The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, installation view at the New Museum, 2009

A new generation of artists

Age is an important issue in all societies. Pop culture celebrates youth, and commercial brands aim their marketing campaigns at the young in order to get them buying and keep them buying the rest of their lives. In this issue of Artkrush we raise a glass to a young, international group of artists on view in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus exhibition at New York's New Museum, and pick the youthful Julieta Aranda, who is inaugurating New York's Guggenheim Museum's new Intervals series with a display of work that addresses time, as one to watch.

- Paul Laster, Managing Editor

FEATURE

Pablo Picasso once said, "It takes a long time to become young." That wisdom is evident in the playful paintings and prints he made in his 80s and 90s, which are currently on view at New York's Gagosian Gallery. Further downtown at the New Museum, a new group of artists is being celebrated for simply being young and, of course, talented. Presenting 50 artists under age 33 from 25 countries, The Generational: Younger Than Jesus explores work in a variety of media — ranging from painting, sculpture, and installation to photography, video, performance, and video games. Selected from a list of 500 artists; assembled by an international team of curators, writers, teachers, and critics; and fully documented in Phaidon's accompanying Artist Directory, YTJ offers a surprising mix.

Notable painters include Poland's Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, German-born, New York-based Kerstin Brätsch, the US' Adam Pendleton, and Iranian-born, Amsterdam-based Tala Madani. Ziolkowski riffs on modernist abstraction, making oil paintings of hallucinatory figures. Brätsch exhibits abstract and figurative paintings on paper that blend lightly applied washes with impasto brushstrokes. Pendleton shows conceptual, black-on-black silkscreen, language-based paintings from his Black Dada series, which is also on view in a solo show at Haunch of Venison in Berlin. Meanwhile, Madani toys with humorous interpretations of Islamic cultural and sexual identity in her small paintings on wood.

Video represents one of the strongest elements of the exhibition. Lebanon's Ziad Antar shows clever shorts of children singing along with a synthesizer and a pianist pounding silent keys. France's Cyprien Gaillard screens Desniansky Raion, a video shot in Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Kiev that moves from chaos to order as gangs fight and buildings collapse. South Africa's Dineo Seshee Bopape uses video as the central point of an installation. Her black-and-white video, Dreamweavrr, captures a bearded lady performing with a parasol, and is shown in a small room, transformed with reflective Mylar, painted synthetic plants, and disco balls. The US' Ryan Trecartin also mixes monitors with objects in his massive, over-the-top installation. Teenage trannies throw tantrums and break glasses in six video monitors, displayed in the midst of found furniture, lampposts, fish tanks filled with sneakers, and sections of airplanes.

Keep reading for more on The Generational »

ONE TO WATCH

It is altogether appropriate that Julieta Aranda, an artist whose work is about mapping new coordinates in space and discovering the human dimension of time, was tapped as the initial artist in the Guggenheim Museum's new, contemporary art series called Intervals. The exhibition, which quietly resides in a cylindrical stairwell, features objects with altered time/space mechanisms: a radio that transmits electrocardiogram data, a clock on the metric system, and a camera obscura that projects an hourglass with gravity-defying sand. Taken together, these pieces reveal Aranda's preoccupation with time and its transmission: its measurement and impact, ticks and tremors, its frequency, signal, and reception.

The Mexican-born, New York-trained artist initially studied film at the School of Visual Arts before deciding that her work was more suited to a gallery context than a film festival. Her past projects include Pawnshop, a makeshift space in which artists could hock their work, and e-flux video rental, which consisted of free rentals, screenings, and an archive. Both of these projects point to a desire to re-configure economic relationships in the art world — exposing it to a modicum of reverse gentrification, as well as pioneering alternate models of access for artists and their audience.

Other projects have made use of pseudo-tabloids, graffiti-esque catchphrases, and false color fields, but her first project to deal with constructions of time explicitly was You Had No Ninth of May!, in which Aranda produced an extensive archive of maps and materials focused on Kirbati, a country that in 1995, changed the position of the International Date Line. For Aranda, this move symbolizes the artifice of our homogeneous, empty construction of time, and even puts temporal markers in language, such as "today" and "tomorrow" into question.

Also exhibiting at the 2da Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Aranda's analytic and nuanced work proves that the representation of time is an infinitely rich sphere to investigate, to archive, and to question.

- Cynthia Lugo

Read an interview with Julieta Aranda in Flavorwire.

NEWSWIRE

Should Banksy be nominated for the Turner prize? (Guardian)
Cultural blogger Jonathan Jones, a juror for the 2009 prize, dismisses street art, while admitting he devilishly considered nominating Banksy for the coveted award.

Taking stock as Milan readies its fair (New York Times)
Utilitarianism reigns supreme at this year's global design extravaganza.

Strippers, protesters are welcome on Gormley's London Plinth (Bloomberg)
Anthony Gormley invites participants to "take their clothes off or rant about something" in his project for Trafalgar Square.

Shepard Fairey one-ups Associated Press in dispute over Obama image (Los Angeles Times)
Street artist counter-sues AP for violating copyright laws when it used a photo of his Hope poster without getting permission.

Peter Zumthor's quiet power (New Yorker)
Architecture critic Paul Goldberger praises the 2009 Pritzker Prize winner, proclaiming him a cult figure among architects.

Sculpture of Jesus Christ in the electric chair makes waves in France (Los Angeles Times)
Paul Fryer's Pieta, on view in the Cathedrale de Gap, comments on capital punishment, while drawing a crowd.

Berlin Wall given a facelift as freedom painters return (Guardian)
After the wall's cleaning and restoration, artists that bombed it with graffiti 20 years ago are asked to remake their murals, provoking some dissent.

The Lost Skyline: Casualties of a building boom that got ahead of itself (New York)
A roundup of New York architectural projects — delayed or scrapped, due to the recession — are paired with photos of the current state of their sites.

Berlusconi and his new golden girl are laid bare (Independent)
The Italian Prime Minister and a former television starlet, whom he appointed to a cabinet position, are parodied in a Filippo Panseca painting.