The New Museum’s ‘New Humans’ Reckons With Human-Machine Relations in the Workplace
ARTnews reviews “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” the inaugural exhibition at the recently renovated New Museum, describing it as a four-floor presentation of more than 700 works that examines human-machine relations through the lens of labor. The article frames the show with a Mesopotamian creation myth about gods creating humans to take over arduous work, connecting that narrative to artworks that depict humans being reshaped to animate modern “worker-machines.” A key section titled “Mechanical Ballets” references Oskar Schlemmer’s Das mechanische Ballett (1923) and Das triadische Ballett (1922), linking early 20th-century performance to industrial-era anxieties after World War I. The review highlights John Heartfield and George Grosz’s 1920 sculpture The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture) as an example of a body refashioned into an instrument of war and commodity production.
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This story was covered in Restitution Reckonings and Museums on the Brink