Smells Like Bob Saget

"Smells Like Bob Saget"

Back in the day we dressed in plaid, combat boots and cut off shorts watching the latest grunge band on MTV, shows on Nickelodeon, or were collecting Beanie Babies, while the AIDS virus claimed lives, and the New York art center was being challenged by a more politically driven art. These days that we are nostalgic for, the 1990’s, are being rehashed in the New Museum’s current exhibition, “NYC: 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” -- named after the Sonic Youth album -- on display until May 26th. The exhibition curators, of which Massimiliano Gioni is one, attempts to address the political issues that were apparent in the nineties such as gender roles, identity, class and race subjugation, through re-showing many of the art works featured in the politically driven 1993 Whitney Biennale. However, the politics that are being reworked in this exhibition are lost, and the selection of this show is a fragment of the omnipresent resurgence of the 1990’s mass culture we are facing today.

    Wolfgang Tillmans, John Curin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Elizabeth Peyton, Alex Bag and Paul McCarthy, are only a few artists who are stringed together in the exhibition that seeks to recapture the dialogue between the mainstream and underground, political, and DIY artist cultures that was definitive to the nineties. Massimiliano attempts this through curating well-known artists -- some featured in the Whitney Biennale -- along with those of lesser known artists who emerged in small commercial galleries or artist studios in 1993. The title of the show is another attempt to link “museum art” with today’s mainstream by using the title of a then underground 1994 album by Sonic Youth; a band that is now well known. This highlights the blending of forms and the cross-breeding between art and music heralded by Sonic Youth and in the general nineties. However, it has been used today as a marketing ploy: triggering our post-millenial urges to live in nostalgia and to get the mainstream into the museum. In conjunction to the opening of the exhibition was a nineties themed dance party that encouraged the crowd to wear plaid and their scrunchies while listening to the nineties top forty hits, demonstrating that today’s market requires a lot of “pop” with its “culture”.

    The potency of these art works seem lost, or belittled amidst the retro-craze that our current era of “collective experiences” via social media is purporting. 1990’s TV shows like “Doug,” “My So-Called Life,” and “Boy Meets World” are running amok on Youtube and Netflix, while nineties top-forty music, veiled ironically as “guilty pleasures” are being shared and re-shared countless times on Facebook. Major TV networks and music corporations have taken notice. MTV has a TV series of the movie “Scream” planned for the fall, Nickelodeon, a daily two-hour block called “The 90’s Are All That” showing “classic” reruns,  and the New Kids on the Block announced a tour with Boyz II Men. For those that have grown up in the nineties with the introduction of the internet are reliving their “coming-of-age” decade through fan-pages and Tumblr’s devoted to bands, actors and TV shows. As in the case of “NYC: 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star”, and in these examples, what we surmise is that our generation will be looked back upon without features of its own, but instead what will be apparent is a continuous cycling of modes and fashions of eras passed.