New Museum Presents “New Commissions,” Works by Jeremy Deller, Daria Martin, Mathias Poledna, and Urban China

Daria Martin. Minotaur. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London and New Museum of Contemporary Art.

This winter the New Museum presents ”New Commissions,” four significant projects by Jeremy Deller, Daria Martin, Mathias Poledna, and Urban China, some of the most interesting voices in contemporary art today. These commissions were undertaken as part of the Three M Project, an ongoing partnership of New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, to jointly commission, exhibit, and acquire contemporary art by artists whose work has not yet received significant recognition in the United States. All three museums share a collaborative vision and entrepreneurial spirit, and the belief that ambitious art projects on a national scale can be produced through efficiently sharing knowledge and resources.

London-born and based artist Jeremy Deller will present at this occasion, “It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq” (February 11-March 22, 2009) that encourages public discussion of the history, present circumstances, and future of Iraq. In March, Deller will share the dialogues begun at the New Museum with diverse audiences across the nation. He will travel aboard an RV with Nato Thompson, Curator at Creative Time; Esam Pasha, artist and formerly a translator for the Chief Advisor in the British Embassy of Baghdad and for American forces around Iraq; and Jonathan Harvey, a Platoon Sergeant for the U.S. military and a specialist in the psychological effects of warfare.

For her part, Daria Martin inaugurated in January 28 her installation “Minotaur.” It depicts a duet choreographed by the legendary dance and movement pioneer Anna Halprin based on the 1886 sculpture “Minotaur” by artist Auguste Rodin. Martin has carefully edited the film to juxtapose the movements of the two dancers with close-up views of Rodin’s sculpture, images of the sculpture in a book, views of the wooded exterior of Halprin’s Northern California studio where the dance takes place, and shots of Halprin herself. In doing so, Martin creates a complex and multilayered synthesis of various art forms–film, dance, and sculpture–while simultaneously meditating on the process through which art is made, and the shifting sexual dynamics between men and women as embodied in both the sculpture and Halprin’s performative re-imagination of it. “Minotaur” remains on view through March 8, 2009.

“Crystal Palace,” the project presented by Mathias Poledna (January 28-March 8, 2009) is a 35mm film installation comprised of a small number of long, static shots of the montane rainforest landscape of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua, New Guinea. Using tightly framed medium-close to medium-wide shots, the film’s carefully selected scenes focus on the complex patterns, textures, and the overall abstract qualities of this environment, seemingly without human presence. Only subtle changes in light and movement in foliage provide visual cues to the passage of time. Simultaneously engaging with as well as collapsing cinematic conventions of narrative development and closure, Poledna’s film explores the ambiguities and constructed nature of historical representation.

“Informal Cities” (February 11-March 22, 2009) is the first U.S. commission of Urban China, the only magazine devoted to issues of urbanism published in China. The magazine’s global, cross-disciplinary network of correspondents and collaborators merge rigorous methods of data collection and analysis of rapidly developing cities in China, with witty graphic representations of their findings. This dichotomy endows the magazine with an ability to take dense reams of seemingly unrelated information and spin it into digestible narrative webs, suggesting unknown connections that shape the way cities and lives are continually made and remade. This commissioned installation will include a built environment of reclaimed construction materials; a massive wall graphic combining photographs, found images, numerical data and maps; a flash-based user-navigable database of photographs; and a selected collection of past issues of Urban China. Together, these elements will fill the lobby gallery, exploding the magazine’s radical worldview off its pages and into the physical space of the New Museum. 

Further information, www.newmuseum.org