The Ungovernables: 2012 New Museum Triennial
Exhibition
The art of Political Drama
Art surveys can be daunting. They are years in the making, but we only get a few months to absorb them. They often ramble, or are so packed they're inscrutable. So you may be happy to hear that the New Museum Triennial is bite sized. The ideas in it, however, are gigantic. The Propeller Group tasked a marketing firm in Ho Chi Minh City with repackaging communism, a gesture that contextualizes the primary power struggle of the 20st Century as a branding exercise. José Antonio Vega Macotela staged intricate exchanges with inmates in the Mexican prison system for art documentation, like trading DVDs for tracings of every cellblock tattoo. Adrián Villar Rojas' massive love poem to industrialization was constructed over recycled Styrofoam from the museum's previous experiment in social participation, Carsten Holler's Experience. And when Danh Võ discovered the Statue of Liberty was actually a thin copper sheath, he hired craftspeople to recreate the process, resulting in warm, giant folds that resemble conscience-driven Richard Serras. Like some distant echo of the Whitney's infamous 1993 "political biennial," The Ungovernables reminds us that politics is everywhere, whether or not we choose to see it.
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