Arte joven en Nueva York / Young New York Art. De radical a establecido

Another of the deceptive and ultimately false premises of young art in New York is New York itself. New York art? This show could have been staged in Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Paris or Berlin (yet probably not in Madrid), and these artists could be working, and are working, around the world, in many cities. There is no "New York art" understood as a group of artists who work together, inspired and influenced by the city of New York. What we have is a lot of artists working in the same city, without really sharing any common themes or getting together to work on collaborative efforts. Individualism, isolation, competition: "Success is a job in New York," said Andy Warhol, and the city is no longer an embracing force as it was for Matta-Clark in SoHo or Kiki Smith in the East Village. There was a sense of place back then, a consciousness of being an artist in the greatest city in the world. The Greater New York exhibition left some in the art world suspecting young artists today live here because this is where the market, dealers and galleries are: profiting from the city probably not artistically but merely in an economic, professional manner.

Nevertheless, the true diversity of these young artists is remarkable. The new generation working in New York City is not exclusively American; nowadays these artists are from Germany, Mexico, Pakistan, Slovenia, Ethiopia and from just about every corner of the globe.

Regarding the artistic themes treated by the "emerging" artists in New York, the lack of involvement with the real world, with politics and with events surrounding our society is almost shocking. These artists seem to be stuck in their worlds of happiness and adolescent fun, reflecting a "joie de vivre" that may just be a reflection of their lives: fashionable, young successful artists with no preoccupations other than having fun and enjoying themselves. For working a city that is only just getting over the devastation of the September 11 attacks in 2001, is periodically put under fear and alarm of supposed terrorist threats and is living under the ever-present difficulty of being a massively Democratic enclave within an increasingly Republican nation, the artists participating in Greater New York proved to be largely oblivious to thorny issues like politics and society.

This kind of joyful artist that ignores politics and current events follows the widely popular path of hedonism, silliness, teenage vacuity and childish fun, representing ninjas, aliens, Vikings, weird creatures (Yetis were popular at the show) and other topics of a tv - and Pop-based culture. They also recreate themselves in the "being young and playful," basing their work on the adolescent body, mind and hobbies, showing an alarming lack of depth and ultimately failing to transcend. Another direction for the non-historically-conscious young artist is the focus on craft: constructions in paper and wood resembling a school contest or a fun class for kids. This "scissors and glue" hand-made art surely requires skills in cutting-and-pasting, but unfortunately the resulting works reveal little else than an elaborated surface.

Some of the craft-inane artists are worthy of being mentioned: Ryan McGinley, not crafty but positively empty, was the youngest artist ever to be awarded a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (his first European show is being held this fall at the musac in León, Spain). His photographs of young, drugged friends and "youth culture" in the Lower East Side of Manhattan follow the path of Nan Goldin in the 1980s East Village or Wolfgang Tillmans in London and Berlin in the 1990s, contributing nothing new or challenging to a well-worn style of home-made Polaroids. Ian Burns exhibited what was possibly the most popular piece among the youngsters visiting Greater New York. The Epic Tour is a wooden circuit with a cabin the spectator can ride in. Visitors enjoyed it, but for the art critic it was hard to see anything beyond "the wow factor." Jen DeNike's double video of teenagers frolicking in a yard was perplexing in its vacuity. Saya Woolfalk was given a whole room to install her art -a series of puppets, hand-made dolls and pop imagery that supposedly addressed race and gender issues; the transcendence was missing and the room just looked like a playroom. The irritant Peter Caine laughs at everyone and calls himself an "artist" knowing it will anger us. His tableaux starring oversized ugly puppets made of objects trouvés have a lot of the sickness of Paul McCarthy and the absurdity of Jake & Dinos Chapman; their total lack of meaning except the pure annoyance could be a Dada effect and his attitude of "I'm not artist" might be taken as a necessary slap in the face for the art circus, but ultimately this is art probably and only because it has been sanctioned as such by dealers, collectors and, now, also by curators.

Among these artists, Banks Violette stands out with little effort as the most important young creator of our times in New York and well beyond the city. The sculptures included in Greater New York, where he was given a whole room and was critically praised, were a gathering of references to art history that were also innovative and fresh. In the sleek black surfaces of his polished metal sculptures that mirror the viewers, the influences of Gerhard Richter, Frank Stella or Robert Smithson could be noted. Minimalism and Modern Masters, but also Gothicism, darkness and youth subculture, in that astonishingly solid mixture of High and Low Banks Violette masters.

British artist Adam McEwen's powerful conceptual work is only second to Violette in artistic soundness. In painting, sculpture or photography, McEwen questions, works and reworks history, using everyday materials and far-reaching echoes of John Baldessari, On Kawara, Richard Prince and Félix González-Torres. At the Greater New York show he presented an enlarged, inverted version of the famous photo of Benito Mussolini and Clara Pettaci hanging dead in a Milan public square. Dramatic and energetic, the bodies acquire a living dimension, disturbing the viewer. Performance artist Clifford Owens executed his piece for Greater New York only a limited number of times over the almost six months the exhibition was on show. Hidden in a small room, the public directed him to do things in his "cell" -the room as it was left after the performance was part of the piece, and, in truth, crawling inside it and finding detached walls, scratched floors, debris and signs of violence made a strong impression. Marina Abramovic, Günter Brus and the Wiener Aktionismus could be easily perceived as references, but probably not by an American public not used to Body Art. The fact that this European-rooted visceral art comes from an African-American artist makes Clifford Owens a very uncommon artist, one to watch closely.