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Debris and immobility.

Article Excerpt
A ticker tape of statistical figures races to keep pace with the cataclysms pulsing nonstop through the landscape, through its inhabitants. A sharp rise in the number of limbs lost by soldiers this month. The population of New Orleans cut in half nearly overnight. "That city could be bulldozed," responds the leader of the US Congress. Roll titles: Extreme Makeover, Shock and Awe Edition. Tah-dum! After twenty years, suddenly a white majority presides over the city council.

Call it Risk Society, Liquid Modernity, Disorganized Capitalism, Flexible Accumulation, or plain ol' Shit Happens. Only eight years in and already we're said to live in "a headless century." (1) "There isn't time or distance enough to perpetuate monuments .... No absolutes are reliable and no hierarchies are consistent, so that which seems most a part of the world in its freshness, rawness, and anxiety trumps the autopsies of the acceptable and the negotiable." (2) Sounds pretty cool, or so you'd think from thumbing through the essays and pictures in Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, the catalogue accompanying the inaugural exhibition of New York's freshly relocated New Museum. Assembled here is yet more testimony regarding the rise to prominence today of a new aesthetic, what Philip Dodd, the director of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, back in 2003 called "bedroom art"--"grubby, less designed, do-it-yourself work." (3) Besides London and New York, much the same case has been made by recent shows in Washington, DC (The Uncertainty of Objects and...

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