Bronx Calling, The First AIM Biennial: Profit and Loss

Is now introducing a new generation of emerging artists who participated in the 2011 AIM (Artists in the Marketplace) Program. Often, perhaps unsurprisingly, the work is a little too reflective of a marketplace that tends to muddle passion and bastardize ideas. When forced to commercialize work, there is an inclination to forget that art can be profitable and

The Bronx Museum show fills the lobby, galleries, and hallways with a smorgasbord of colorful works that fluctuate across a broad range of scale and media. Whatever the delights of variety, though, too many of the works rely on the sort of bland conceptualism that uses reasoning as a generative process, rather than an expressive tool. The result is an abundance of adequate metaphors, but rarely an impactful artwork. In one video, Nicky Enright shouts definitions of the word “inflammatory” in front of an enormous fire hose that spells “inflammatory”; it should say something, right?  The audio not only drowns out Julia Oldham’s adjacent video Antimatter Twin, but is layered so that it drowns out even itself. As if to reiterate [a point?], matchboxes with cartoon labels declaring “Rome was not BURNT in a day” fill a museum donation box on a pedestal. This work aspires to the ultimate Kosuthian hyperbolic oxymoron: he’s talking about forceful language, three times over, in the most innocuous language possible, without saying anything forceful. The blunt jumbling of symbols, a repeatedly-used tactic throughout the show, fails to transcend the sum of its parts.