'Jesus' doesn't save, and that's O.K.

On my last birthday, people asked how old I am. I confessed to being 34 years old, and expressed relief that I've made it past Jesus's age. I thought it was a stupid joke, but people laughed. They would laugh to the point that I had to keep saying the joke. All day I was telling a joke I didn't believe fully in because it got a positive reaction. It was better than just telling the truth, plainly. Now I know how Bob Saget feels on stage, and now you know a little bit about what it's like seeing the New Museum's current show, "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus."

The premise of the show is that it's a global review of artists who are under the age of 33. There's a lot of provocative, interesting work in this show, and it's varied enough that most visitors will find something they connect with.

Not surprisingly, artists raised in the internet era like working in different media and are willing to create an overload of material. It's not about crafting objects as much as it's about the rapid churn of creativity. That idea, which has been around for a long time, is especially timely when there's so much information (including art) out there. The only way to rise to the top is by doing more, bigger, faster.

So, for instance, we are greeted on the fourth floor by Josh Smith's wall of panel paintings of varying individual interest. None of them may hold your interest long, but there are a lot of them to look at.

Josh Smith, Untitled, 2008

Once an artist abandons the idea of specific, personal connection between the work and the viewer, it leads to strange places. There is a broadness to a lot of the work in the New Museum show, which becomes both a strength and a weakness.

Cyprian Gaillard's video of fight clubs sparring in the streets of projects in Belgrade is set to a soundtrack by Koudlam and becomes exciting to watch, if only because it features large crowds of men beating the shit out of each other. The wall text makes note that Gaillard shot this footage illegally, as if Gaillard were putting himself in danger. And that may be true, to some extent, but make no mistake: this footage is shot from at least 100 feet away from the fighting, from an elevated platform. The video is only cut when Gaillard changes locations.

Gaillard's film becomes a Gen-Y equivalent of anthropological classic "The Ax Fight," which is an ethnographic analysis of what happened during a Yanomami fight in Venezuela. Unlike that film, however, Gaillard provides very little context and doesn't seek to analyze. Instead, he provides an electronic soundtrack. There is a sense that this sort of thing happens out of boredom and frustration in the projects. The world is imperfect, so why try to figure out details?

Here's an excerpt of the video, but is not exactly what's shown at the New Museum:

One of my favorite pieces in the show was Faye Driscoll's video called "Loneliness." Driscoll had a friend take photos of her dancing around her apartment, wrapped in a green tablecloth. Then she edited the photos to music by Dynasty Handbag. The small screen, tucked in a hallway, is intimate and personal and strikes at the core of what a lot of art is about -- rejoicing in life, and staving off the demons of time.

loneliness

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski's paintings impressed me as strong combinations of abstraction and figuration. Like other work in the show, the specific is subsumed by the general. In a series of portrait-like paintings, what becomes important is the gestalt of a head and not the details. This is a kind of primal reading of reality, where flesh is the byproduct of a deeper force. It comes to fruition in a painting he does of a great battle scene under a kitchen table, where rows of figures in uniform become expressions of something greater.

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, The Great Battle Under the Table, 2006

This idea of something greater makes the work in this show less chancey but also less strong. The idea of interconnectedness is taken for a given. Commitment is rare, because nothing is taken in isolation. If one thing leads to another, why stay with one thing?

Unfortunately, this habit of mind leads to a watering down of what could have been the best work.

Ryan Trecartin is one of the finest video artists working today. And by fine, I mean he's so foyn. His past work overflows with creativity and is jam-packed with weird referential fragments. Trecartin and his friends create elaborate environments and he edits to overstuff his video into a manic hyperreality. Any one moment in his video leads to a dizzying array of references and associations. For instance, in one moment he's dressed in white drag, stroking his hair while snowflakes fall. It's strange and alarming, but one can't help but think of Snow White, Mariah Carey videos, or any number of images.

It becomes a bit like W.B. Yeats's philosophy of poetry -- to use broad, symbolic images to connect with deep, internal human associations. Trecartin's references aren't always deep, but there's an unstoppable, restless searching to them that's instantly endearing.

In his installation at the New Museum, however, he's taken over two rooms and installed broken pottery, wacky furniture, headsets, etc. It's like Trecartin's video environments have spilled into real life. And guess what? I couldn't pay as much attention to the video. The video ceases to be a metaphor and becomes real life. And if Trecartin's sets become real life, then it's just more stuff in the world, too distracting and confusing to be metaphorical or symbolic.

I kept coming back to an important question while strolling through the museum: Is art special? What makes the art experience different than entertainment? We can have personal experiences watching TV or surfing the Web. Does it matter that this work is "art" and not just on YouTube? Can art be on YouTube? Clearly, for this generation where different platforms are just different ways to experience the same thing, the answer is yes.

But I'd like to get back to the title of the show. Not enough people have commented on it.

Why didn't they call it "Younger than John Belushi" or "Younger than Chris Farley"? Both of these men died at 33. And why 33? Is there actually a religious component to the work that demands Jesus actually be a reference? Outwardly, of course not.

But the reference to Jesus is appropriate for several reasons. Firstly, in a show that's about global art practice by Generation Y, irony is front and center. My guess is most of the artists on display aren't religious at all; what they share in common is the overload of imagery and symbols created by lives submerged in mass media and the internet. Jesus becomes another reference. And in a world of infinite connectivity and endless references, the stronger the better.

The other aspect to this name is the idea of salvation. With the idea of avant-gardism thoroughly discredited -- artists are in no way paving the way to an ideal future which non-artists will follow, which was a subtext to the Gaillard video -- there is a lingering question of what art is for. Of course, I'm not talking about the kind of art that has always been with us since the cave paintings. I'm talking about the kind of art that sophisticated people pay money to go see in hopes of ... what, exactly?

It's not salvation, but it's a kind of eternal cool. In a thoroughly materialist society (in both the Marxist and the shopping sense), there is a premium placed on the experience of youth.

In a pre-youth culture era -- that of the existentialists comes to mind -- the feeling of incompleteness people felt was connected to a loss of faith. Now, post-Beatles, post-hippie, most adults have gone through the furies of youth and graduated to a similar feeling of incompleteness.

There is no Jesus or loss of God to blame. So curators and collectors go to the fountain of youth for an answer. And let me tell you, friends: there are no answers there, either.