Featuring CU grads and artists on the rise, ‘Greater New York’ fails to capture city's color

With skyrocketing rents and a tightened art market, New York is not the gritty haven for young artists that it used to be. But every five years, at MoMA PS1’s exhibition titled “Greater New York,” predominantly young and unestablished New York-based artists are chosen to exhibit the happenings in contemporary art.

This year’s iteration, the third in PS1’s history, showcased 68 artists in the museum’s renovated public school building in Long Island City, Queens. Twelve of those featured were graduates of the Columbia School of the Arts’ Master of Fine Arts program.

The show, curated by MoMA’s Klaus Biesenbach and Connie Butler, as well as PS1’s Neville Wakefield, is known in the art community as a fantastic way for artists to gain footing in the slippery and volatile world that is the New York art scene. But 2010’s survey, which closes October 18, proved to be an exhibition of wide critical disdain and a largely unconvinced public.

Pieces tended toward new and non-traditional mediums—videos, performance art, or installations were common. But for all the attempts toward the avant-garde, “Greater New York” seems awash in a sea of feeble visions.

Its weaknesses may have played up the show’s few assets, however, as certain artists clearly stood out. Columbia School of the Arts graduate Leigh Ledare, SoA ’08, attracted attention with his provocative series of photographs featuring erotic shots of his mother.

Artist Pinar Yolacan’s photographs stood out as well. Titled the “Mother Goddess” series, the work veered from the overt shock of Ledare’s, instead exploring the constriction and concealment of the body. Her work is disturbingly reminiscent of ancient Greek nudes—but here, high-color photographs feature bodies completely bound in various materials, from Intarsia sweater cloth to high-gloss black rubber.

Gilad Ratman, another Columbia School of the Arts graduate (SoA ’09), produced one of the few captivating videos. In his piece, amorphous bodies bubbled beneath a sea of mud. Tubes snaking around and through this swamp revealed tiny moving droplets of water and dirt, which eventually leaked out of wooden flutes hung on trees. The work veered toward seriousness, hinting at a psychological interpretation, toward those things haunting and monstrously bubbling beneath the human surface. Yet, intrinsic to the piece was a subtle nod to humor that is often missing in contemporary art.

Admittedly, there were no artists who stood out as icons, none who mastered their mediums and documented their city, such as the likes of Keith Haring or Nan Goldin did in the ’80s. Many of the artists seemed to be too close to their roots in their respective M.F.A. programs, entrenched in making a statement or submersed in unintelligible theory. This may be the most disappointing aspect of the show. The lack of clarity, both in individual pieces and in “Greater New York” as a whole, didn’t accurately represent the few artists who exhibited promising works. But most of all, the show didn’t benefit a city with a long history of creativity, a city still awaiting a refreshing new era of visual arts.