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

Mike Bouchet is also art history-conscious, but very American. His eccentric, grandiose socio-artistic projects have an eye on history and politics, halfway between Chris Burden and Santiago Sierra and are, eventually, silly and humorous; his reworking Walter de Maria's New York Earth Room with Home Depot soil in an era of corporate brands and malls is a good example. Deceptively crafty and adolescent, without out being that at all, Marc Swanson deals with isolation and fear in sculptures of animals recalling Bruce Nauman. For Greater New York he hid an unhappy, lonely Yeti in the ps 1 boiler room. Tucked in a forgotten corner of the basement, suddenly stumbling upon "him" conveyed real sadness. Between Maurizio Cattelan and historic critique, the mysterious Pakistan-born female artist Huma Bhabha intrigued visitors with a sculpture that appeared to be a praying Muslim covered in black plastic that guarded the meaning or actual shape of what was underneath, showing only two outstretched hands. It is promising that her art looks like nothing we have seen before. Wade Guyton's sculpture-literally- reworks art history. He had a Marcel Breuer chair mutated into a minimalist sculpture, and his work has referenced and used Modernist masters like Mies van der Rohe or Moholy-Nagy. In the same vein, Mexican sculptor José León Cerrillo reworks Minimalism, only respectfully, with a black, austere sculpture that is reminiscent of Tony Smith. The delicate-yet-solid, architectural sculptures by Slovenian-born Tobias Putrih challenge the space they are placed in and the idea of materials, bearing a likeness to Félix González-Torres, as does Carol Bove with her poetic beaded curtain and constructed shelves, full of personal objects.

King & Díaz de León are a collaborative duo who work on video and music. Their hypnotic fast-paced video combined music for strings with cutting-edge Doug Aitken-style electronics, in a mesmerizing approach to technology that made it one of the sensations of the exhibition. Another noteworthy video artist was German creator Christian Jankowski, not an emerging artist for he excelled at the Harald Szeemann-curated 1999 Venice Biennale. His movie, full of the conceptual fictions and confounding realities that characterize his work, was undoubtedly the most professional, fully-developed of those presented at ps 1 . Leo Villareal, another fully-grown artist, follows closely behind. His art of light and environment shows a strong similarity with Dan Flavin, which is both a blessing and a curse.

Justin Lowe uses a craft approach but takes the "scissors and glue" method to the dimension of high art. For Greater New York he made a "tipi" out of cut-and-sewn patches that could be accessed and lived in, and for the nearby Sculpture Center he created a tunnel constructed with worn-out cloths. Both are interactive pieces in the spirit of the early Bruce Nauman, encouraging exploration and engaging the viewer, making the public part of the piece. In a similar treatment of crafts, Japanese artist Yuken Teruya offered one of the most compelling pieces at ps 1 , a selection of handmade brand-name shopping bags displayed in shelves mimicking the window of an expensive store, but with McDonald's among the brands and miniature trees inside the bags. Kent Henricksen's historical wallpaper humorously presented individuals from the eighteenth century French genre painting wearing hoods, transforming elegant ladies into perverted practitioners of sadomasochistic sex.

Painting is alive and kicking, as popular as drawing and other traditional mediums. Ryan McGinness is one of the most favoured artists in this field, a remarkable painter whose large abstract forms painted on the walls embrace the viewer like a Sol LeWitt-on-acid creation, 2005-version.

Kelley Walker works under the positive shadow of Andy Warhol, dealing with death, disaster, social abuse and racism (his painterly photographic/sprayed renditions of Warhol's Race Riots are first-class art). German artist Nina Lola Bachhuber is one of the young artists specialized in drawing, a popular medium among up-and-coming artists in New York. She excels on ink and paper her exquisite series of multiple drawings are reminiscent of the red and surrealism of Louise Bourgeois. The murals by Nicola López follow a recent tradition of imaginative, explosive abstract painting made famous by the likes of Matthew Ritchie and Julie Mehretu. Dana Schutz, involuntary conductor of this critical survey, is, of course, the most famous product of Greater New York. Her expressionistic, shockingly colourful and loosely naïve style of painting has many devotees. I fail to see anything positive in her art -I find the acceptance she has had in the art world inexplicable, probably just a trend. Hyped and bloated, her huge Presentation looks out of place at m o ma , forced to be there but not finding its place among mature contemporary art works.

Just as the ps 1' s big brother Museum of Modern Art ( m o ma ) has traditionally dictated the history and direction of established art, now the once-independent Contemporary Art Center in Queens acts as Phone Book and Bible of the "emerging-and-soon-to-be-engulfed trends" before passing them on to Manhattan, where m o ma will turn them into digestible mainstream. The Dana Schutz story with which I have begun and finished this piece is the latest and most acute example of this practice, and it is not surprising that the most interesting artists working in New York are now, with exceptions, those who are either not yet collected by m o ma or are less known than many of their peers. Those, thus, who are not yet fully submerged in the corporate machinery of the New York art world.