‘Double Album’ at the New Museum

Walter Pater asserted in the 19th century that all art constantly aspires to the condition of music. Today’s contemporary artists, however, seem mainly to aspire to talk about music — in the sentimental tones of a classic-rock DJ. “Double Album,” a two-artist exhibition at the New Museum, pairs the first American surveys of the Mexican-born Daniel Guzmán (b. 1964) and Canadian Steven Shearer (b. 1968), both of whom, like so many artists working now, wallow in the cultures of rock and pop music.The surveys are small, each occupying half a floor. And given the similarity of the two artists’ productions, it’s a format that functions well. Theirs, however, is familiar territory treated in all too familiar ways. Both work in a variety of modes — drawing, sculpture, collage, and, in Mr. Guzmán’s case, video — and both indulge unrestrainedly in nostalgia, the most common emotion expressed by younger artists today.Of the two, Mr. Shearer is, to my eye, the more inventive. Although he considers himself a figurative painter, his most arresting piece here is a sculpture called “Geometric Mechanotherapy Cell for Harmonic Alignment of Movements and Relations” (2007-08), a 9-foot-tall cube of black plastic piping that emits thumping, tuba-like sounds. Mostly he’s into ’70s-era heavy metal, though other genres do make appearances.One piece, for example, reproduces, with an ink-jet printer, a multitude of images of the ’70s teen pop icon Leif Garrett. Its all-too-apt title: “I thought I was a Visionary — But I Learned I was a Channeler”(2003). Mr. Shearer channels the dreams and lives of others through his picture archives, a vast trove of digital images mostly found online, which he assembles into large, themed mosaics. “Slumber” (2004), for instance, reproduces hundreds of images of people sleeping on a digital C-print as wide as a driveway. Others explore the generally music-centered existence of adolescent males.Mr. Shearer began collecting the images as source material for his drawings and paintings, virtually all of which depict long-haired kids in their teens and 20s. Finely rendered with nearly Dutch precision, the drawings, mainly in ballpoint pen or in crayon, evince a now-uncommon psychological expressivity. “Longhairs” (2004) presents five highly distinct, hirsute individuals, in red crayon on notebook-size sheets, in a sort of typological lineup: It’s almost as much a study of hairstyles as faces. Moodier, “Smoke” (2005) depicts a feminine boy with long, straight hair pulling on a cigarette in a room made shadowy by the dark blues of the ballpoint pen.The more stylized “Smoke” resembles Mr. Shearer’s somewhat twee paintings, portraits of androgynous youth in concert-poster colors and a style that seems an imperfect mash-up of Edvard Munch, Henry Fuseli, and Elizabeth Peyton. Less significant than merely trippy, the work’s fluorescent colors jibe with the subjects’ stoned gazes. But whether the paintings convince you will depend on your appetite for album-cover symbolism.Mr. Shearer is at least a part-time visionary. Mr. Guzmán spends far more time channeling the work of others, though he proves himself at times a master of contemporary visual idioms, if an innovator in none. “Sunshine State” (2005), a black skull resting on a black box with streams of gold chain pouring from its eyes, as well as “Sigue siendo rock and roll para mí (It’s still rock and roll to me),” from the same year, a red Styrofoam skull on a black metal bucket with pink paint drips, both slide perfectly along the deeply worn groove of goth art. But by 2005, skull imagery had already become numbingly trite, and these examples add nothing to the iconography. Nor does his untitled painting, from the “New Face in Hell” series, of four small skulls on a black ground.Indeed, too many old faces seem to populate this purgatory (the work is too good-natured to be hell). A pile of cassette tapes on a blue vinyl drop cloth reminds one of an anemic Mike Kelley floor sculpture. “Que extraordinario que el mundo exista (How Amazing that the World Exists)” — in which a plastic bucket appears in various street locations in a series of photographs — could stand in for any number of mildly compelling conceptual photographic projects one has encountered over the past 15 years.His “Spider Man” sculptures, a set of three iron webs — in red, yellow, and blue — each featuring Spider-Man eyes, are fluent examples of the sort of anonymous kitsch produced under the same corporate umbrella as Jeff Koons’s toy shop. And while Mr. Guzmán’s exuberant drawings are the highlight here, they inevitably call to mind Raymond Pettibon’s similar couplings of word and image.The irony of these artists’ shared obsession with the musical cultures of their youth is how far it removes them from the mind-set of their spirited, forward-looking heroes, be they Led Zeppelin or Kiss. Mr. Shearer and Mr. Guzmán seem closer to an older generation, one that couldn’t abide anything that wasn’t the Perry Como or Frank Sinatra they grew up with. The two have milked youth culture for its dregs of cool, leaving something dry and empty in its place. They could have titled this album “Déjà Vu.”Until July 6 (235 Bowery at Prince Street, 212-219-1222).

‘Double Album’ at the New Museum

‘Double Album’ at the New Museum

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