Pepon Osorio, "The Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?)," Detail, 1993. Mixed medium installation.

NYC 1993 is a baroque catalogue: a kind of “greatest hits” of high and low New York art. The impressive roster of artists pack every floor of the New Museum, spilling out into the side stairwells. The art in the show can be called “good,” absolutely, but we are supposed to understand this already; its perceived worth is why it was selected. As the exhibition’s catalogue specifies, the show is comprised of either art that was popular in 1993 or work from that time by artists who gained notoriety thereafter.

NYC 1993 fixates on context. It displaces works from their original orientation, arranging them in co-informative groupings within the contemporary museum’s framework. The vast majority of pieces are accompanied by informational plaques about the work’s genesis and history. Wandering through what felt like a maze of “good art”, I started getting hung up on reading every plaque, pressured against the danger of not considering the work “completely.” Unable to simply consider the work aesthetically, I was afraid I would miss something. This terror of “missing something” haunts this exhibition’s project in culling together a variety of cultural parts in the service of getting the whole picture – or at least a distilled image – of whatever “1993” means.

Alex Bag, "Untitled (Spring 94)," 1993. Video, sound, color; 30 min.

Much of the content in NYC 1993 originally performed a deep cultural incision. Cheryl Donegan’s Head is a short video of the artist sensually licking up milk out of a gaping hole in a bright green jug and spitting it onto the pink wall of her studio. Adjacent from this video, Lutz Bacher’s My Penis is a looped video clip from the rape trial testimony of William Kennedy Smith, in which he must eternally repeat the words “I did have my penis,” wincing. These concentrated acts of subversion become sterilized against the white walls of the Museum. Though their content remains intact, these videos feel censored as they are relegated to the realm of dated relic. The context of the museum forecloses the possibility of shock, and thus of subversive interpretation.

Karen Kilimnik’s video piece Heathers is presented on a small video monitor in one of the museum’s stairwells. She filmed a television, re-recording, slowing down, freeze-framing and rewinding original footage from Heathers, a 1988 cult film about teen culture and social rebellion. Kilimnik gratuitously re-works some of the film’s most emotionally taut moments. Across from Kilimnik’s installation, Todd Haynes’ image sourcebook for the film Safe sits open on a pedestal to be leafed through by viewers. The film itself is nowhere to be found. We are saturated by the imagery surrounding a moment: that which romanticizes, embellishes and fabricates it. These source images (abandoned gas stations; a desert sunset) signify the artistic product of the film itself as they stand in for its absent body.

The museum’s top floor features a wall of Samsung televisions looping a constant feed of events that punctuated the cultural progression of the titular year. For all its interest in the important “moments” of the featured year, NYC 1993 seems most concerned with the representation of history rather than the history itself. Being enveloped in reminders of cultural memory provides an emotional feedback in which we can revel, as personal memories of the recent past are integrated with the socially significant. We feel a kind of personal validation, as if some kind of historical weight can be afforded to our collective fantasies about what has happened and what continues to happen to our lives.

Matthew Barney, "Drawing Restraint 7," 1993. Installation with three video monitors, six high-abuse fluorescent lighting fixtures, enamel on steel, and internally lubricated plastic.

Gregg Bordowitz‘s Fast Trip, Long Drop, an experimental autobiography about the artist’s battle with AIDS, is a salient example of how this re-working of personal history might stop feeling simply masturbatory and transcend into an empowering political position. Bordowitz describes his despair in living while slowly dying from a condition that to this day is largely ignored and stigmatized. In one interview, he relates a rage fantasy he has about picking up a prostitute just so he can infect him with AIDS. Bordowitz explains, desperately, “I need to feel that my fantasies still have power. If our fantasies cease to be compelling, even to us, then we’ve lost.” Bordowitz’s feverishly real video confession is one of the few moments in the show that marks how essential this personal fabrication of history can be for daily survival.

NYC 1993 is a show persistently informed by the shadow of the original. Nostalgia itself is defined by a necessary mutation of the subject. Through the exhibition’s comprehensive range of art, a variety of precious moments are extended, chopped and screwed into a new past: one that was never actually experienced. There was a past, but the past that we wistfully recollect and embellish never existed. Rather than desiring the past we had, we long for the one we remember. NYC 1993 charters this uncanny valley, glossing it over so that we might move more smoothly between fetishistic and collective re-imaginings, surfing the fluid chain between the then and now.

NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star is on view at the New Museum through May 26, 2013.

Karen Kilimnik, Installation view at 303 Gallery, New York 2011.

Karen Kilimnik’s current show at 303 Gallery in Chelsea is refreshingly spare and conceptually tight. Centered on a multimedia installation from 1989 titled The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers, the show also includes a few drawings from the late ‘80s and a handful of paintings and photographs from 2011. The disparate elements on view gel to create a sort of mini-opera, complete with a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Right before you can scream “kitsch!” the show stakes the claim that performing arts-style drama is relevant in contemporary fine art, and it’s utterly convincing (unless you hate Sofia Coppola and Black Swan, then don’t bother, and p.s. you’re boring).

Karen Kilimnik, Master Hare, 3rd Lord Grantham 2011.

Carrying much of the dramatic weight here is the audio track in the Avengers installation. Re-mastered to be louder and clearer than the original, the track includes snippets of Madonna, Haydn, and the Rolling Stones, among others. It weaves its way into your experience, tying it in with a mood that could be described as “retro-sinister.” Apparently, the installation is based on a particularly saucy and controversial episode of the British cult classic spy TV series by the same name — but you don’t really need to know that to be drawn into the work. Unlike many installations that still feature the stultifying Bill Viola “art hum,” (a.k.a. pretentiously creepy mouth breathing sounds), Kilimnik understands the power of a good soundtrack. The audio, which is at turns catchy, ambient and suspenseful, lends a bit of drama to a trio of fairly pedestrian full moon photos, and overall imbues the show with a dynamic narrative that would otherwise be absent.

Karen Kilimnik, The Hellfire Club episode of the Avengers, 1989, mixed media Installation view at 303 Gallery, New York, 2011

The simplistic term “Scatter Art”, for which Kilimnik became known at the outset of her career, fails to describe how varied and formally acute The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers really is. Despite the staging and use of prop-like materials, Kilimnik knows how to throw stuff around in a way that feels way more considered than clusterfucked.  For instance, a faint white chalk drawing of an Edwardian manor on black paper ever-so-gently peels away from the black wall. A black velvet curtain on the same wall leads to nowhere, casually adding an unseen dimension.  Plastic axes and Halloween-grade cobwebs are manipulated in a way that transcends a haunted house aesthetic without stripping them of their store-bought oomph.  Although it might sound corny, a group of photos, Xeroxes, empty picture frames and shards of glass flesh out what is an immersive theatrical experience.

Karen Kilimnik, The Family in Scotland, 2011.

Few artists assimilate such disparate personal fetishes into their art as seamlessly as Kilimnik does.  In any given piece, she implicates widespread historical eras, painterly techniques, and psychological states.  The Ragamuffin of Kiddington Hall is as fey and dashing as any Fragonard, but with a touch of Brit rock attitude. Her drawings, which take their cues from advertising and employ a speedy illustrative touch, are impossible to date. They have a ‘60s vibe that looks simultaneously current, yet they were actually made in 1989.  Kilimnik’s signature knack for turning animal portraits into fetching character studies is also present in dog and cat paintings that are both fragile and endearing.

Karen Kilimnik, entre acte photo, 2011.

In essence, this show seems to be about the fleeting nature of… well, nature. It’s almost like if you were to stare at some of the works too long, they might dash off the wall or fade away like a passing trend. Kilimnik can be equally hard to pin down. According to the current issue of Interview magazine, she recently relocated to Montana from her longtime home in the Philadelphia suburbs. Who knows, maybe this accounts for the spaciousness of the installation. A full moon photo called My Walk in the Woods at Night underscores the noir vibe that prevails in this show, in lieu of her usual regally saccharine interior worlds. This time we’re outside, sort of… under the chandelier-lit night sky.