Walking over to the shimmering New Museum to see the exhibition After Nature, I stepped over a dead baby bird on Prince Street, and then some oily treacle running down the Bowery. It was a suitable overture to the show, which “surveys a landscape… darkened by uncertain catastrophe.” This clever and terrifying collection of work from a broad timeframe is organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions at the New Museum. (See this special online version of the exhibition; click on the underlined words to move organically through the artworks.)
An anchor for the show is Werner Herzog’s film, And A Smoke Arose—Lessons of Darkness, about the burning of the Kuwaiti old fields by retreating Iraqi troops after the 1991 Gulf War. Many of the other artworks seem to record the aftermath or precedence of some traumatic event. read more
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