Walking Drifting
Dragging at the New Museum
A small but
personable collection of conceptual artworks created on long, winding travels
makes up the New Museum’s short-lived, interesting exhibition Walking Drifting Dragging, which closes
February 3rd. One New York
artist, Ellie Ga, tagged along on a research vessel trawling the depths of the
Arctic, propelled only by the currents.
Though her artistic introspection at the loneliness of the frozen
wastelands could only be imagined, her work was done when the boat stopped—for
what reason, we aren’t sure, as the purpose of the mission is not
revealed. Her bird’s-eye-view charcoal
sketches all include the same, near-ovoid body of the ship in white, surrounded
by the ice in a chilling gray. The steps
the researchers took when dismounting the boat are traced in a dotted
line. The line always seems to follow a
circle around the ship, finding nothing but the hard, never-ending floes that
blocked their path in the first place.
Who can say what metaphorical relevance this has? These of Ga’s works, like the Arctic, are
cold and cartographic.
But on her
long walks around the craft, Ga was busy with an entirely different
project. Scattering bright, bluish
lanterns in the fissures opening around the ship, she took wide-angle pictures
of the rusting boat from far away, so that the now illuminated cracks seemed to
point home, or at least the possibility of home. Ga’s series is called The Fortunetellers, and while it’s true the fissures and dotted lines
ingrain the ice like lines on a palm, the true fortune that needs to be told
seems to be: Where will the ship drift next?
In such a vein does the exhibit display, nearly without comment,
artists’ travels through their odd worlds, and the ways they attempt to chart
them where it may seem impossible.
Other
highlights include artist Paulo Nazareth’s 4,618-mile walk from his hometown of
Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to New York City, mostly barefoot but occasionally in a
pair of neon green flip-flops, which are on display. Nazareth played off cultural stereotypes on
his way across the border between Mexico and the United States, holding a
cardboard sign that read “I Will Clean Your Bathroom for a Fair Price.” Exploring the cultural welcomes that awaited
him in Latin America and beyond is a different kind of map than Ga’s, but a map
nonetheless.
For these
artists are all drawing maps of one kind or another, struggling to denote all
sorts of new territory, some more successfully than others. (Some were actually trying for the less
successful approach--Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain charted a
river in Guwahati, India by asking different local fisherman for their
input. The responses were so dissimilar
that on their map, the river branches out in an impossible number of directions
and even flows both ways.) Perhaps that’s
why the exhibit (curated by Lauren Cornell) is so stark and simplistic, with
the works jutting out like landmasses.
It, too, is a map, but of entirely new lands—those wildly diverging
attitudes and ideas of emerging artists.
Artists themselves can be hard to track, hard to define, and sometimes hard to
enjoy, but no one could do more on their behalf than the New
Museum.
It
would be hard to imagine that anything these artists might do in their
respective futures could be more complex or more difficult to execute than the
feats they have managed in Walking
Drifting Dragging. The name of the exhibition,
with its images of groans of strain, is not far off from what these abstract
artists had to go through to present us with their apparently simple final
products. I’m not certain, either, if I
would be so interested as to what they might get up to in their strange,
underground art world some time in the future.
But here they have presented us with something it took them a great deal
of effort to achieve. We may as well
congratulate them.
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