"PrayWay" on exhibition at the New Museum, created by Slavs and Tatars. Photo Credit: www.slavsandtartars.com

Despite walking hastily from Prince Street and Broadway to the New Museum, I caught the white facade of the museum from two blocks away. The building looks like six boxes of varied sizes precariously stacked up on top of one another. But it’s not only the exterior that is raw. Inside, the 2012 New Museum Triennial, “The Ungovernables,”reflects the look of the museum – although not so much because of the works themselves (which are impressive when you understand them,) but because of its ambitious intention to allow 34 artists to be truly unrestrained, and because of its intriguing layout.

Once inside, I went floor to floor with my fellow Teen Reviewers and Critics, our instructor and a member of the museum who gave us a tour and noted some clever approaches to the layout of the works of the exhibit and the array of mediums.

On the fourth floor, the centerpiece, Argentine artist Adrian Villar Rojas’s floor-ceiling sculpture “A Person Loved Me,” makes use of the high ceiling. The towering sculpture looks like a fungus or something from a science fiction film. It is made of cement and clay, with clay applied to pieces of polystyrene and will be demolished at the museum (imagine the floor in ruins!).

Next, our “tour guide” led us down a staircase, where the exhibit continued (who knew!). One at a time, we walked inside a small space inside the wall and looked up to try to see the ceiling. But the view was obstructed by objects hanging from the ceiling. Moreover, we heard blasting music from the floor below that provided a hint at one of the works that we were going to see next.

But before we saw the film, we spotted an unexpected area to lie down and hang out on in a museum: a rug called “PrayWay,” made by the group Slavs and Tatars.

Suprisingly, unlike most museums, where film is shown in an open area, the New Museum has an enclosed area to show one of its films. Hassan Khan’s video of two Egyptian men dancing is shown in a very dark room, which provides viewers a different kind of experience and interaction with the work. After watching the ten-minute long video, words buzzed in our minds: brotherhood, competition, family, love. We were desperate for explanations.

And Hu Xiaoyuan’s “Wood,” pieces of lumber are covered on one side with sheets of white-lacquered silk, Rita Ponce de Leon, ‘Acepto que nada es mio’, 120 ink drawings on paper, and a projection of Venn diagrams were no less academic. One actually needs to read about the influences of the works so one can even grasp what one thinks they dealing with!

However, most works in the exhibition such as Pratchaya Phinthong’s sculpture of Zimbabwe money and Jonathas de Andrade’s “Ressaca Tropical (Tropical Hangover)” ‘s timeline expressed their theme of the past, the present, and the future clearly. And I still left the New Museum feeling refreshed.  Perhaps it was because I loved the artists’ explosive and unrestrained approaches to personal expression that resulted works varying from large-scale sculptures and installations to video art to paintings or it was because I simply loved how I viewed art in a stack of boxes.