The New Museum Returns, but Humans Are Left Behind
The New Museum knows that most viewers will be of two minds about “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” a blockbuster exhibition meant to crown the museum’s reopening after a sixty-thousand-square-foot expansion. With more than seven hundred objects, spread across three floors, the show is designed to both stimulate and fatigue you. The official remit is “what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes.” In practice, this means a madhouse of multimedia rooms, packed with gurgling videos and useless machines and humanoid bodies. There are bodies made from scrap metal, bodies pierced with tentacles and affixed with screens for nipples and eyes, bodies broken down for parts, and walls lined with images of skin. In some rooms, paintings are hung salon style. In others, objects are suspended from the ceiling, mounted above doorways, or made to float via balloon. As if to poke fun at the show’s size and ambition, the curators have installed in the lobby a visual joke by the artist Ryan Gander: a tiny animatronic mouse.
Still, if we’re looking for “what it means to be human” today, the exhibition isn’t a bad place to start. It operates as a kind of encyclopedic junk pile, with hundreds of discarded visions of how technology might save—or estrange—us from ourselves. The first piece inside the galleries, a 1967 painting by the German artist Maina-Miriam Munsky, depicts a schematic outline of a cube struggling to contain a mass of dreamy flesh. It reads as a diagram of human folly: for centuries, we’ve tried to rationalize and control ourselves, only to be undermined by our excess and unreason. The show continually wobbles between these two poles. In the same room as the Munsky, in a section titled “Reproductive Futures,” a pack of Dadaists and Surrealists represents unreason, while the marvels of the rational are seen in a 1927 video of stickleback fish eggs by Jean Painlevé, a French photographer and filmmaker who trained in biology. In between are a bunch of mongrel appliances that leave both humans and technology worse for wear, like a computer, in a 2024 photo by Sara Deraedt, that seems to be giving birth to a wet child. The entire logic of the exhibition—with science and art, fresh names and familiar ones, lumped together—is here in miniature. Your job is to pick and choose your way through the heap.
The time line of the show starts roughly with the First World War, when new ideas about the human flourished around the killing fields of the Somme and Verdun. A series of lithographs from the nineteen-twenties, by the Soviet artist El Lissitzky, presents the cast of an opera as geometric puppets made of steely widgets, with Bolshevik-red organs—the body a cog readied for mass mobilization. A capitalist alternative is found in the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, an engineering couple who fastened little lights to workers’ hands and tracked their movements with long-exposure photographs, hoping to reduce motion and increase profit. Often, modernists didn’t have a coherent vision of the body so much as a criticism of it. John Heartfield and George Grosz’s “The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild” (1920) is a child-size mannequin spliced with odd prosthetics: a revolver for an arm, a set of teeth for genitals, a light bulb for a head, a fork for . . . well, I’m not exactly sure. The piece is half statue, half practical joke. The human becomes a palimpsest of all sorts of contemporary events and psychological possibilities: the soldier blown apart by mortar shells, the worker alienated from his own limbs, the man fearful of a woman’s dentition, the brain replaced by an electrical device. It can be bittersweet, the way a body is rarely just a body.
I almost missed “The Middle-Class Philistine” because of a Technicolor demon wriggling in the air nearby. “The Fireside Angel (Fourth Version)” (2019), by Cyprien Gaillard, is a hologram adapted from a 1937 Max Ernst painting, recalling Marshall McLuhan’s point that the content of a medium is always another medium. Less well known is McLuhan’s theory that art operates as a radar system for detecting disasters before they happen. I expected to see some warning signs in “New Humans,” but had trouble finding them. Hito Steyerl’s “Mechanical Kurds” (2025) shows footage of Kurdish refugees in Iraq who make poverty wages tagging and classifying drone images for Amazon (distinguishing whether something is a weapon, say, or a carton of milk); Sidsel Meineche Hansen has a video of a sex doll unboxing itself. The exhibition doesn’t offer glimpses of the future so much as glimpses of a world you already inhabit but would rather not.
The centerpiece of the expansion, which was led by the architects Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with the firm Cooper Robertson, is an atrium that snaps right onto the side of the flagship building. I can’t say it was worth the renovation’s eighty-two-million-dollar price tag, but the space is brilliantly subtle. It works like a snorkel for the museum, giving it a new column of air for the vertical flow of traffic to the galleries, which have basically doubled in size. Climbing the atrium’s stairs, you can look out the glass façade, onto the Bowery, or squint at the mesh panels that flank you, shimmering with green light and exposing the building’s internal supports. Architecture like this, which reveals its structure while producing its effects, can make a museum feel slightly more humane.
Unfortunately, when you reach the third floor, the show starts to flail. To poke holes in the universalist pretensions of Cold War-era “human rights,” with its use of the white Western male as a stand-in for the species, the curators try to tackle post-colonialism, Pan-Africanism, plants, animals, and extraterrestrials in one swoop. This results in some head-scratching decisions, like putting a closed copy of Alain Locke’s “The New Negro” (1927) in a vitrine, along with issues of Fire!! and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Crisis, which sit there like mute tokens of Black intellectual ferment. Nearby are paintings of animal-human hybrids by the Danish artist Ovartaci and a 2022 video environment by Christopher Kulendran Thomas, which includes what appears to be footage of Tamil independence fighters and a deepfake of Kim Kardashian. If the framework of an exhibition is so baggy that it can accommodate any piece of art, with nothing resembling a principle of selection, it risks deteriorating into spectacle. Part of me wonders whether that’s the point.
Toward the end of the show, you’ll enter the “Hall of Robots,” which is sort of like a Universal Studios Hollywood tour, if it took place in a large intestine. More than a dozen robots and creatures are scattered on a pink carpet. Behold a model of the wrinkly protagonist from Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.,” or H. R. Giger’s alien from “Alien 3,” or a robot jogging in place with dumbbells. The most disturbing figure is a blond mannequin who seems to be hanging herself with a mirror instead of a noose. She has one bionic arm, wears silver Nikes and a sweatband, and is plugged into an electrical outlet, causing her right hand to periodically twitch. Somehow, “Glass Man” (1935), on loan from the German Hygiene Museum, in Dresden, with all of his internal organs visible, ends up being the most wholesome thing in the room.
The Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser once argued that “the lens”—from the telescope to the camera—was partly to blame for the decline of humanism. It allowed us to make large things that were far away seem close, and small things that were close seem large. It warped our sense of place in the universe. I can imagine a version of “New Humans” that would have tried to repair things, rather than cataloguing the various ways we’ve become shrinking adjuncts to our machines. But maybe the future no longer belongs to art. What is the subhead of the show—“Memories of the Future”—if not an elegy? ♦