Although I've recently been a little dismissive of what the aggregate NYC art scene is producing through the lens of PS1's curatorial emphases, but several recent shows in Williamsburg show that the methods and broad feeling are not completely homogenous. The most disturbing thing in the PS1 show was the apparent desire to communicate through languages that were often too easy too consume for a knowledgable reader and unrewarding without a broad but NY provincial understanding of art. This was not the case throughout, and many of the artworks were engaging in numerous ways, but there was more homogeneity to the methods employed, to the dialects spoken, than seems likely for a survey show of NYC.

The method-dialect engaged and addressed the knowing viewer through the last 45 years of art-languages, and required that background knowledge in order to communicate something new. This is very sensible, and should demonstrate an appreciable motion in the kind of ideas that the NYC-aggregate is discussing in relation to a near-half century of artwork. In my view this isn't a simple process of reiteration, or of facile recreation, but of employing subtle nuances and the rebalancing of former statements, premises, assumptions, etc in order to enrichen the historical language and content of that language. This is what every field of knowledge does, this is the reflective self-assessing that is often mis-construed as progress. It is more cyclical, more 'rhizomic' than the notion that progress implies.

There are two other things to mention about methods in general. The first being that because they are a way of viewing work - traditionally viewed as a lens - all objects can be subjected to them but not all obects, works of art, should be. At some point I'll address (or I should address...) the notion of moral imperatives or of any imperative or external and quasi-stable values. For now let it stand that the schema presented here doesn't account for all artworks nor are there schemas which will address all well.

The second thing that is relevent here is that although there can naturally be multiple lenses for looking at works, it is not imperative that the lens is the primary aspect of looking at the work. The notion of looking can inflate or deflate the values and primacy of methods, and the work does have a role in determining that. Again, in order for this to work it relies upon structures extrinsic to the focus and remit of this arguement, and will - probably - be dealt with later.

I often speak of history in my teaching, of the role of language and the 'a priori' nature of languages (in both the philosophical sense and in the non-specialist senses of the phrase), and this method is something that creates a communicable framework, which is useful in the research sense as well. It is, in other words, an epistemology. It is one epistemology, one model of knowledge and one rationale for creating work; assessing and evaluating work, for framing work and so on. It has its boundaries and its limits and when it is presented to you en masse it shows them with force.

The questions in that regard is more to do with role of this method rather whether or not it is applied.

Williamsburg's art scene is both part of the greater NYC scene, its vanguard, and judging, from the migration from Brooklyn to Manhattan the entry card into Chelsea for both artists and their galleries, and with that greater exposure of various sorts. Two of the shows that opened over the last weekend reminded me of different but not unrelated approaches to PS1. Both Caroline Cox's show at the Sarah Bowen gallery, and Eric Heist's at Shroeder-Romero offer alternative ideas of reading, framing and of methods.

Caroline Cox's offers a method which has been seen less in recent years, but draws parts of its framework from Arte Povera and more personally to me from 80s British sculpture - and in that sense can be called upon with the methods above. There's a negotiation between cultural association, the connotive strength of the materials and a poetic sensibility which calls upon a different understanding of the role and meaning of material values. The values are not necessarily called through the use of clothing tags, through plastic netting, through the metaphorical meanings dervied from the usage of the material, but from another source which gathers momentum in spite of that, or even in direct disregard for that. The process of perception, the act of looking, enables these objects and their formal structure to move into an abstract poetry. the abstractions finds its poetry not through the contemporary abstract-sculpture/installation language, but through requesting aspects of ourselves to empathise and imaginatively find connections of meaning through the form. This seems to call upon something else beyond the critical discourse outlined about, and outside of the role of the conscious-language, but stems from another cultural resource that is located elsewhere.

Eric Heist's work differs directly from the PS1 show in a way that is common to most of Schroeder-Romero's output in that it is politically active and sensitive. (Although there was one set of drawings from a war artist in Iraq at PS1). By demanding that we refocus our viewing onto a realm of action we resistantly call pollitics, by opening up not shock but something closer to genuine and almost certainly justifiable outrage, and by reconfiguring that within the context of our implied personal responsibilties through a pun on the word of 'agent' in 'travel agents', the work finds an aggression that is mostly contemporary and widely, I suspect, felt to be due.

Between the two works the process of finding meaning addressed different aspects of myself, not refraining from opening up parts which almost seem vestigial, and asking me questions in languages that I'd thought I'd forgot.

PS: the notions presented here are not final, they are an attempt to open up these notions in my mind and to begin to explore them. I will revise this post as it becomes clearer to me, and build upon it in future entries.