“How Soon Is Now?”

Dulce Pinzon, Cecilia

Photograph: Courtesy Dulce Pinzon and The Bronx Museum of the Arts

In its 28th year, Artist in the Marketplace (AIM), the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ career-building program for emerging artists, is sending off its latest class with an exhibition titled “How Soon Is Now?” AIM enrolls 36 students a year, just six percent of those who apply. Most arrive with art degrees, and this unusual postgraduate night school tutors them in the practicalities of copyright law, taxes and marketing.

Like any cyclical program, AIM varies from class to class. There’s something uniquely exciting about the evaluation of a season’s latest trends (curator Erin Riley-Lopez is this edition’s arbiter). But a weak show can replace that exuberance with lethargy and cynicism, and this one is a true buzzkill. “How Soon Is Now?” is a plethora of flimsy Conceptual pieces dominating a space that has often seen better.

AIM is always uneven, but this year a critical mass of the work looks undeveloped and even amateurish. Negar Ahkami presents the only large-scale painting, The Birth of Pattern, but it’s a poorly executed mash-up—Frida Kahlo meets Judy Chicago in Persia. The video Sing-A-Long #1 (when a man and a woman listen to “when a man loves a woman” and they don’t know each other) by Rä di Martino unfolds exactly as described, with no more intellectual grist than its title provides. Two futuristic installations, Kelli Miller’s The True Believer (stacks of silver televisions on green carpet) and Si Jae Byun’s Catch (an inflated plastic environment encasing a monitor) lean so powerfully on art-school clichés that they stymie the success of promising videos. (The Bronx Museum makes matters worse for artists who use sound, providing headphones so poor that they compromise the work the institution wishes to promote.)

The few highlights stand out. Brendan Carroll’s wall of type-inscribed Polaroids is flecked with short texts that declare their independence from the images to which they’re attached. On a photograph of a brick wall, a couch and two odd lights resembling eyes, he’s typed, HE WROTE TO DO LISTS, AND SURFED THE NET FOR JAPANESE PORNO. HIS MOTHER CALLED; on another, a close-up of an advertisement, I HAVE GIRL HANDS­—TINY, DELICATE, SMOOTH. I STARTED THERAPY FOR THE TWENTIETH TIME TODAY. As in the photo pages of a biography, every caption suggests a narrative continued elsewhere.

Cosme Herrera, Frost

Photograph: Courtesy Cosme Herrera and The Bronx Museum of the Arts

Nearby, Irys Schenker’s A House is made up of rickety cardboard interiors. If her miniature sets greatly overemphasize their modest materials, they also offer a few good moments, including a patterned floor, carefully carved out, and a vantage point from a window onto a landscape photograph on the wall behind. These small corners of the show spark the hopeful feeling that some of the artists here are gathering strength and evolving in interesting ways.

Though “How Soon Is Now?” is just as much about the art of the present moment as more prominent midcareer showcases like the Whitney Biennial are, it doesn’t mimic their increasingly hectic form. The galleries are less crowded, and the works largely self-contained. One unavoidable effect of the growth of those major group surveys is a wider familiarity with contemporary work in all its proliferating forms: The art here will look familiar to even casual viewers. That in itself isn’t a problem—knowing an artist’s influences can be helpful—but because most of AIM’s students trail so far behind their influences, that information is of limited value.

Any number of recent behind-the-scenes changes might have affected this year’s show, but the reduction of seminars by Jackie Battenfield, a veteran teaching artist whose work is at the heart of the AIM program, must have been a hit. Battenfield is taking time off to work on a book tentatively titled The Artist’s Career Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love. It’s tempting to think her presence would have curtailed a few ill-advised choices, even just in presentation­ (the redundant display of artists’ statements alongside work, and new exhibition catalogs, reconceived in a disposable-looking glossy magazine format).

Though AIM’s goal is to help students transition into the marketplace, “How Soon Is Now?” has a more academic feel than some of its predecessors, as if the participants were still hanging on to the comforts of graduate school. The museum environment is a shock to their work, just as their work will be to museum audiences unprepared for both the show’s unusual developmental role and a bad year’s selection. But with an economic downturn threatening to make universities better sources of income than the market, maybe the artists’ attachment to the academy is wise.