“Ginger Kittens,” an installation by Diana Thater, 1994
Ah, the ever-shortening nostalgia cycle. No sooner have we gotten a big 1980s museum show out of our Texas blood and now here comes the touring exhibition, Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, to the Blanton in Austin in early 2016. Come As You Are originated at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey under the curatorial direction of MAM’s Alexandra Schwartz, and is on display there now.
You can guess some of the major players in the show: Matthew Barney, Doug Aitken, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Elizabeth Peyton, Ellen Gallagher, et. al. (actually about 40 others. Frankly, this work does not feel old enough to historicize but the wheels keep turning). According to the Blanton, the is “the first major American museum survey to historicize the art of this pivotal decade,” though NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star took place at the New Museum in NYC in 2013 and covered some of the same ground, and Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the ’90s took place at LA MoCA in the actual ’90s. Etc. Nonetheless, there are some good names here. It opens at the Blanton in February 2016 and runs through part of May of that year.
