New Museum Unveils Expanded Facilities and Inaugural Exhibition

The New Museum has officially reopened following renovations overseen by Shohei Shigematsu, Rem Koolhaas, and the design firm Cooper Robertson. The inaugural exhibition, titled “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” offers a comprehensive look at what it means to be human in the modern technological age.

Zachary Fine reviews the show, describing it as an encyclopedic collection of visions regarding technology's role in either saving or alienating humanity. The exhibition constantly navigates the tension between rational control and human excess.

Exploring the Poles of Reason and Unreason

The opening piece, Maina-Miriam Munsky’s 1967 painting, illustrates this conflict. It depicts a cube struggling to contain flesh, symbolizing centuries of attempts to rationalize the self, only to be undermined by irrationality.

This duality is evident throughout the galleries. The section “Reproductive Futures” juxtaposes the unreason represented by Dadaists and Surrealists with the rational marvels presented by Jean Painlevé. Painlevé, a French photographer and biologist, is featured for his 1927 video showcasing stickleback fish eggs.

Other works highlight the detrimental effects of technology on humanity. Sara Deraedt’s 2024 photograph, for instance, shows a computer seemingly giving birth to a wet infant. The exhibition’s core logic—blending science and art, established and new names—is encapsulated in these diverse pairings.

Historical Context: Modernism and the Body

The timeline of the exhibition begins around the First World War, a period when new concepts of humanity emerged amidst the devastation of battles like the Somme and Verdun. Early modernist visions often critiqued the body rather than presenting a coherent view of it.

Early 20th Century Visions of Mobilization and Profit

Soviet artist El Lissitzky presented lithographs from the 1920s featuring opera casts as geometric puppets. These figures, constructed from steely widgets with Bolshevik-red organs, represented the body as a component ready for mass mobilization.

Conversely, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth offered a capitalist alternative. This engineering couple used long-exposure photography, attaching lights to workers’ hands to track movements, aiming to increase profit by reducing motion.

John Heartfield and George Grosz’s piece, “The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild,” serves as a half-statue, half-practical joke. It features a child-size mannequin modified with odd prosthetics, including a revolver for an arm and a light bulb for a head.

These works illustrate the human body as a palimpsest reflecting contemporary events: the shell-shocked soldier, the alienated worker, and the fear of technology replacing the brain.

Contemporary Warnings and Discomfort

The show also features Cyprien Gaillard’s “The Fireside Angel,” a hologram derived from a 1937 Max Ernst painting. This piece evokes Marshall McLuhan’s idea that content is always another medium, and that art acts as a disaster detection radar.

However, finding clear warnings proved difficult. Hito Steyerl’s “Mechanical Kurds” displays footage of Iraqi refugees tagging drone images for Amazon for low wages. Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s video shows a sex doll unboxing itself. The exhibition presents glimpses of a world already inhabited, rather than distant futures.

Critique of the Upper Floors

The exhibition reportedly begins to falter on the third floor. Curators attempted to address post-colonialism, Pan-Africanism, and non-human entities to challenge the universalist claims of Cold War “human rights,” which centered on the white Western male.

This broad scope led to questionable curatorial choices. For example, a closed copy of Alain Locke’s “The New Negro,” alongside issues of Fire!! and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Crisis, are displayed as “mute tokens.”

Nearby, works include paintings of animal-human hybrids by Ovartaci and Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s 2022 video environment, which reportedly features Tamil independence fighters and a Kim Kardashian deepfake. Such a broad framework risks becoming spectacle if selection principles are absent.

The Hall of Robots

The conclusion of the show features the “Hall of Robots,” described as a disquieting experience. Over a dozen robots and creatures are scattered across a pink carpet, including models of E.T., H. R. Giger’s alien from “Alien 3,” and a robot jogging in place.

The most unsettling figure is a blond mannequin appearing to hang herself with a mirror. This figure has a bionic arm, wears athletic gear, and twitches as it is plugged into an electrical outlet.

In contrast, the “Glass Man,” loaned from the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden and displaying visible internal organs, is noted as the most wholesome object in the room.

The review concludes by referencing philosopher Vilém Flusser, who blamed lenses (telescope, camera) for warping humanity’s sense of place. The exhibition catalogs our decline as adjuncts to machines, suggesting that the subtitle, “Memories of the Future,” acts as an elegy.