Some where between artist, scientist and second grade teacher seems to lay Natalie Jeremijenko. Last Thursday amongst the large illuminated balloons of the Bubble project at Materials and Architecture she presented a lecture on some of her last works exhibited at Postmasters focusing on the line between natural and urban, giving a staring role to the pigeons of New York city. With all the verve of an elementary school teacher she presented her vision of, for lack of a better term, art/science, a popular trend in new media and where her work is strongly placed and she is kind of the Queen Bee. This area of artistic development takes arts usefulness out of the realm of visual pleasure and positions it in the world of science and experimentation. This analytical inquiry by way of quirky art projects seems to allow some type of “value” in a post-post modern vision of art.
Natalie’s entire presentation had the air of car salesman to it, trying hard to convince you of the ideas behind her unusual projects. Her ideas sounded interesting, but it was hard to judge how successful they are as individual/collected artworks, as the documentation requires considerable notation to know what is going on. Even Natalie herself seemed to indicate that the public at large has had a hard time knowing how to approach her work without further instruction. Her green roof work at Postmaster has an interesting premise, but a little too cutesy at times, using exaggerated concepts (How long will it take for a plastic toy to degrade? A wedding dress?) to make points that are rather easy.
Though my instinctual bias has been to be a bit dismissive of works like this, something in her presentation lightened my approach to art/science. So strongly tied to performance/conceptual art of the last century, perhaps it is still just the gesture of art/science that is the point of the work rather actual pieces themselves, with awareness and small interactions always at the forefront of meaning.
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