The New School centennial exhibition "In the historical present" is up, at the Sheila Johnson Design Center, and it's lots of fun. A dozen contemporary artists, some alums, were commissioned to create something new engaging the New School's past, and if not all of them are quite New School specific, they're interesting reflections on what it is to recall, reconstruct, revitalize a tradition challenging the status quo. Archival objects are also featured and displayed in engaging ways. The curators (both alumnae) strike a suitably serious-playful tone:
An intricate and disorderly bureaucracy with a paradox at its heart, The New School is at once an institution and a scrappy insurgency, a venerable newcomer, an official dissident.
Three of the works invite you to take something with you (above). Daniel Bejar's poster Don't say you don't remember takes words from a New School student protest flyer - itself appropriating a McGovern presidential campaign slogan about the killings at Kent State - and makes it a generic and obscurely poignant plea for memory. Sheila Bridges' "19" takes the form of paint swatches to critique the white walls ubiquitous even at The New School. And Matthew Jensen's "New School Forest Archive Walk" lovingly documents all the street trees near our several buildings. Clever interventions all, if a little general.
The more truly New School content comes from archival selections, which are displayed in accessible and witty ways. For instance, slides of images from across many decades invite viewers to play with them... each can make their own little exhibition!! But all the while the curators are playing with us, and with the paradoxes of memory, and of exhibition. I gather the retro form of the slide is an ironic late addition to the life of these images, which live in the archives as prints. They were rendered as slides only for this show, this object lesson.
