Rashad Glover & Emily Eastridge
Cashin’ In
2006
Tilton Gallery
All's not fair in the world of Art Fairs...
Ben Davis makes obvious sports allusions via Artnet, 3/10/06, in
THE ARMORY BOWL
Art dealers can claim more stamina than athletes, though, since the Super Bowl lasts four hours and the Armory Show five days. The blitzkrieg of galleries that swamps New York's Piers 90 and 92, Mar. 9-13, 2006, means more art doing battle for the attention of more buyers surrounded by more events and more info, with hopefully more sales logged.
Critics are quick to note that this kind of overkill makes the notion of art appreciation at the fair a bit like trying on Sunday hats in a wind tunnel. The Armory's not the best place to go to see new work, either; the home galleries are better for viewing new art displayed in depth, at more considered length.
Still, as that great fan of contemporary art G.W.F. Hegel always liked to say, changes in quantity become changes in quality, so it’s worth puzzling out the quality of art proper to this level of spectacle. Among other things, the Armory's scale demands art that is grand and easily digestible, superficially complex, knowingly artificial and/or coolly fetishistic -- hence, the inclusion at multiple booths of Alex Katz (grand and easily digestible), Anselm Reyle (superficially complex), Jonathan Lasker (knowingly artificial) and Julian Opie (coolly fetishistic).
Left: Armory Show cofounder Paul Morris. Right: Collector and dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. Rhonda Lieberman does her best Cindy Adams for her Armory write-up in the latest Artforum Scene & Herd: 03.13.06:
Rich Relations
Last Friday, the first official day of the Armory Show, I earned the purple heart of art-schlepping, trekking all over town to gawk at cutting-edge tchotchkes and their human support system: the dealers, the artists, the merely curious, and most importantly, the collectors—supershoppers who are the target audience and, implicitly, the stars of this fancy trade show.
and then:
I had a Proustian moment [...]
before she:
settled into the groovy Artforum lounge area at the Armory to watch the relatively well-heeled crowd roam the white-cubicled trade-fair setting. "Who are these people anyway?"
Left: Creative Time curator and producer Peter Eleey and Artist Space curator Christian Rattemeyer. Right: Marilyn Minter with her billboard "Mud Bath."
Earlier, Brian Sholis reported on the opening (Scene & Herd, 3/10/06) in
Mid Drift
"A great swath of established galleries—reliable fair exhibitors elsewhere—is missing." So noted White Columns director Matthew Higgs, pinning down one of several ways in which this year's Armory Show is different from its predecessors; there are also significantly fewer booths and an increased number of one-artist presentations. Contrary to MoMA director Glenn Lowry's press-conference platitude about fairs offering a "nonhierarchical" view of art, this missing center accentuates a very real hierarchy: At or near the top, one finds blue-chip contemporary galleries occupying more square footage to exhibit fewer artists; at the other end of the scale, young galleries and nonprofits are crammed into Manhattan Mini Storage closets ("I can't stand anywhere without blocking something I want people to see," said Guild & Greyskhul's Sara VanDerBeek) or squeezed into hallways abutting bathrooms.
Among the holdouts are a number of New York dealers, perhaps the most talked-about subject during the Thursday afternoon lull between the arrival of the early-bird collectors, who showed up at noon along with the members of the press, and the evening's MoMA-benefiting vernissage, which offered staggered entry times beginning at 5:00 PM. Gone are Marian Goodman, Tanya Bonakdar (who participated in last month's ADAA fair), Luhring Augustine (ditto), and even relative newcomer Daniel Reich. Missing too was Barbara Gladstone, who sent out an e-mail press release for next month's Matthew Barney exhibition during the evening reception, signaling that it was business as usual down on Twenty-fourth Street.
Gladstone, Bonakdar, and Roland Augustine, all unencumbered, prowled the aisles with collectors David Teiger, Mickey Cartin, and Glenn Fuhrman; a posse from Miami including the Rubells, Rosa de la Cruz, and Craig Robins; Chicago-based museum patron Sara Szold and Londoner Anita Zabludowicz.[...]
Whereby Artnet's Charlie Finch opines (3/10/06):
Poster for "The Garden Party" at Deitch Projects, opening Mar. 9, 2006
This year I had tickets to the Wednesday night Whitney Biennial opening (aka "B" night) and bought two $250 passes to the Museum of Modern Art benefit at the Armory Show (7 pm dispensation). I didn't go to either. [...]
[...] the meta-reason, to use a cliché, is the sheer disconnectedness of the contemporary art world from reality. Jeffrey Deitch gave us a tour two days ago of his "Garden Party" installation in Soho. As young artists slaved away to concoct yet another disjointed hymn to Deitchland, Jeffrey pointed to a sucking wishing well by Olafur Eliasson in the floor, whose blue hue resembled what comes out of a Tidy Bowl dispenser.
"We're particularly privileged to have this in the show," Deitch intoned. But are we? Yesterday the United Nations predicted that Avian Flu may hit the U.S.A. in six months or less, simply as a function of seasonal changes of wind and water current. Not to get paranoid or anything, but shouldn't all the concerns of the wealthy elites, whether Bushies in Dubai or Bush-haters at the Armory, be taking a back seat in our consciousness at the moment, as they should have consistently since 9/11?
Journalists we've talked to claim that the Armory Show has finally "jumped the shark," and a glance at the copious "VIP calendar 2006" reveals something pathetic: galleries that would never have a shot at being included in Matthew Marks' fandango are hosting breakfasts and drinksfests in conjunction with the moneyfest. Have they no pride? Meanwhile sensible elitists such as Marks' close pal Barbara Gladstone, Luhring Augustine and hip satyr Daniel Reich pulled out of the Armory this year.
One thing I learned working two decades in Democratic Party politics is that John Kerry and George Bush have more in common with each other than you or me.
Getting sick of the Armory means that George Bush is just Matthew Marks in drag. And the left pretensions of the art elite are as stilted and sexless as Karl Rove. Take the semiotics of this year’s Whitney Biennial, named after Truffaut's Hollywood meditation, Day for Night: the meaning of the exhibition derives from the original French title, La Nuit Americain, the American darkness shadowing a world of suicide bombers and their idiot enablers in the West. What a recipe for masochism! Perhaps oceans of Lauder family goop will salve the wounds. [...]
Yet others manage to find some happiness at the fairs: via ArtFagCity, Sunday, March 12, 2006:
Pulse: The Fair I Actually Liked
A good art fair doesn't need a gimmick, it need only be a selection of galleries that give an indication of new trends and innovation in the art world. Scope and the Armory failed on this front, Pulse did not. The reason is this: The galleries exhibiting represent work that is a viable alternative to what is seen in Chelsea (even if a few of them are actually located there).
If Pulse gives us any indication as to what's hot in the art world, it would appear to be Houston. Ironically enough, The Whitney Biennial, also suggests this is the case, given the most challenging work by a long shot in that show is that of the Texas artists collective Otabenga Jones & Associates.
All's perhaps not fair in the world of Art Fairs, nor is it for the curated themed blockbusters that open in tandem. CriticTyler Green HATES the Whitney Biennial and is not fascinated that it is "fascinated with ugliness":
via MAN (3/13/06):
Pink is the New Biennial, y'all
The 2006 Whitney Biennial is an awesomely bad exhibition, an all-in presentation of a narrow strain of today's art. It is the worst contemporary group show I've seen in a major museum since The American Effect, which was (coincidentally) at the Whitney in 2003.
There are three primary problems here: The show is full of hideous things that consciously reject the viewer's first glance and don't deserve a second. The show is badly installed, crowded and over-stuffed with curatorial gasbagging that turns wall text into wall essays. Finally, curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne apparently felt the need to compete with the artists, to create installation art out of groupings of artists in some kind of effort to say something. (Isn't that what artists are for?)
and (3/14/06):
WhiBi: In which we become popular with curators
"There seemed a particular urgency to make a bold curatorial statement about the current zeitgeist," Iles and Vergne wrote in a curator's preface to the show. Wrong. Artists make art and artists may make statements. Curators show art. Artists and curators are not and should not be competitors. Curators should not set artists in competition with each other for a viewer's attention.
But that's what happens in the very first gallery in the show. A Rudolf Stingel painting hangs on a wall. A Urs Fischer sculpture rotates in front of it, leaving circles of candlewax on the floor. Fischer also cut holes in two walls and it is through these that the Stingel and another Fischer are visible. This is not fair to Stingel, at whose painting I never got a good look from further than about 18 inches away. (From another angle, Dan Colen's rock-turds were in the way.) At first I thought this might be a cluttered installation, but then I saw some Mark Bradfords nearby and realized that the curators were constructing an installation about deconstruction. It's fine to hang related work together, but that's not what the curators did here. By installing art in making a 'bold curatorial statment,' they subjugated art to their statement-making.
But back to the Armory and its untapped potential for inspiration... it looks like Jerry may have quite a few ideas brewing here (maybe he's thinking of the Pulitzer?):
Jerry Saltz immersed in a Jim Lambie installation at the New Museum booth (Photo: Mary Barone for Artnet)
