8.18.25 — Gathering as Assembly
MoMA PS1 is a busy place. It manages five separate solo shows this summer, through August 25, and “The Gatherers” through October 6, but then the artists themselves suggest a certain hesitancy—and I work this into an earlier report on Rirkrit Tiravanija, also at MoMA PS1, and Mary Helena Clark in the galleries as a longer review and my latest upload.
Their art seems all but forced on them, and it is hard to say whether they mean that as critique. One can forgive Alanis Obomsawin, for this is cinema, sixty years of it, and who can begin to take it all in? Only slowly can it take shape as indigenous Canadian art. 
In the process, ordinary people need do no more than speak to children and speak for themselves. The work itself has a rather slow pace that will grow on anyone. As a film’s title has it, The Children Have to Hear Another Story.
Thanks to Bani Abidi in Pakistan, children are still waiting. They line the parade route for an unnamed entourage of motorcycles and limos that may never arrive and would demand unqualified obedience if it does. The museum’s two-story lower gallery seems just right for an oversized display of applause, and the winding parade already asserts it importance, with security forces in pristine white. What it means as political statement or art I hesitate to say. Not much happens in Reserved—and no doubt it has already taken place in many countries many times before. Political power works, Abidi might say, because it is predictable, anonymous, and halfway entertaining.
Julien Ceccaldi may have already given in. This is “everyday digital subjugation and hyperconsumerism,” the museum insists, with the accent on the everyday. It is “distorted” as well, which here might count as praise. It centers on a good-sized mural of a painting within a painting, as Adult Theater. The oversized woman is suggestively lying down and already licking her lips. Three figures sharing a raised steel platform next to it might be a museum worker, a curator, and a global explorer.
Or maybe not, but everything here is an imagined archetype of an alternative museum or a stereotype out of mass culture. I lost patience before I could decide. Upstairs, Whitney Claflin is up to almost anything short of soft-core porn. She seems unable to decide, and it makes for a puzzling but more intriguing show. Abstractions make a point of their spareness and white ground along with their brushwork and drips. A naked mannequin does a hand-stand like a circus performer in on the act.
Claflin makes it worth looking regardless for connections that may not actually exist. Put it down to the summer doldrums and real talent. Sandra Poulson has more focus, and it allows her truly to take flight. Based in Luanda, London, and Amsterdam, she is not out to map contemporary art, but she has a way of taking in the past and giving it a place in the present. A crowded room bears furniture that appears assembled the wrong way, but good news: a cabinet, a desk, and a preposterous wooden toilet sit at odd angles, and the outline of a face in wood appears carved into a t-shirt, for This Bedroom Looks Like a Republic!
After all that, “The Gatherers” could be that rarity—a group show that will try anything once but sticks well enough together. Tableware from Tolia Astakhishvili and Dylan Peirce, a junction box from Klara Liden, and motherboards in their ratty cases from Selma Selman might each belong to a single artist. Together, the artists are gathering what becomes the detritus of its own assembly. Ser Serpas speaks of a corpse, and others might well have kept the wrapping and thrown the work away. Texture may count most of all. Worst comes to worst, Poulson has supplied the furniture to put it all away.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.