kurimanzutto’s ‘TITAN’ Wants You to Look at Art in Plain Sight

With its political turmoil and pandemic lockdowns, 2020 has been a banner year for text-based works and street art, to which a partially depopulated and boarded-up Manhattan has provided a stark backdrop. Organized by Damián Ortega and Bree Zucker, kurimanzutto’s ‘TITAN’ – an outdoor exhibition staged in phone booths on Sixth Avenue that are due to be replaced by wi-fi kiosks next year – is well suited to a moment when guards seem to outnumber visitors at the Museum of Modern Art half a block away. 

The panels of these now-obsolete booths feature poster reproductions of works by 12 artists, including Hans Haacke, Zoe Leonard and Cildo Meireles, among others. I saw ‘TITAN’ on 7 November, just minutes before CNN called the US presidential election for Joe Biden. The timing was propitious given that Glenn Ligon’s trio of works – Synecdoche (For Byron Kim) (2018), Aftermath (2020) and Red Hands #2 (1996) – features the date 3 November 2020 on one end of the booth and, on the other, 4 November 2020 (the day of and the day after the election). The works feel particularly vulnerable on the street. A promotional sticker for the far-right, conspiracy-theory website InfoWars had been affixed to the centre of Aftermath. Jackhammers pounded a few feet away. Behind, an advertisement for a salad read: ‘YOUR VOICE. YOUR VOTE. YOUR MEAL. Introducing the Poll Bowl.’

During the hour or so that I meandered among the booths, not a single passerby seemed to notice any of the works. Hal Fischer’s ‘Gay Semiotics’ (1977), from his series evoking the lost world of pre-AIDS urban cruising, could be read as fashion ads. Despite this, the works in ‘TITAN’ reward the curious flâneur who takes the time to engage. Renée Green’s booth reads: ‘AFTER THE CRISIS’ and ‘AFTER YOU FINISH YOUR WORK’. Taken from the artist’s Space Poem #5 (Years & Afters) (2015), the words feel apt for these dark days with no decisive end in sight.

'TITAN' is on view in New York City through 3 January 2020.

_{Main image: Yvonne Rainer, EXCERPTS FROM APOLLO’S DIARY, WRITTEN DURING HIS LAST VISIT TO EARTH FROM MOUNT OLYMPUS, 2020, installation view, 'TITAN',  kurimanzutto, New York City. Courtesy: the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York; photograph: PJ Rountree}