Jan Avgikos on “New York: 1962–1964”
The Jewish Museum’s boisterous exhibition “New York: 1962–1964” is stuffed stuffed with vitality, specializing in a three-year interval in New York Metropolis when sundry inventive realms coalesced in a delirious apogee of full-blown American vanguardism. Along with the “new artwork” of the period on show right here, there’s an abundance of contextualizing materials drawn from promoting, media, music, dance, movie, magazines, trend, poetry, and inside design, ostensibly documenting a so-called widespread cultural pulse that fomented in Gotham and unfold throughout the land.
The presentation’s timeframe, aligned with the tenure of Alan Solomon, the influential director of the Jewish Museum, is bracketed chronologically by the “Worldwide Exhibition of the New Realists”—which came about at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962 and examined the varied stripes of Pop throughout North America and Europe—and Robert Rauschenberg’s exhibiting on the 1964 Venice Biennale. Solomon additionally organized vital surveys on the Jewish Museum himself, together with “Towards a New Abstraction” (1963) and “Latest American Sculpture” (1964). Artworks for “New York 1962–1964” have been chosen from these and different key exhibitions, together with Lawrence Alloway’s “Six Painters and the Object,” on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Dorothy C. Miller’s “Individuals 1963,” (each 1963) on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork. Additionally included have been works from the New York College of Poets and the Harlem-based photographic collective Kamoinge Workshop. But, regardless of its exacting purview, the present gives the look that everybody throughout the US was studying the identical publications, listening to the identical radio stations, and watching the identical sorts of tv—and, by extension, regarding the identical artwork. Alas, this was not the case.
It’s the prerogative of the observer whose homeland is elsewhere to think about a steady American identification, however in lots of respects New York Metropolis has little or no to do with the remainder of the US. Within the Nineteen Sixties particularly, it was virtually a distinct nation in its politics, attitudes, and socioeconomic construction. The present’s organizer, Germano Celant (1940–2020), was a legendary Italian curator and critic who beloved to form historical past by bringing unlikely teams of artists collectively. Celant was not alone in his advocacy for an expanded understanding of this era in American artwork as a flowering of unparalleled creativity and variety. But the overwhelming surfeit of supplies contextualizing all of the work—from a whimsical re-creation of a tricked-out Nineteen Sixties kitchen to a classy rendition of a front room whose TV performs era-appropriate snippets of sitcoms, adverts, and information tales—undermines lots of the vital artwork. An unlucky unbalancing happens, during which the manufacturing by a spread of main cultural innovators and transgressors from a pivotal time in historical past turns into psychically and conceptually equal to the significantly much less fascinating pop detritus that fueled its making.
After all, it’s troublesome to account for the plenitude and experimentation of these choose years. Whereas that is perhaps an issue for historians, it’s additionally a formidable curatorial problem. Kudos to Celant for his Eurocentric imaginative and prescient of US overzealousness and extra. However with its try to be in every single place suddenly, the present produces a trapped-in-rush-hour sort of feeling. For example, Jack Smith’s queer erotic fantasia Flaming Creatures, 1963—so lovely that it purportedly impressed Fellini—has been relegated to a nook and virtually disappears. North, 1963, a solemn wall-like construction by Anne Truitt, is positioned beside the jazzy parlor set, turning into nothing greater than a room divider. And a wood polyhedron painted grey by Robert Morris, Untitled, 1963, seems stranded and insignificant in comparison with the bells and whistles animating most of the objects surrounding it. (Plenty of the Minimalist artwork right here is handled as an afterthought and will get overshadowed by all of the Pop.) Whereas there are a lot of unimaginable moments—together with the sensational pairing of Chryssa’s steel grid with a letter-F sample, Projection Letter F, 1958–60, and Sally Hazelet Drummond’s radiantly monochromatic portray of finely wrought dots Drone, 1962—the exhibition blows proper previous the classic aesthetics of show that initially favored the “new artwork” and gave it appreciable room to breathe. Right here, the precedence is on a circuslike ambiance, within the so-called spirit of midcentury American garishness, glamour, and genius. Sadly, the noisy orchestration works towards a lot of the output, which is tuned to a extra reflective and mental key.
