The New Museum’s Muted 2021 Triennial Reflects Culture’s Inward Turn,
The New Museum Triennial is, as ever, an international show. About one third of the artists in its 2021 edition hail from North America, and the rest from points elsewhere, so it can’t really reflect a national mood in a simple way. Yet it does reflect what its U.S.-based curators, Margot Norton and Jamillah James, think their audience might need or want. And there’s even a reading of “Soft Water Hard Stone,” which opened last month, as a “Biden Biennial.”
Back in 2018, the last edition of this show was called “Songs for Sabotage.” One of the big keywords its curators used to define the show’s purpose was “propaganda.” In the thick of the Trump presidency, that show’s curators sought to convey in their statements a sense of urgency for its core U.S. audience.
Compare this rhetoric to “Soft Water Hard Stone” and the latter comes to feel very much like a post-Trump show (even if the curators selected most of the 40 artists during the Trump presidency.) The will to perform immediacy is diffused; the show’s title, from a Brazilian proverb about how a gentle force will eventually wear down even the hardest obstacle, celebrates incremental action. Everything feels very hushed and withdrawn, as if in the wake of something.
Kate Cooper, Somatic Aliasing (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
This show continues the feeling at other recent big international survey shows of seeking grounding in folklore and crafts, adding to these an even greater sense of retreat from anything too in-your-face or definite, maybe in reaction to an over-crowded, hyper-mediated culture.
A retreat from mediation is reflected, I think, in the utter vanishing of photography, conceptual or otherwise, as a medium. There’s not much to suggest popular culture, besides a clip of rapper Nicki Minaj, interlaced with quotes from Marx, in a video playing within Gaëlle Choisne’s collage environment, Temple of Love—Love to Love (2021).
Installation view of Gaëlle Choisne, Temple of Love—Love to love (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
There’s also hardly a thing that signals the digital, save for Kate Cooper’s looping video that seems to show fragments of digitally rendered anatomy, cross sections of veins and bones coming in and out of focus, and Sandra Mujinga’s Pervasive Light, featuring a spooky, driving electronic soundtrack and a cloaked figure, her image shimmering with electric orange accents as it moves into and out of darkness—a reflection on “how Black bodies can harness invisibility.” Both videos are purgatorial.
There is also scant…
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