Smooth and Safe at Pier 94
Installation view of the Armory show.
These days contemporary-art fairs tend to travel in franchised packs. A large successful fair spawns parasite copycat fairs, and before you know it, you’ve got an art-fair fair.
New York is having one this weekend. The Armory Show, now in its 10th incarnation, is back, accompanied by nine younger, smaller, less prestigious fairs, the most ever. Those who make their way through all of them should be honored — like the seven-summits climbers who scale the highest peak on each of the world’s continents — or medicated for obsessive-compulsive disorder.
At Michael Stevenson, hats by Meschie Gaba.
Given a downwardly spiraling economy that no doubt will affect all aspects of the art world, fairs included, this situation may be temporary. But even without the falling dollar and nervous hedge funders, there is a point at which critical mass fosters inertia. There is nothing wrong with art fairs that fewer of them wouldn’t cure.
“Tool Table” by Thomas Hirschhorn
But the Armory Show goes down very smoothly, not unlike the Whitney Biennial or last summer’s Venice Biennale. An air of orderly professionalism pervades; outrageousness of any kind is rare. There are no cringe-inducing moments, although the cluttered, quasi-Rauschenbergian installation cooked up by Assume Vivid Astro Focus for the exterior of the V.I.P. Lounge comes close. And there is almost nothing that makes you stop in your tracks. Yes, there is the annual tape-’n’-things sculpture by Thomas Hirschhorn. This one, “Tool Table,” is, for a change, bloodless and cerebral: a sea of mannequin hands clutching de rigueur books (Nietzsche, Sartre, Thomas More) or tools (hammer, saw, trowel). It proves how much Mr. Hirschhorn’s work needs some form of sex or violence.
At Modern Institute’s booth, Jim Lambie is represented by this colorful wall.
The attraction of any art fair is that many kinds of art all talk at once, randomly, democratically, in a relatively direct way, unedited by museum curators, magazine editors, international exhibition commissioners or even art critics. Still, it is possible to string together different conversations. One concerns the persistence of painting or paintinglike surfaces, something that few museums seem willing to broach these days.
Chiho Aoshima’s mural
At Blum & Poe, Chiho Aoshima abandons her usual high-gloss surfaces to create a soft, cartoony, urban wrap-around mural on paper, melding photography and digital manipulation with clouds as old as Japanese screens. At Patrick Painter, Ivan Morley reiterates a mildly Abstract Expressionist composition (middle-period Guston) with thread, while Tim Berresheim uses ink-jet to print a frazzled, linear, computer-derived motif on wood.
Daphne Fitzpatrick at Bellwether
The nonpainting conversation is, of course, vociferous. At Bellwether, Daphne Fitzpatrick’s raw-wood ramp and gigantic copper-lined shoe create their own strange world, aided by Anne Hardy’s ambitious set-up photograph and Chihcheng Peng’s “Shadow Your Man,” a series of hilarious digital variations on a short sequence from Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock Jr.,” in which shoes figure prominently.
Michael Bauer at Hotel
At Patrick Painter Ivan Morley reiterates a mildly Abstract Expressionist composition (middle-period Guston) with thread, while Tim Berresheim uses ink-jet to print a frazzled linear motif, derived from computer manipulation, on wood. Hotel, a London gallery, has devoted its small, black-walled booth to the elegantly Goth paintings of Michael Bauer, as well as his sculptures.
Barbara Probst at Murray Guy
At Murray Guy, a dozen large images by the German photographer Barbara Probst show the same woman photographed at the same instant from all angles, stretching one second into three-dimensional space, like Cubism.
Dominic McGill at Derek Eller
At the Derek Eller booth, the manic master draftsman Dominic McGill meditates on modernism past and future, while adding collage to his arsenal in “Moloch.” In this enormous, new, volcanic drawing-collage, the words of Baudrillard, Santayana, George W. Bush and many others collide and combust around a fiery newsreel-like cluster of magazine images, all red. Their shape is based on the flailing monster at the center of Max Ernst’s “Fireside Angel,” which was inspired by the rise of Franco. Mr. McGill has mustered a commensurately apocalyptic tone. He makes the end seem near, and for much more than just art fairs. N.Y. Times
Add a comment