Wearing You Away

John Haber
in New York City

Soft Water Hard Stone: The New Museum Triennial

The Shed: Open Call 2021

The New Museum Triennial would like to wear away your resistance. It reaches out, to artists from at least twenty nations—and goodness knows how many places of personal and family origin. Yet it has just forty contributors, so that each has a chance to make an impact.

It takes wearing away resistance as a theme as well. Its title, "Soft Water Hard Stone," asks not to underestimate less obviously blunt materials and the power of persistence. Could art itself be soft power? So broad a cast and elusive a theme can mean a survey of emerging artists that is never close to representative and rarely all that clear. And its strict limits can mean blending into a single mess over every one of the museum's five floors. It may try your patience all the more, but not for lack of trying.

New York's most exclusive arts venue is letting in emerging artists, too. In fact, it calls out to them, and selections are on view as the 2021 edition of "Open Call" at The Shed. It is the second in a series that began with The Shed's opening in spring 2019, and its run includes performances by more than a dozen other artists as well. Everything is free, so the welcome extends to you. Can it match the open call of biennials and triennials everywhere? Not really, but it still asserts its roots in the city.

An exhibition of just eleven artists may not sound inclusive, especially when it runs less than a month. One enters not from the street, but from the plaza of Hudson Yards, a pricey shopping mall only steps away. Yet it presents New York as a city of immigrants, and for once everyone has a place. Still, it is just one more institution claiming to assess the state of the art. Must a museum find its future in the community rather than the creative imagination? Can it look beyond the latest thing?

From the ground up

The triennial takes seriously its theme of human and natural materials, and it starts from the ground up. Samara Scott layers her irregular shapes and earth colors onto the ground-floor windows outside. They set a very different tone from plain text in large letters on the façade above—by Glenn Ligon, the African American artist, for an earlier show of "Grief and Grievance." Inside, Jeneen Frei Njootli starts on the ground, too. Clusters of metal beads lie along the floor, here and there on every floor, like ball bearings but more inert and shining. You may find yourself looking out for them.

Often domesticity and the earth come together, as human habitation. In the lobby gallery, Arturo Kameya sets out an entire domestic setting half abstracted away. Steel silhouettes seat at a table with a dog, while decorative forms hold the wall. Kang Seung Lee opens the top floor with drawings of plants and seeds, but also an outdoor scene set by a cottage. A slab on the floor holds pebbles and dried plants, but also gold threads, while a living cactus in a saucer and ceramic pot sets out its Archive in Dirt. Nearby, Cynthia Daignault paints equally meticulous trees in black and white.

Art here may get to you, slowly but surely, but it is sensitive to erosion and decay as well. Brandon Ndife sees them everywhere at home—and mimics them in sculpture. Thao Nguyen Phan translates mud and sand deposits into video, for a "history of the Mekong River." Angelika Loderer imagines sculpture as akin to icicles and mole tunnels. Tomás Díaz Cedeño incorporates a water pump, and his concrete mimes cave formations. Erin Jane Nelson calls stoneware Freezing My Eggs on a Melting Planet.

Just how responsive, though, are they? In a curator's photo, those beads follow cracks in the earth outdoors, but they make an impression more like planks by John McCracken, leaning up against gallery walls in Minimalism's blunt old days. Kameya speaks not of home but of witches, while the remaining sculpture and video are near shapeless. Nelson claims also to address slavery and the American Civil War. With As I Lay Dying (named after the novel of dying in the Old South by William Faulkner), Daignault attests to the Civil War, too, with "witness trees." But will they see? Others are too obscure for you to see much at all.

The New Museum has been trying to start over from its beginning in 1997, as an alternative space under Marcia Tucker—and then again in a mammoth home on the Bowery. With its first of five triennials, "Younger than Jesus" in 2009, including Ryan Trecartin, it boasted of a "generational." (No gods or humans were killed in the process.) What is left, though, to set it apart? The Bronx Biennial can stand for a borough, The Shed's "Open Call" for a city, and the Whitney Biennial for a nation. The 2021 New Museum Triennial shoots for the world.

The curators, Margot Norton and Jamiliah James, also look to the future, with work from almost exclusively the last two years. Only weeks before in Long Island City, "Greater New York" similarly cut back in number while ranging overseas. Yet it seems mired in past struggles more than present politics and art. The New Museum must sense an opportunity, but can it make the past relevant while keeping art firmly in the present? Yu Ji calls his plastered body fragments Flesh Stone Ghost, and which incarnation will win out? The answer can only depend on the role of tradition in real art and real lives.

Tradition in motion

For artists here, tradition is very much alive. Gabriel Chaile bases a monster of a head with a pot's short feet on Argentinean ceramics, as Mamá Luchona, while Amalie Smith draws on the Cyprian Bronze Age and pillars by Bronwyn Katz on Capetown. Evgeny Antufiev papers a wall with a marbled relief from Russia, and his bronze takes the shape of masks. Already, though the boundaries of past and present are subject to erosion. Nickola Pottinger creates similar masks from colored paper pulp. Sculpture by Yu Ji in China looks "primitive" enough, but she insists on urban materials.

Cultural identity is always personal and political, and that alone carries the show into the present. Blair Saxon-Hill treats a wall of constructions as "household figures." Video by Haig Aivazian slips back and forth between cartoons, suburban evenings, and police repression—and "they're shooting at you." Figures on video by Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho duck past ominous lights to vanish in the darkness. They mean to embody a parable of colonialism, capitalism, and displacement. Harry Gould Harvey IV makes a monument from stripped, charred church doors.

Much of it is art in motion. Laurie Kang speaks of time as a medium—with photograms, cast aluminum anchovies, and cables on steel tracks to prove it. Moving parts for Gabriela Mureb bore a deeper and deeper hole. Alex Ayed outlines weathered sails as paths through the ocean, while bare black lines for Clara Ianni trace the path of the artists themselves on their way to the museum. Nadia Belerique sets them amid global commerce, with shipping barrels for stained glass and found objects. Light fixtures from defunct offices form an empty frame for Iris Touliatou. Krista Clark borrows her "organic tent" from a construction site, while Hera Büyüktaşçiyan sets out piles of industrial carpet awaiting installation—although his title swears that there is Nothing Further Beyond.

All this can be too precious for words—and, as Pottinger terms his masks, "inscrutable." It also all but precludes traditional media, much as with the 2019 triennial, "Songs for Sabotage"—just when painting and tapestry are everywhere. Ann Greene Kelly has her "body landscape," but beside a polka-dot sofa. Christina Pataialii has the packed, shaded forms of the most radically political painting ever, Mexican murals. Twelve feet of painting by Ambera Wellmann ranges from abstraction to nudes, all as echoes of eighteenth-century "cycles of movement." They, too, are hoping to wear the world away.

Wall text runs so long that it can wear you out as well, but even that may not be enough. You may never grasp what half of it is about. Jes Fan treats latticed silicate and liquid culture as a symbol of otherness, but why, and is Goutam Ghosh in India tracing anything at all? Is Gäelle Choisne altogether ironic in calling her sprawling installation a temple of love? Sixty rings turned up with metal detectors over twenty years, by Rose Salane, can I fear be nothing else but a labor of love. Others, like Lien and Camacho, duck in and out of the darkness.

They may suggest the elusiveness and immediacy of art at its best. Video by Kate Cooper is Somatic Aliasing, and I cannot begin to explain, but she has one seeing ghosts and the light. A black male in the Congo addresses an audience in near darkness for Sandra Mujinga, as Pervasive Light. Just who is he, and what difference has he made? I am not sure either how Tanya Lukin Linka sees her video performance as An Amplification Through Many Minds. And yet not one of them can so easily be dismissed or worn away.

Solitude and the city

You may be sick and tired of biennials and triennials—for all their boasts of "Greater New York" and its diversity. At their best, they may have you admiring curators scouring the city as you never could. An "open call," in contrast, takes the easy way out, inviting submissions while favoring work that sounds good on paper. What in real life does a tapestry by Pauline Shaw have to do with an MRI or an MRI with her memories, and what do Filipino martial arts have to do with a mother's death for Caroline Garcia? And why do the martial arts look more like table tennis? Amid the wealth of Hudson Yards, with the sculpture by Thomas Heatherwick still off-limits, The Shed still offers a microcosm of the city.

Two works single out street corners. Esteban Jefferson offers a love note to Devra Freelander, a fellow artist, and the corner where she lived and died. He sketches it only lightly in oil, so that her face on one canvas and memorial flowers on another spring to life. Aisha Amin Masjid enters a Brooklyn mosque from a corner on Fulton Street. His video plays above forty prayer rugs to open the experience to you as well. For him, The Earth Has Been Made a Place of Prayer.

All but four works rely on new media, and every last one stands apart as an installation. That makes each an urban corner to itself. Has the earth come to Bed-Stuy? For Anne Wu, architecture in Flushing becomes A Patterned Universe, and yet its steel bars look like nothing so much as a playground. Reflections off a DVD cast light on the floor, while the construction casts its shadows. Le'Andra LeSeur traces her music to African American churches.

Ayanna Dozier pretends to document a neighborhood that never came to be, but through voices in the present. Dubbed the Negro Coney Island and destroyed before it could open in 1924, it is her Cities of the Dead. Blacks then, a woman explains, hardly cared that the site had held only a potter's field, which is indeed how most people remember Hart Island now. Tajh Rust paints bathers, black and white, who might have enjoyed the beach in Brooklyn, too. Their silhouettes in silver on glass face a quote from a Caribbean philosopher who "made an attempt to communicate with this absence."

Simon Liu leaves New York for Hong Kong, but his video could be just another day in the life. Its woods evoke his ancestral village. Fires rage at night, as part of protests against Chinese repression, but students go about their business in sunlight. Whatever The Shed says, they look anything but "hyperkinetic." Kenneth Tam responds to violence directed against Asian Americans. Punching bags rest on the floor, standing or overturned, much as for Liz Larner in 1990, but his video suggests a slow dance or a ritual.

Maybe Masjid is right, and the earth really has becomes a place of prayer. For all their anger, the artists find hope in the everyday. Emilie Gossiaux stands as a little girl beside her seeing-eye dog on its hind legs, as True Love Will Find You in the End. A pulley system allows a tapestry in felt to hang beside Shaw's blown glass. She does indeed base it on an MRI, and the objects under glass must, for her, bear memories, too. The Shed's diversity is no more than fashion, but the memories are personal.

jhaber@haberarts.com

The 2021 New Museum Triennial ran at the New Museum through January 23, 2022, "Open Call" at The Shed through August 1, 2021. The Shed returns to its privileged ways the next month, with Drift. Related reviews look at past New Museum Triennials, including "Younger than Jesus," "The Ungovernables," "Surround Audience," and "Songs for Sabotage." Another review takes up the "2023 Open Call."