A president calling for the absolute destruction and end to a civilization probably shouldn’t have me thinking about art, but for some reason I started to think about the work of Congolese sculptor and artist Bodys Isek Kingelez this week. Kingelez’s model/sculpture, Ville fantôme (Ghost Town), 1996, is one of the major highlights of the New Museum’s re-opening and overwhelming exhibition, New Humans: Memories of the Future. The work, a dizzying and imaginative cityscape of bright colors made entirely of paper, cardboard and plastic, is intricate and full of minute details of a utopian infrastructure and almost childlike wonder. But there is also the sense of human abandonment, something left behind, a place discarded, a space deserted. In all its wonderful flourishes, it's a city of the future without humans or signs of life, just the infrastructure we demand to make and don’t dare to think of what it stands for when we leave. Although he once told Artnet “ “I’m dreaming cities of peace... I’d like to help the Earth above all,” in the context of a show that pushes the boundaries of post-human and analog utopianism, the beauty of the work is the desperation for something better for ourselves as we edge closer to destruction.
New Humans is the New Museum’s big reentry to the global museum game, reopening in New York after 2 years for construction of new exhibition spaces. Opening with a show dedicated to “exploration of artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes” had me at the get. This is the type of show worthy of a biennial, perhaps even over-shadowing a certain biennial across town. The show is bold, almost purposefully and preposterously over-loaded, and it all works. And what worked best was that before-mentioned analog and technological, a multi-century look of a global confrontation with where human imagination and innovation is headed. I gravitated to the architectural drawings and models, the visions of the future that were preoccupied with space and city planning. Kingelez’s work was a highlight, but also incredible dystopian drawing installations and maquettes with a post-contemporary flying jellyfish by South Korea’s Anicka Yi capturing the disparate but simultaneously articulate juxtaposition of the show’s intent.
I know that much has been written about the museum’s new structure itself, about the function of the space, but as a kickoff, as a message to the world, the show itself was the right call to kick off a new era. It’s polarizing and powerful, a show that demonstrates a collective throughline and obsession of the artist that spans most of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. What is it to be human… well, it’s evolving? —Evan Pricco
