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March 7 to March 11, 2012
529 West 20th Street, Second Floor
New York City

A couple of blocks south of the Independent was the latest addition to the packed roster of Armory Week fixtures:  New City Art Fair.  The vowel-free hpgrp Gallery was the instigator of this fair  that brought together eleven galleries representing Japanese contemporary artists.

Kawaii figures, animé riffs on classical scroll paintings, and whimsical reactions to life in a high tech world were evident at eitoeiko gallery.  These three young artists there in person to discuss their work.

Yuki Hashimoto painstakingly creates and crafts figures made entirely with clay onto cellphone bodies. Each one has its own profile. #15, for example, is YOSHIE: She has a difficulty to walk. But she is good at English and she is a Japanese/English bilingual office worker. Last month she was married with a tall man who was introduced by her friend. She will quit her job and will be a housewife. Inspired by Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth (1948).

Shusuke Ao showed an airplane in reverse, as he described it, called FSS-X00. In a statement the artist says: We are usually surrounded by technology. However, supposing you stand in front of this work, you will be in the outside of technology then. And that is a frontier of imagination and creativity usually confined by technology. You will hear the exhaust sound of your engine called imagination which exists inside you there.

Masaru Aikawa’s CD project appears, at first glance, to be a display of disks on shelves with two listening stations next to it. On closer inspection, they are in fact replicas and on listening to them one discovers not Queen, Kraftwerk, Jimi Hendrix, or the Ramones, as labeled, but a tonally challenged Aikawa humming each song.

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What is it about French artist Sophie Calle, beds and hotel rooms? There was The Sleepers, (1980) The Hotel, (1981) Room with a View, (2003) Exquisite Pain (2003) and now, Room. For one weekend in mid-October, Calle took up residence 24/7, so to speak, in Suite 3A at the Lowell Hotel on New York City’s Upper East Side. Room, a new installation by Calle, was commissioned by the French Institute Alliance Française as part of their “Crossing the Line” annual contemporary art festival.

In order to construct Room, Calle very deliberately strewed a stuffed cat, banana, wedding dress, embroidered sheets, black brassiere, red bucket, blond wig, Polaroids, and all sorts of printed ephemera, including love letters, notes and a certificate for a cemetery plot she purchased in Bolinas, California throughout the suite’s three rooms.  She manipulates and blurs the line between fact and fiction. Many of the items Calle culled for this installation have been seen in her previous installations and books. In true-to-form Calle style, each object was accompanied by what appeared to be an autobiographical text by Calle typed out on an index card, often expounding on her relationships with men, family members; sometimes revealing events that took place in her life or even her very own perceptions of herself. Visitors milled about the suite quietly reading the copious text while scrutinizing the objects.

Adding a rather strange dimension to the already odd feeling of being a voyeur in a stranger’s hotel room was the artist’s presence, itself, in the suite, at times. At one point Calle burst into the room, speaking French to a young woman watching guard over the installation, and then plopped down on the couch, beginning to busily type away on her laptop, French news blaring all the while from the nearby TV. No one addressed her at all. She jumped up at one point and walked into the bedroom and then back to the living room. It was difficult to know if no one spoke to her due to not recognizing her, or for lack of desire to break through that fourth wall.

A handwritten message on a board off to one side of the living room proclaimed:

What happens is always so far ahead of us, that we can never catch up to it and know its true appreciation.

Indeed.  Or, as they say in French: certes.

Accompanying text card reads:

When I was fifteen I was afraid of men. One day, in a restaurant, I chose a dessert because of its name: “Young Girl’s Dream.” I asked the waiter what it was, and he answered: “It’s a surprise.” A few minutes later he returned with a dish featuring two scoops of vanilla ice cream and a peeled banana. He said one word: “Enjoy.” Then he laughed. I closed my eyes the same way I closed them years later when I saw my first naked man.

The text on the card reads:

I had three cats. Felix died after having been accidentally locked in the fridge. Zoe was taken from me when my younger brother was born; I hated him from that moment on. Nina was strangled by a jealous man who had, some time before, given me the following ultimatum: to sleep either with the cat or with him. I opted for the cat.

Text from Calle’s Appointment with Sigmund Freud, (2001):

I was six. I lived on a street named Rosa-Bonheur with my grandparents. A daily ritual obliged me every evening to undress completely in the elevator on my way up to the sixth floor, where I arrived without a stitch on. Then I would dash down the corridor at lightning speed, and as soon as I reached the apartment, I would jump into bed. Twenty years later I found myself repeating the same ceremony every night in public, on the stage of one of the strip joints that line the boulevard in Pigalle, wearing a blonde wig in case my grandparents should happen to pass by.

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Show Hours

Thursday, March 17 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Friday, March 18 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, March 19 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Sunday, March 20 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Run, don’t walk to the Park Avenue Armory, for this weekend’s cornucopia of fine photography from around the world. A veritable feast for the eyes, ranging from incunabula to the latest experiments in photographic abstraction, this is a chance to see many prints that otherwise remain in the private domain.

If this year’s show feels more New York-centric than usual — with predominantly American gallery participation, and with Irving Penn, Diane Arbus or Nobuyoshi Araki all in the mix – there is nonetheless a striking Japanese flavor to the fair. Among galleries showcasingJapanese artists, there is a palpable effort to support Japan in its heartbreaking state.

Representing Japan directly is the Picture Photo Space Gallery from Osaka, with a selection of Araki’s Polaroid series artfully installed, along with astonishing work by Ayano Sudo, a young artist from Kobe. At first glance, her portrait series appears to be of 1970’s Manga-styled young guys and girls. Upon further examination, their gender bending ways become subtly apparent, with sparkles of glitter embedded into the prints. Ayano Sudo will be present at the gallery’s exhibition this weekend, dressed in her native garb, to answer any questions directly.

A few galleries are showing work that contends with, questions, and challenges the boundaries and relationship between painting and photography. Often, the results confound. Higher Pictures’ exhibition of work by Sam Falls and Claire Pentecost does just that. Sam Falls, a recent ICP-Bard MFA recipient, plays with and manipulates his photographs, so by the time he’s done, the viewer is not exactly sure what medium was used. Kim Bourus of Higher Pictures points out that it has now been ten to twelve years since artists began playing with Photoshop, and that this is the first generation of artists to integrate technology into their work successfully. Claire Pentecost documents her drawings on walls by photographing them using an 8 x 10 camera. She then makes palladium prints, referencing the early history of photography. On first regard, one must ask: are these drawings or photographs? Over at Steven Kasher Gallery, four portraits of an African-American family ask the same question.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery often shows beautiful, vintage Kertész prints at AIPAD, amongst many other classics. This year he also offers work by Shinichi Maruyama, and the series Kusho: gigantic photographs of paint in mid-air. For the diehard Andy Warhol fan, Deborah Bell Photographs offers Andy Warhol’s Street Series, a fascinating series of black and white photographs taken from 1981-1986 right here in New York City. Additionally, several works by the singular Gerard Petrus Fieret are included in her exhibition.

Saturday will also bring a slew of all-star panel discussions throughout the day, beginning with Photography Now: How Artists are Thinking Now, moderated by gallerist Julie Saul with Larry Fink, Shirin Neshat and Alec Soth. The last session of the day at 6 pm, AIPAD and the IPAD: New Technology and Photography, moderated by Barbara Pollack, focuses on the ramifications of new technology.

Tickets for the panel discussions are available in advance, at $10 per session, and are also available on-site
www.aipad.com/photoshow/new-york

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