Speak of the Devil on the Bowery

The irony about the recently expanded New Museum, a venue founded in 1977 on a self-stated mission of “working towards a better society,” is that the place is starting to act its age. Granted: No one will ever mistake the New Museum for The Frick Collection. Culture vultures seeking the glitz and geegawgery typical of our perpetual avant-garde can rest assured that no shrink-wrapped transgression or rubber-stamped obfuscation will go uncelebrated at the Lower East Side. Look no farther than the newly opened shows, “Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony” and “Diego Marcon: Arrivederci, Piggies!,” both of which condescend to the audience in the cause of, respectively, confused agit-prop and sickly nostalgia.Still, the New Museum has begun exhibiting marked signs of historicism. Upon reopening last spring, the museum mounted “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” an exhibition that found room to acknowledge precedent without feeling the need to denigrate it. Presented as a “diagonal history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” “New Humans” was a clatter of sci-fi suppositions that served as a marker of our technological moment. A raft of newbies was provided with grounding by coots like El Lissitzky, Hannah Höch and Germaine Richier. The results were enlivening.As is “The Bowery: Devil’s Mile,” an exhibition that, in presentation and intent, would not look out of place at the Museum of the City of New York or The New York Historical. It is, dare one say, an august outing whose raison d’etre is the New Museum’s home address. The chronological endpoint is Nan Goldin’s demimonde slideshow, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1985), which you’ll find situated near an homage to the Lenape peoples. Well, it’s a sort of homage: Brad Kahlhamer’s “Bowery Nation” (1985-2012) is a ticky-tack accumulation of thrift-shop cast-offs that tries to do for land acknowledgments what Alexander Calder did for trapeze artists in “Cirque Calder” (1926-1931).Would that the New Museum’s Director Emerita, Lisa Phillips, who curated “The Devil’s Mile” with the assistance of Thalia Stefaniuk, had done right by the Lenape in selecting objects of greater historic weight or artistic merit. As it is, Mr. Leithammer’s riff on kachina dolls tells us more about the junk aesthetic of post-punk Manhattan than it does about the longstanding principles of indigenous peoples. Fair enough. Not too far from “Bowery Nation” are David Godlis’s photographs of the Ramones, Patti Smith, and Debbie Harry. The neighborhood, Ms. Harry recalls in the accompanying catalogue, “seemed a no-man’s land, peopled with downtrodden men who were inebriated but also seemed sort of invisible.”‘Blondie, PUNK Magazine Benefit, CBGB,’ by David Godlis, 1977. Courtesy David Godlis“The Devil’s Mile” is a commingling of artworks, artifacts, curios, videos and a 19th-century hand-pumper fire engine, “The Lady Washington Engine Co. No. 40.” The last time the latter traversed the Bowery was 1840, long after the arrival of Peter Stuyvesant, a portrait of whom by an anonymous artisan suggests that he was a tough nut to crack. It’s hard to imagine that the Bowery was once home to Stuyvesant’s 62-acre estate dubbed, yes, the Great Bouwerie. Less difficult to believe, perhaps, is that a rivalry between thespians led to riots in the streets or that zoos were once a Bowery mainstay. A watercolor from circa 1842 advertising “Herr Driesbach and his Wild Animals!” shows the man himself sleeping peacefully amid a bevy of big cats.Give the accompanying wall labels a light once-over–the New Museum is still intent on educating the unwashed masses about this, that or the other marker of elite opinion–and you’ll find a lot that is informative, fun, heart-breaking and ridiculous. Testaments to P.T. Barnum and his homegrown “humbuggery” are there to be gawked at. The likely star of the show is a taxidermied mash-up of several animals that was once hyped as the Feejee mermaid.Feejee Mermaid, circa 1842. New MuseumA video presentation of Jacob Riis’ sobering photographs of tenement life is on display, as are sundry paintings and sculptures by artists whose studios were nearby, including Adolph Gottlieb, June Leaf, and Billy Sullivan. Tattoo parlors of yore are given a nod with an unexpected credit bestowed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for his 1997 lifting of the ban on the practice.The Bowery makes for strange bedfellows, it seems. What kind of bedfellow The New Museum will prove to be in the scope of the area’s history is still in question. In the meantime, “The Devil’s Mile” is worth traversing.

Speak of the Devil on the Bowery

Speak of the Devil on the Bowery

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