"Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century"

When objects are neither a product, nor the subject in an artwork but a medium itself, what does this imply? These are issues raised about art and culture at the current show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

"My painting does not come from the easel. On the floor I am more at ease." (Jackson Pollock)

A statement like that was a slap in the face of traditional notions of what art is and how it is made. Good art needs guts, risks, and free experimentation. Easel painting was too timid and conservative in these new times of wall-sized paintings.
Jackson Pollock at Work

"Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes." (Marcel Duchamp.) Perhaps today's art is made by using what one has spent.
Marcel Duchamp with a "readymade" sculpture

Each movement in art is a reaction to the past and its updated response to what happens today. We live in a culture where endless information of any subject is at our fingertips. Rather than a movement of one, we are a creature of all. Just look at pop music today. Much contemporary art practices the art of appropriation…borrowing bits from here, a sample from there. Culture is pieced together into a society of Frankensteins. In a culture of abundance, how does art express who and what we are today?

“Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,” s show that runs through March 23rd at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC is one way of answering that question. I had the chance to visit the exhibit over winter break and I was excited and nervous by what I saw. The exhibit showcased 80 works by 30 contemporary artists.

Installation in "Unmonumental" show at The New Museum

The process of assemblage and collage were the dominant art process in the artworks throughout the museum. Art Critic Roberta Smith said it well when she wrote, “that assemblage-type sculpture, rampant at the moment, may also be today’s most viable art form. Why? It tends to be low-tech, modest in scale, made with found objects and materials and structured in ways that are fragmented if not actually disintegrating." Like in the days of the Baroque and Renaissance, art has a multi-media approach again utilizing all the visual disciplines together in spatial environment that is meant to be experienced, not seen from a bench. Are the boundaries between painting and sculpture disappearing?

What does this mean for art students? I think it means today's artists don't have to choose between one medium to work with. Art made from traditional and non-tradition materials can be liberating and confusing all at once for students, artists, and art appreciators leading one to ask, is our culture learning?

While assemblage/collage is not exactly new, it seems an appropriate fit for today’s chaotic human experience. It does not bother me so much that art and trash/found objects are beginning to have more similarities between the two. Perhaps it is just the gravity of what that means for our lives. This discomfort this makes me feel is very important. “The main idea here seems to be to make art that looks like art only on careful examination, guided by the assumption that everything, every detail, is intentional and meaningful.”

Installation at "Unmonumental" at The New Museum of Contemporary Art
I once had the fortune to hear art critic Jerry Saltz give a lecture and he said something interesting about how we approach art. There is art that you look at and go "WOW!.......huh?" And then there is art that you look at and go, "HUH?........WOW!" There is a big difference between the two experiences. Sometimes we get impressed by the surface of an artwork, until we realize that it is all surface. Good or interesting art can be a diamond in the rough, and at times need a second or third glance to come to appreciate.

Like Duchamp said, “I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.” Well said, and with an exhibit such as this one, it hit the mark with a splat.

Read Roberta Smith's Article on "Unmonumental," here.