I WISH I DIDN&rsquo;T&nbsp;feel as conflicted as I do about &ldquo;Trigger: Gender As a&nbsp;Tool and a Weapon,&rdquo; the New Museum&rsquo;s scattershot, building-filling group show about &ldquo;gender beyond the binary.&rdquo; There is plenty to admire in the show, organized by Johanna Burton, including new artists worth celebrating and the greater political cause: to cry havoc at the rising tides of hatred and sketch out the new landscape of identity-driven, gender politics-inflected art. But &ldquo;Trigger&rdquo; does not ultimately deliver on that promise, mostly because it fails to showcase new forms of disruptive radicalism. For an exhibition about things &ldquo;blurred,&rdquo; &ldquo;trans,&rdquo; and not &ldquo;normative,&rdquo; &ldquo;Trigger&rdquo; is laden with art that too neatly fits into totally known and familiar lineages, namely, post-conceptualism of the&nbsp;1960s&nbsp;and &rsquo;70s. The result is that&mdash;much as I wished that it could be&mdash;&ldquo;Trigger&rdquo; cannot be rightly called a new Transavantgarde (after the explosive 1980s Italian art movement).It does have some very good and interesting work in it. There are at least a half-dozen artists in the show using fabric, collage, embroidery, and other malleable things to make art out of bits and pieces, so that &ldquo;Trigger&rdquo; exhibits a strong group of artists who indulge a fabulous Proustian drive to devour materials and processes in minutiae &mdash; including Ellen Lesperance&rsquo;s using super close-up pictures of knitted fabrics to make geometric drawings. Tschabalala Self, who is 27, makes black personages&mdash;I imagine some as randy gods&mdash;out of paint and fabric, sewn and collaged into portraits that could have been painted by the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi. Self&rsquo;s more material works echo a promising crop of other young painters who are doing similar crackling things in more painterly ways, including recent MacArthur-grant winner Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Toyin Ojih Odutola (whose current Whitney project sizzles), Louis Fratino, Alex Chaves, Nina Chanel Abney, and Amy Sherald, who was all but unknown when she was rightfully picked to paint Michelle Obama&rsquo;s official portrait. Meanwhile, back at &ldquo;Trigger,&rdquo; Leidy Churchman&rsquo;s hot-pink New Dawn Marsden Hartley Soutine combines Hartley&rsquo;s brawny 1940 masterpiece Madawaska&mdash;Acadian Light-Heavy and Soutine&rsquo;s flaming color. Christina Quarles makes a splash here with tightly composed, kaleidoscopically colored figurative painting. Ditto Vaginal Davis with her fetishistic friezelike portrait fragments painted using neon nail lacquer. Justin Vivian Bond&rsquo;s self portraits and wallpapered mise-en-sc&egrave;ne exude love and pathos. I covet both the Sadie Benning wood cutout paintings here.On the gnarlier, sculptural side of the tracks, there&rsquo;s Nayland Blake, resourceful and sometimes intellectually ornery, whose life-size bear-bison &ldquo;fursona&rdquo; is Blake&rsquo;s avatar in the furry community. The beaded remakes of Zulu masks by Curtis Talwst Santiago and Paul Mpagi Sepuya&rsquo;s porny self-portraits strike sparks. (Almost everything I&rsquo;ve seen by both of these emerging multi-style artists has caught my eye.) The lecture video by Gregg Bordowitz perfectly combines poetry and pedagogy. If you missed Simone Leigh&rsquo;s Afrofuturist performance at the opening, find it online.The showstopper is Mickalene Thomas&rsquo;s video installation of the artist sprawled naked like some black Ingres odalisque accompanied by an Eartha Kitt audio track talking about how easy it is to find a man to lie down with but how hard it is to find one to lift you up.That is all on the good and exciting side of the ledger. Yet at the same time that &ldquo;Trigger&rdquo; opens up discourse, it tightens aesthetic restrictions. And the show does feel narrow. Absent are the crazed paintings of Tabboo! (a.k.a. Stephen Tashjian, whose current Gordon Robichaux show delights); drag performance artist Kalup Linzy; Zackary Drucker&rsquo;s photographic muddying of gender; Matthew Weinstein&rsquo;s haunting fish videos; and Genesis P-Orridge, who lives outside the gender binary: S/he and h/er late wife, Lady Jaye, surgically altered their bodies to look alike. &ldquo;Barbarian&rdquo; artists like these remain at the gate. None of them fits any aesthetic status quo&mdash;but all hint at liberations of art, style, materials, bodies, gender, whatever &ldquo;I&rdquo; is, even society.Identity assertion is a pressing political cause, especially when it&rsquo;s practiced by those who have for so long been asked to hide the core of who they are. Or, worse, deny it. But identity alone does not great art make.The 1993 Whitney Biennial, which set so many future courses, featured identity-driven work from all over the map, but much of this work innovated formally, from artists like Fred Wilson, Coco Fusco, Renee Green, Lorna Simpson, Zoe Leonard, Andrea Fraser, Byron Kim, Gary Simmons, Jimmie Durham, Daniel J. Martinez, and Sadie Benning. &ldquo;Trigger&rdquo; &rsquo;s issues are the same, which is fine; but its forms are virtually unchanged, which isn&rsquo;t. &ldquo;Trigger&rdquo; has too much art whose main message is either &ldquo;I&rsquo;m beautiful because I&rsquo;m me&rdquo; or &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a great student of 1960s and &rsquo;70s art history.&rdquo;That lineage&mdash;and that leaning&mdash;weighs down &ldquo;Trigger.&rdquo; As with many shows these days, there&rsquo;s art here that mainly exists in the artist&rsquo;s head or in long-winded explanatory paragraphs. All this would be welcome if these works had more visual, formal, physical, material, imaginative, or conceptual originality. Just like the wider art world, then, &ldquo;Trigger&rdquo; features work deemed worthy because it&rsquo;s being done in a style or in the service of a cause already deemed worthy. Tropes like the darkened souk setting, disco ball, film loops of refracted light, and big empty stage have been in every show like this since 1980. We need to ask if it&rsquo;s productive to do shows that deconstruct or critique artistic power structures while buttressing aesthetic convention.And yet, still &hellip; Now that I&rsquo;ve offered my main criticism, I&rsquo;ll lay my &ldquo;Trigger&rdquo; cards on the table and say what I love about this show. First, forgive my local boosterism, but with New York real-estate squeezing artists hard, amen that almost two thirds of &ldquo;Trigger&rdquo; &rsquo;s artists work here. Our artists dearly need the support of local gallerists, critics, and curators.But my favorite thing about &ldquo;Trigger&rdquo; is that everything in it was made in the past ten years. That might not sound like anything, but it&rsquo;s a lot. Because amid this current political crisis, just when we need to be seeing how artists are reacting in the here and now, the art world remains in an extended, 40-year period where many curators, critics, and gallerists continue the grand project of correcting art history. This project was initiated beautifully by curators Marcia Tucker, Alanna Heiss, Okwui Enwezor, Thelma Golden, Catherine David, Massimiliano Gioni, and countless others&mdash;and brilliantly continued in the Obama years.This project can never be abandoned. But in this dire moment, the present calls to us. Even if artists are only making sewn portraits or responding to our ugly times by making beautiful things, we need to see them; the content of now will be in their work because they are working now. Yet numerous gallerists, critics, and curators are still allocating much time, money, and space to rediscovering unknown, under known, and deceased artists. Some of the art touted is deserving; some of it is not; most of it reinforces all the usual above mentioned dynastic lineages and artistic kinships. Thus, ironically, the aesthetic walls are closing, not opening.

Less Talk, More Shock

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