Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
Pawel Althamer: The Neighbors, which opened today (to Apr. 13) at the New Museum, is the latest in that uninstitutional institution’s distinguished list of visually and intellectually stimulating presentations of artists whose work I don’t know well but undoubtedly should.
Born in 1967, Althamer still has no gallery representation in New York. (This show could change that.) I had seen a couple of his works in the New Museum’s controversial Dakis Joannou “Skin Fruit” show (numbers 7 and 14 in the slideshow at this link). And he was, for me, a standout in a compelling New Museum-ish survey that I happened to catch in 2011 at Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery—Rearview Mirror: New Art from Eastern and Central Europe.
In mounting the Warsaw artist’s first major one-person museum show in the U.S., the New Museum’s associate director Massimiliano Gioni and curator Gary Carrion-Murayari have given us a big dose of an artist who gave himself big doses of mind-altering substances. Both the euphoric and harrowing results of his forays into of different states of consciousness are rivetingly documented in a series of videos shot by Artur Zmijewski that surround visitors on the museum’s second floor.
Occupying the floorspace there are the skeletal “Venetians,” created for last year’s Venice Biennale, which Gioni directed. These gray wraiths, fashioned from cast plastic and extruded plastic ribbons, represent the workers and illegal immigrants whom the artist encountered while wandering through Venice:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
A big part of Althamer’s artistic practice is community engagement: The show includes a changing roster of street musicians performing in the museum’s lobby and a huge, ongoing collaborative drawing (titled, “Draftsmen’s Congress”), occupying the entire fourth floor. Its rotating group of creators receive free museum admission for their labors:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
The show also includes a men’s (what, no women’s?) coat drive to benefit the homeless and hungry at the nearby Bowery Mission. Donors get free museum admission.
What else did I see? Come with me now to explore the galleries and hear my reflections (i.e., “Rodin on acid”). A part near the end looks different than most of the video; I had to resort to my smartphone when my video recorder ran out of juice: