Always Paid the Price? So what if thread, glitter, and Spiderman are all that Nicolas Moufarrege has to show for New York and Beirut? So what if Marilyn Nance slips easily from protests to carnivals in her black-and-white photos, when you can, too?
Every so often, it may even evoke the present. Bettina Grossman sees the city reflected in store windows and the glass of skyscrapers, where the discomfort is well worth seeking out. Rosemary Mayer captures urban noise as sound art. In photos by Avijit Halder immigrants from India might be dancing or just finding a home. Their neon colors and subjects are close indeed to those in "Inward" at the International Center of Photography now. You may still wish for more, a lot more, but there may yet be a far greater "Greater New York."
"Greater New York" ran at MoMA PS1 through April 18, 2022. Milford Graves also ran at Artists Space through January 8. Other reviews consider "Greater New York 2000," "Greater New York 2005," and "Greater New York 2010," and "Greater New York 2015.