The Ungovernables

This second edition of The New Museum Triennial1 1  - The event took place from February 15 to April 22, 2012, at the New Museum in New York. owed much of its interest to the fact that its theme, “The Ungovernables,” coincided so perfectly with urgent preoccupations of the time. With mine, in any case, as I was visiting New York just as the student strike was entering its fourth week. Events that followed in Quebec, with the popular uprising broadening into a general protest against the neoliberal regime, would also reveal the not-so-underground connection with the Occupy movement that had marked the fall of 2011, from Victoria Square in Montreal (rechristened “Place des Peuples”) to Zuccotti Park in New York. Despite local authorities’ ban on occupying venues, the outrage, even muted, finally resonated again and would find other occasions to manifest itself.

In addition, the context of my visit to New York offered another prism through which to view the Bowery street exhibition in a favourable light, since it took place at the same time as “Art Week,” an event that gives priority to the commerce surrounding art fairs, from the prestigious Armory Show to more recent fairs, such as Pulse and Scope, that are attempting to carve out a place in the market. Art, having become an ideal safe investment, does not seem to have suffered in the slightest from the economic crisis. Anyone frequenting such events is aware of their substance and willingly admits that it is here, after all, that art trends of the world are played out. Obviously, an institution such as the New Museum cannot be unconcerned² 2 - Katie Kitamura, in her comments on the exhibition, mentions the history of the museum’s complex relationship with private and corporate financing in Frieze: Contemporary Art and Culture, No. 147 (May 2012), 219., but to see an exhibition of works openly critical of political and socioeconomic realities gave one hope and proved a good hedge against cynicism.