The Mere Future

Joel Dean

Devon Dikeou

Half Moon Bay Center for Theatre and Performance Art

Stephen Kaltenbach

Marc Kokopeli

Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho

Nils Norman

Curated by Tim Gentles

The Mere Future is an exhibition examining the relationship between artistic production and the erosion of the public sphere. In varying ways, the seven artists in this exhibition take the urban landscape as emblematic of the constellations of social and economic power that undergird the art world.

The exhibition looks in particular to one of the unexpected but well-documented legacies of post-conceptual practices and institutional critique—namely, that reflexivity to the politics of representation, audience and display is thoroughly compatible with contemporary art’s role as one of the main financial engines behind the catastrophic transfers of wealth from the private to the public sector over the past three decades. With art’s corruptibility firmly in mind, The Mere Future presents work that negotiates complicity with the potential for renewal and the possibility of a new commons.

At a moment when the President of the United States is an ex-property developer, many of the exhibition’s works carry explicit or implicit traces of New York City’s voracious real estate market. Devon Dikeou presents a sculpture she first showed in 1992, a replica of one the planters in the lobby of Trump Tower. Joel Dean’s sculpture cartoonishly probes the affects of the city’s architectural marvels, locating them on a continuum between power and submission. Nils Norman contributes a series of plans for a proposed redevelopment of Battery Park City, including a redesign of Richard Artschwager’s public art piece “Sitting Stance” as a gentrification advice kiosk, presented here for the first time since they were shown at American Fine Arts Co., New York in 1999. The Half Moon Bay Center for Theatre and Performance Art’s new commission is a mumblecore-inspired short film depicting a young artist navigating the depressingly predictable economic and social realities of the New York art world.

The two drawings contributed by Stephen Kaltenbach, executed in 1970, escape the city, seeming to depict suburban and country homes, but finding hierarchies of taste equally entrenched there. Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho explore the circulation of cultural capital in the ever-shrinking loop between center and periphery in a series of photographs of the traditional Filipino dish, champorado, taken at a well known cafe in the bohemian-artistic/eco-touristic Baguio City, Philippines. Finally, Marc Kokopeli references Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree series with his own version, virtually unchanged from the original, a melancholic acknowledgement of a political imaginary in stalemate as much as a call to reconstruct the future.

The exhibition borrows its title from Sarah Schulman's prescient 2009 novel about liberal hubris, whose dystopic vision of New York City, where all social problems have finally been solved, suggests the provincialism bound up in fantasies of urban progress.