The police tape strung across the opening of Pepón Osorio’s The Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) serves as an indication that one may observe this environment, but not enter it.

Traces of a violent altercation are apparent nevertheless: what appears to be a woman’s body lies beneath a bloodstained sheet, surrounded by broken china. The specifics of the crime are omitted, however, leaving viewers to solve the missing pieces of the puzzle themselves and to create their own narrative.

“NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star”, closing on Sunday, attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics. Join us tonight from 7–9 p.m. for free night!

Photo: Benoit Pailley

Image: Laura Kurgan, Interface: Information Overlay, 1993. Installation view: “Trade Routes,” New Museum. Photo: Fred Scrutin

“NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star”, closing on Sunday, attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics. 

New Museum Curator Laura Trippi worked with sociologist Saskia Sassen and political economist Gina Dent to organize “Trade Routes” at the New Museum in 1993. The exhibition looked at how artists were addressing the “cultural consequences of the globalization of finance,” and the works included examined how networked technologies and changing flows of finance and information both emerged through and produced effects at local levels. The exhibition brought together a group of international artists including Laura Kurgan, Allan Sekula, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, and Sowon Kwon, among others. 

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Another gem from 1993.

“NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” is on view this spring!

(Source: eltigrechico)

In the year 1271, the Italian explorer Marco Polo set sail on an epic journey to Asia. He returned to his native Venice twenty-four years later bearing numerous gifts and treasures. Legend has it that one of the things Marco Polo brought back from China was noodles, which the Italians quickly adopted and called their own: pasta. Though this story is now thought to be myth, it was nevertheless the impetus for Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (1271), first exhibited at the 1993 Venice Biennale in the Aperto section. The piece consists of a supply of instant noodles, carried into the gallery in an aluminum canoe, boiled in the accompanying pot of water, and then offered to visitors.

“NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star”, closing on Sunday, attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics. 

Photo: Benoit Pailley

“NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” is closing on Sunday!

The Fourth Floor of the exhibition includes works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Rudolph Stingel, Zoe Leonard, Robert Gober, Julia Scher, and Kristin Oppenheim.

”NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics. 

Photo: Benoit Pailley

letmypeopleshow:

Self-Portrait as a Self-Destructing Chocolate Head

Many of us attending the opening of the New Museum’s “NYC 1993” saw visions of our former selves back in the day, but no one had more selves there than Janine Antoni.

On the second floor, on a row of high plinths, are 14 Antoni heads. These are her famous self-portraits, Lick and Lather, casts made in chocolate and soap that were modeled on classical busts and “re-sculpted” by the processes described in the title.

Standing nearby, Antoni enjoyed watching visitors walk up close to the heads, and smell them.

“There’s not a lot of time between smelling and biting,” concedes the artist, whose heads have been attacked that way on several occasions. “It’s a funny thing when you make pieces about desire and people succumb to their desire.”

Antoni is happy to make replacement heads, which she does using FDA-approved latex molds: “Then I have to re-lick it, which is a bummer.” 

Read more at ARTnews.com

Detail of Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather, 1993. 

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LUHRING AUGUSTINE, NEW YORK.

Closing this Sunday, May 26!

Each photograph in “Clubs for America” by John Miller shows the former site of a sex club that was shuttered during police crackdowns in the 1980s in an attempt to curb the growing AIDS epidemic.

Many of these clubs featured live performances on a regular basis. In fact, Bette Midler got her start in singing at the Continental Baths (later replaced by Plato’s Retreat in the ornate Ansonia building at 74th Street and Broadway), accompanied by Barry Manilow. 

“NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” is on view one last week, closing this Sunday May 26.

Jeremy Bailey presents the newest installment for the First Look series titled “Famous New Media Art Patent Office,” in which he explores contemporary debates around patent law, bringing to light crucial issues affecting artists, entrepreneurs, and consumers alike.

An extension of previous projects, “Patent Office” reflects Bailey’s longstanding interest in combining new possibilities for self-representation with established forms of performance art.

View the artwork here.

Click here for more information on the New Museum’s First Look: New Art Online series.

The artist Julia Scher is known for her work with surveillance technologies. In 1993, Scher’s video installation Mothers Under Surveillance was included in the exhibition “The Final Frontier” at the New Museum. A simultaneous broadcast of the gallery space is mixed with prerecorded footage of elderly women being tracked while they attend “adult day care.” By including a date and time stamp, which functions as a sign for the “reality” of these images, the two streams of images merge into a single surveilled world. Scher creates an endless loop of people watching people while being watched themselves, with the aim of making visible the invisible systems of power and control enabled by electronic technology. Mothers Under Surveillance is on view in “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” through May 26.  

reanimatorlab:

New Museum logo, made at IDEAS CITY

Thanks to everyone who participated in The Reanimator Lab’s hand-drawn animated GIF factory!

In this timeless series of photographs, “Gilles and Gotscho” (1992–93), artist Nan Goldin brings together four pictures of her Parisian art dealer Gilles Dusein and his partner Gotscho (also an artist). Dusein was an ardent supporter of Goldin’s work but died due to complications from AIDS in the early 1990s, like many of Goldin’s closest companions.

Although Goldin is a passionate activist for gay rights and AIDS awareness, these photographs are not politically motivated. Rather, they reveal truths about love, loss, and pain that transcend the disease and its afflicted communities.

Closing in less than two weeks on May 26, ”NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics. 

Today at 2 p.m.: A Proposition by Center for Historical Reenactments: After-after Tears

“After-after Tears” explores the political dimensions of institutional suicide through reconsideration of temporality, duration, and history. Reflecting on the platform’s recent death, Gabi Ngcobo (Center for Historical Reenactments [CHR] member and faculty at Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg), in collaboration with artist Kader Attia, will contemplate how staging an institutional suicide can not only be a form of refusal but also a means to desire a different existence, one that enables the platform to haunt obsolete systems and ideologies that continue to condition contemporary life. A two-part response will expand upon various logics underpinning creative acts of refusal. Khwezi Gule, Chief Curator at the Soweto Museums, will delve into the crisis of meaning around ritual, sacrifice, and transcendence in addition to notions of self and collective preservation. Sohrab Mohebbi, writer and Curatorial Assistant of Public Engagement at the Hammer Museum, will consider measures of time in music that produce shared frames of reference in order to imagine ways institutions could also be synched to a different time signature.

For more information on the program, click here.

“Center for Historical Reenactments: After-after Tears” is on view at the New Museum from May 22 – July 7, 2013.

As part of a partnership with the New Museum’s Education Department, Elastic City is presenting Admission, a walk through “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” by dance artist Michelle Boulé and theater director Niegel Smith. They will lead museum-goers on a playful sixty-minute walk-through and address codes of museum engagement. All are welcome at 1 p.m. on Friday May 24. Please sign up for tickets here (limited capacity).

Elastic City offers participatory walks by artists throughout and outside of New York. Rather than fact-based tours, the walks may rely on sensory-based techniques, the creation of new folk rituals, and/or other artist-derived exercises to explore one’s self, the group, and a given space.

Photo: Caitlin Ruttle

On Saturday May 4 at the IDEAS CITY StreetFest, teens from the New Museum’s G:Class program, Chinatown YMCA, and University Settlement created a 250-square-foot mural at 273 Bowery with the help of Groundswell teaching artists. Check out an in-progress shot here!

To learn more about the IDEAS CITY Festival, click here.