New Mu

Checked out an exhibit at The New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery.  Opened in 2007, it’s the first museum to be built below 14^th Street, and is responsible for bringing galleries and an art scene to the LES.  The exhibit, NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star is a look at “art made and exhibited in New York over the course of one year. Centering on 1993, the exhibition is conceived as a time capsule, an experiment in collective memory that attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics.”

I was particularly drawn to Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather, fourteen casts made of herself in chocolate and soap modeled on classical busts and “re-sculpted” by the processes described in the title.  "I wanted to work with the tradition of self-portraiture but also with the classical bust...I had the idea that I would make a replica of myself in chocolate and in soap, and I would feed myself with my self, and wash myself with my self. Both the licking and the bathing are quite gentle and loving acts, but what’s interesting is that I’m slowly erasing myself through the process. So for me it’s about that conflict, that love/hate relationship we have with our physical appearance, and the problem I have with looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘Is that who I am?’"