1969, PS1

This is a show with many ramifications, a thrust into an archive or in this case a series of archives, an elaborate collaboration between MOMA and PS1, and curators from all departments. The parameters: anything from 1969, suggesting a mystical weird year vacuum, but the range of work is bewildering.

The most backwards innate object is an official wall text mock-up from Five Recent Acquisitions (MOMA, 1969) penned by Kynaston McShine. It is in a clear archival sleeve, nailed to a wall, I assume the page was something sent to the print shop initially. A cool move into the relative non-art “documents” found throughout the show, one of a million parallels. The sentiments in 1969 are honed on relationships the art objects have to bygone time (era), to each other, and to the institutions, modes, and sentiments responsible for their survival.

Henceforth there is a behind the scenes tone, a breach of the secret scenarios required in an enigmatic art world. This of course runs parallel with much of the institutional critique of the years before and after ’69 (see Hans Hacke, currently showing at X Initiative). Robert Smithson plays a believable drifter/artist in East Coast, West Coast, a video with Nancy Holt as the uptight New York counterpart, in which the stereotypes are exaggerated to death. Mel Bochner’s Theory of Painting feels like a calm associative acknowledgement of the cultural machine and its cogs. Another Smithson piece, Corner Mirror with Coral, is protected from the cruel concrete floor by a platform and an explanation (apology) for the apocryphal kid gloves tactic.

This is ambitious history folding, especially when several contemporary artists are invited to “intervene.”

PS1 until April 5