Nathaniel Mellors: Progressive Rocks
The fantastical and wryly comical videos, sculptures, and installations by Los Angeles– and Amsterdam-based artist Nathaniel Mellors (b. 1974, Doncaster, UK) employ absurdist satire to incisively critique morality, national identity, religion, and power structures in contemporary society.
Conflating narrative tropes and methods from television sitcoms, theater, science fiction, mythology, and anthropology, Mellors writes the scripts for each of his projects, which he also directs, edits, and produces. His raucous films feature a book-eating creature named “The Object” who literally digests a family’s library in Ourhouse (2010–ongoing); a Neanderthal in perpetual free-fall over the San Joaquin Valley in Neanderthal Container, (2014); and two messianic beings, in the form of a cardboard box and a giant egg, who attempt to make sense of a culture that they created millions of years prior in The Aalto Natives (2017, in collaboration with Erkka Nissinen, originally conceived for the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale). For his exhibition at the New Museum, Mellors will create a new environment including video projection and animatronic sculpture.
2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage
“Songs for Sabotage,” the fourth New Museum Triennial, questions how individuals and collectives around the world might effectively address the connection of images and culture to the forces that structure our society.
Together, the artists in “Songs for Sabotage” propose a kind of propaganda, engaging with new and traditional media in order to reveal the built systems that construct our reality, images, and truths. The exhibition amounts to a call for action, an active engagement, and an interference in political and social structures, and will bring together works across mediums by approximately thirty artists from nineteen countries, the majority of whom are exhibiting in the United States for the first time.
“Songs for Sabotage” explores interventions into cities, infrastructures, and the networks of everyday life, proposing objects that might create common experience. The exhibition takes as a given that these structures are linked to the entrenched powers of colonialism and institutionalized racism that magnify inequity. Through their distinct approaches, the artists in “Songs for Sabotage” offer models for dismantling and replacing the political and economic networks that envelop today’s global youth. Invoking the heightened role of identity in today’s culture, they take on the technological, economic, and material structures that stand in the way of collectivity.
These artists are further connected by both their deep engagements with the specificity of local context and a critical examination—and embrace—of the internationalism that links them. Their works range widely in medium and form, including painted allegories for the administration of power, sculptural proposals to renew (and destroy) monuments, and cinematic works that engage the modes of propaganda that influence us more and more each day. Viewed in ensemble, these works provide models for reflecting upon and working against a system that seems doomed to failure.