This is shaping up to be a pretty great year for New York City museum exhibitions. Visitors to the city have some great options to choose from, ranging from the Whitney’s Yayoi Kusama retrospective to the Museum of Modern Art’s Alighiero Boetti showcase. But when it opens on July 18, the New Museum’s new exhibition “Ghosts in the Machine” may just take top honors. The three-floor exhibition is a historically minded survey of humanity’s fractious relationship with technology, mixing mystical outsider artists from the early part of the 20th century with contemporary media makers.
From Francois Morellet’s randomized red and blue pixel patterned wallpaper decorating the lobby to Stan VanDerBeek’s epic “Movie-Drome” multimedia theater on the fourth floor, the exhibition is a dynamic testimony the impact of machinery on visual art. The show’s curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, have created a cabinet of curiosities that includes Utopia-seeking outsider artists from the 19th century, a Japanese collective of audio-visual poets, healing metal mobiles, and kinetic light sculptures.
Neither wholly optimistic nor pessimistic, “Ghosts in the Machine” casts a careful analytical eye on artists’ engagement with the technological avant garde over the past century. It might be best to just continue on to our slide show, however — in the words of Phillipe Parreno’s appropriated mannequin writing machine that makes an appearance at the museum, “What do you believe, your eyes or my words?”
Click on the slide show for a tour of the New Museum’s “Ghosts in the Machine” exhibition, and stay tuned for our review of the show.