{"id":932092,"date":"2026-05-02T03:49:31","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T03:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/932092\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T03:49:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T03:49:31","slug":"notes-from-new-york-the-world-in-a-convex-mirror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/932092\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes from New York: The World in a Convex Mirror"},"content":{"rendered":"

What, on the 50th anniversary of MoMA PS1, are we actually celebrating?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a spacious third-floor gallery in MoMA PS1, Covey Gong\u2019s sculptures Shi (2026) and Jie (2026) \u2013\u00a0red fabric cut and stretched over stainless-steel scaffolds, in the shape of the Chinese characters for \u2018world\u2019 \u2013 were reflected in Win McCarthy\u2019s Philosophy of Mind (2026), four security mirrors mounted on metal C-stands. Miniaturised and multiplied in these convex surfaces, the words appeared to annotate the room, one of about two dozen devoted to Greater New York 2026, the sixth edition of the institution\u2019s geographically focused contemporary art quinquennial. McCarthy\u2019s mirrors, like the one in John Ashbery\u2019s best-known poem, about the Renaissance painter Parmigianino gazing at himself in a domed glass, distort images to the point of estrangement \u2013 \u2018This otherness, this \/ \u201cNot-being-us\u201d is all there is to look at \/ In the mirror\u2019, Ashbery writes. The themeless 53-artist survey in a sense resembles a hall of distorted reflections. Take, for instance, Mekko Harjo\u2019s I have eaten and made friends (The Devouring Hill) (2026), a Potemkin karaoke bar strewn with confetti and squeaky-clean empties, or Sophie Friedman-Pappas\u2019s Department 4 (2026), a to-scale recreation of a vintage kiln, and \u201cMeet you in hell!\u201d (2026), an assortment of objects from an artist studio including wooden benches and a paint-splattered easel holding a monitor playing a stop-motion video of drawings dancing on a cluttered tabletop, as if to simulate an artist\u2019s working process without showing any work-in-progress.<\/p>\n

The staging of Friedman-Pappas\u2019s studio objects recalled MoMA PS1\u2019s \u2013 formerly P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center \u2013\u00a0inaugural exhibition, Rooms (1976). For that, around 80 artists were invited to set up studios in the art centre, which occupied a decommissioned Long Island City school (exhibitors included Marjorie Strider, who poured latex foam down the building\u2019s facade, and Gordon Matta-Clark, who cut holes in three floors). Perhaps the echo was intentional: Greater New York 2026 coincides with P.S.1\u2019s 50th anniversary and is being used, alongside a block party and gala, to mark the occasion in lieu of a commemorative exhibition like FORTY (2016). Founded by curator Alanna Heiss under the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, a nonprofit that had, per a 2008 press release, \u2018the mission of transforming underutilized and abandoned spaces across New York City into accessible artists\u2019 studios and exhibition venues\u2019 at the height of a financial crisis that nearly bankrupted the city, P.S.1 became the poster child for the alternative space movement of the 1970s, alongside organisations like The Kitchen, Artists Space and 112 Greene Street (now White Columns), that sought, as historian Cristelle Terroni puts it<\/a>, \u2018to emancipate art from the institutional and commercial pressures of the art world\u2019. Unlike the Heiss-curated FORTY, which brought back 28 now-canonised names from Rooms, Greater New York 2026 features emerging and midcareer \u2013 and mostly millennial \u2013 artists for whom inclusion in the survey represented hard-earned entry into the professional artworld rather than any kind of freedom from it.<\/p>\n

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\"\"Greater New York 2026, 2026 (installation views). Photo: Kris Graves. Courtesy MoMA PS1<\/p>\n

Only on paper was Greater New York 2026 as \u2018noisy\u2019, \u2018messy\u2019 and \u2018gritty\u2019 as nostalgic\u00a0early reviews declared. In the galleries, perusing Women\u2019s History Museum\u2019s factory-fire diorama and Arlan Huang\u2019s hermetically sealed specimens of organic matter, one encountered a show as streamlined and starchy as any commercial or institutional endeavour, if not more. The beaded-seat-cover carpet that formed part of Kenneth Tam\u2019s video installation I\u2019M STAYING HOPEFUL AND STRONG (For Bilal and Salah) (2026) was not to be touched or trod on as it was in The Medallion<\/a>, Tam\u2019s 2025 gallery show at Bridget Donahue (now Hoffman Donahue). Signage at the museum read \u2018Please maintain distance from artwork\u2019, and the guards said the same in fewer words. It is by now a truism that the alternative arts organisation \u2013 the \u2018crummy space\u2019, as P.S.1 was dubbed in a 1976 review\u2013 tends to survive by assimilating into the artworld; that MoMA PS1 resembles the space depicted in old photographs in its archives only as much as Piero Penizzotto\u2019s lifesize papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 aunties, The Council of las T\u00edas (Mary, Milagros, Cynthia, Nereyda) (2026), recall the body casts of the artist\u2019s mentor John Ahearn (unlike Ahearn\u2019s expressive life-casts, Penizzotto\u2019s sculptures, their faces masklike and limbs stiff, looked like they were modelled after people in New Yorker cartoons or Lego sets); and that the contact high from the 1970s\u2019 radical experimentation has long since faded.<\/p>\n

\"\"Louis Osmosis, Variations on Public Affairs & Their Subsequent Invigilators: Morning Dew, 2025 (detail), metal signage, wire, artificial cobweb, confetti, figurine, steel, ribbon, plywood, and keyboard stand. 152 x 61 x 61 in. Photo: Kunning Huang. Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

Some artists grapple with the contradictions, staleness and affectation of our contemporary moment more overtly. Louis Osmosis\u2019s junky, toy-covered mixed-media sculptures Variations on Public Affairs & Their Subsequent Invigilators (2026) stood ecstatically amid another half-hearted scattering of disc-shaped confetti \u2013 or so it seemed: each piece was in fact accounted for, with a number chalked on the floor beside it. Poyen Wang\u2019s two-channel video installation Night Stroll (2024\u201325), strobing in the basement next to the boiler room, staged a similar scene of false disorder. Onscreen, a boyish marionette, his body soiled and scuffed, lounged in contorted positions in a grimy abandoned building, monologuing, sometimes singing. Taking the marionette on his word, one might have considered his body a symbolic receptacle of queer and immigrant stigma. But his skin suggested otherwise, smooth and spotless as it was beneath soft brushes of grey that resembled makeup more than soot, as if uncleanliness were a style and dereliction a pose.<\/p>\n

\"\"Poyen Wang, Night Stroll, 2024\u201325 (still), HD video with stereo sound, 22 min. Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

What, on the 50th anniversary of what is now MoMA PS1, are we actually celebrating? On one hand, it\u2019s Heiss\u2019s talent for finding and securing affordable spaces for artistic experimentation and her organisation\u2019s storied reputation for fostering that work. On the other hand, it\u2019s institutional survival over multiple generations, achieved by integrating the \u2018alternative\u2019 into systems it opposes. For those invested in the health of alternative art communities today, the high-profile success of MoMA PS1\u2019s strategic pursuit of institutional visibility and longevity \u2013 from its scrappy beginnings to its $8.5m renovation during the late 1990s to its formal affiliation with the Museum of Modern Art at the start of the millennium (described by a 1999 New York Times article as \u2018a marriage between resources and innovation\u2019) \u2013 traces an unsettling arc of a seemingly compulsory assimilation that ultimately stymies contemporary imagination.<\/p>\n

No sooner had I asked myself what other paths an alternative organisation can take did I come across a show in a defunct WeWork in Brooklyn organised by a recently formed artist-run curatorial platform that turns \u2018vacant former office spaces\u2019 \u2013\u00a0per a statement on their website \u2013 into \u2018temporary clearings in which art can unfold outside the usual pressure of profit, branding, and institutional expansion\u2019. Around 40 artists, tasked to fill in the former coworking quarters, threw projections on surfaces scrawled with past meeting notes (Cato Ouyang, The Attack, 2026), installed sculptures on desks, light switches and door handles, and nestled videoworks in ventilation shafts (Gregory Kalliche, Slow to disappear, 2026). For a second in this new \u2018crummy space\u2019, the irreal image of assimilated radicality snapped back into something resembling coherence, though marinating that vision may require a sprinkle of amnesia and a dash of hope.<\/p>\n

Jenny Wu<\/a>Opinion<\/a>May 1, 2026artreview.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What, on the 50th anniversary of MoMA PS1, are we actually celebrating? In a spacious third-floor gallery in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":932093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,4022,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-932092","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116502945485030897","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=932092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/932093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=932092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=932092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=932092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}