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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March 8 to 11, 2012
548 West 22nd Street, between 1oth and 11th avenues
New York City – Sunday hours: 11am to 4pm

Strolling through Independent with its open, airy installation one feels something akin to calm – an emotional state alien to the usual art fair experience of cluttered booths and madding crowds. Architect Christian Wassmann designed the layout,  in the former Dia Center for the Arts building along with a “site-specific environment” on the roof intended, in the words of the press release. to “align with the true North-South axis of the earth.” Whether or not visitors buy into this ambitious concept – or even notice it – the fair is a delight.  There are few dividing walls, allowing one gallery area to flow seamlessly into the next, a joyful antidote to ubiquitous, claustrophobic cubicles.

On each of Independent’s three floors there are moments of surprise and aesthetic reward.  At The Approach on the second floor, three achingly beautiful white-on-white works by Sam Windett represent the best paintings in a fair diversely populated by installation, sculpture, work on paper, photography, and film.  Daria Martin’s 16mm film projection, Closeup Gallery, at Maureen Paley is a mesmerizing depiction of smiling performers shuffling multicolored decks of cards as they slowly twirl on a kaleidoscopic table.  The colors are bright and nostalgic – the palette of a children’s TV show in the 1980s – though the film’s content is determinedly inscrutable.  It is 10 minutes long, and looped, and it is nearly impossible to walk away.  Mac Adams’s sinister 1976 installation at gb agency, Black Mail consists of a half-eaten meal on a table in disarray, an overturned chair, and dripping candles burned down to their nubs.  An act of violence has taken place, and the title hints at the cause, but with no victim or suspect, we are left to make up our own narrative: a do-it-yourself murder mystery.

On the third floor at Andrew Kreps Gallery, Andrea Bowers’ Tree sits – Canopy Camping, earth First! Direct Action Manual with Dream Platform, an ode to environmentalist civil disobedience, presents a fully functional tree sitter’s platform complete with instructions for residence (dedicating one side as kitchen, the other as bathroom because one “wouldn’t want to do both in the same area”).   Bowers has explored many activist tropes (Feminism, Immigration reform) but her gallerist explained to me that while the work is about activism, it is not actual activism.  This neat semantic hat trick in no way detracts from the sincerity and idealistic appeal of the work.  In fact, given Dia’s treacherously steep staircases, the ropes and carabiners might prove extremely useful to fairgoers.  Other works not to miss on the third floor are Moyra Davey’s grainy close ups of the back of a ten dollar bill from 1989 at Murray Guy and Michel François’s exuberant bronze splatter evoking Jackson Pollock at Bortolami.

Rob Pruitt’s silver-tape covered chairs, The Congregation (2010-12) at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise almost steal the show on the fourth floor, but it is well worth lingering around the corner at Creative Growth Art Center where Dan Miller has created spellbinding odes to the power of language in pen, paint, and typewritten words on paper.  The works are both confounding and compelling – alluring, indefinably sad, and creepy.  Their poignancy is almost overwhelming when one learns that the artist has Autism, and can hardly speak at all.  His words are all in his art.

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March 7-11, 2012
7 West 34th Street at Fifth Avenue
New York City

At Blythe Projects’ Volta booth artist James Clar has a text piece in which the phrase “global English” is transliterated in six non-Latin scripts – Chinese, Russian, Hebrew etc.  It is a good place to start, conceptually, with this popular boutique fair in which style refuses to be pinned down to place.  This LA gallery’s neighbor, for instance, is Frankfurt’s Galerie Heike Strelow, which is showing the Turkish duo Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt, while Pristine Galerie of Monterrey, Mexico, has an Israeli, Oreet Ashery.  If you want to see a German you are best off at Vane, an English gallery based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne with their presentation of Kerstin Dreschsel.  As for the joys of international English, someone someday is going to do something cruel with the name of one of those Turks.

“Must have’er” is the operative phrase, indeed, for Dreschel, the aforementioned German, who makes exquisitely sexy oil sketches based on photos she takes of lesbian sex parties in Berlin.  The painterly sense of participation works to cancel the potential voyeurism of these hard-core images, at least the artist’s.  More complex sexual politics underscores the transgendered theatricality of Zackary Drucker’s photographs and videos at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles’s booth where the most visually arresting works are actually the more understated images: the performer fur-hatted at a snowy football field is more poignant than herself nude and writhing on a dining table, for instance.  Carina Linge, at Jarmuschek + Partner, Berlin, keeps up the libidinal quotient in her reworkings of art historical images, although again, the most erotic is not necessarily the ones that are overtly sexual: a young woman fondling a skinned rabbit that channels Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine is actually her most startling piece.

Canadian galleries are a forceful presence this year.  O’Born Contemporary from Toronto has Alex Fischer whose digital manipulations are entirely made from portions of images sampled on the web, mostly from fine artists.  Janet Werner at Montreal’s Parisian Laundry has two large paintings, Currin-like in their satirical vacuity but out-Currining Currin in their sheer painterly relish.  The artist is to be included in MASS MoCA’s upcoming survey of sixty contemporary artists, Oh Canada, this May.

Sexiness, meanwhile, is not confined to nudes or skinned rabbits: it pops up in the elegantly crafted abstract sculptures of Rachel Beach, Canadian-born and presented by New York’s Blackston gallery, and the slick, glossy artchitecture and graphic design-based abstractions of David E. Peterson who is showing with Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Miami.  His series based on a clothing catalog feel like they could outfit the schematic beauties of Julian Opie – bringing us back to bodies, in other words.

Of course, what happens at fairs updates what’s going on elsewhere.  Andrew Masullo, at Steven Zevitas Gallery of Boston, signals the ascent of the funky abstractionist secured by his Whitney Biennial triumph – by virtue of default as he provides that dour display with rare instances of color and personal touch.  If you are unaware of the work of Mary Heilmann these are paintings that might feel fresh.  The fair also provides the first commercial outlet for Models for (the) People, an installation by Indonesian Dutch artist Tiong Ang first seen at the Shanghai Biennale in 2008, reassembled by Florence Lynch at <<Rewind<<.

A young artist by the name of Wilmer Wilson IV, who is still a senior at Howard University, stole the show, however, with a performance at Conner Contemporary Art of Washington DC.  Echoing – by bizarre coincidence – one of Zackary Drucker’s videos in which she is embalmed in gold tape, Wilson, a tall, lithe African-American youth, patiently mummified himself before his audience with gold stickers, each of which had apparently been authorized by a notary public in DC (past performances and their resulting photographs have used postage stamps and “I Voted” stickers.)  The ritual sends up notions of validation and self-worth and yet has an eerily calm and timeless dignity about it that belies its satirical intentions.

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Nordic countries provide the special Armory Focus in its third edition this year.  A Nordic Lounge at Pier 94 will feature 19 galleries from Helsinki,Copenhagen, Stockholm, Osla, Malmö, and Reykjavik while Armory Performance will include A Symphonic Poem about the Financial Situation in Iceland from Örn Alexander Ámundason, Performed by Metropolis Ensemble on Wednesday afternoon at the Wall Street Journal Media Lounge.

Elsewhere on Pier 94: Leon Golub’s Transparency, an installation created from works from an early 1990s series by the late artist, will feature at Ronald Feldman Booth 824.  CRG survey small paintings by LA-based Tomory Dodge at Booth 811.  On Stellar Rays has Clifford Owens at Both 521 and Horton Gallery has Wallace Whitney at Book 530.  Edward Tyler Nahem debuts new work from Andres Serrano at Booth 604.  Josée Bienvenu has a solo spot for Guatemala City-based Dario Escobar at Booth 526.  Winkleman, in their first presentation at the Armory Show, are devoting their booth, 536, to a solo spot for gallery artist Jennifer Dalton.

Uptown at the ever-confusing show at the Armory that isn’t the Armory Show, The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory, P.P.O.W. presents important historic work in Fleshing out the Grid: David Wojnarowicz and Hunter Reynolds.  The Art Show tends to feature more blue chip historic materials than the Armory: Peter Freeman has prints, paintings and a photograph by James Ensor, for instance, while Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery Jennifer Bartlett’s paintings on baked enamel steel plates from the early 1970s until last year. Philip Pearlstein is the focus of a solo display there at Betty Cuningham Gallery

Some galleries of course bridge the divide and show at both.  Nicole Klagsbrun, for instance, has Xaviera Simmons at the Art Show at the Armory and Patrick Jackso at the The Armory Show at the piers, at Book 532, Pier 94.

And just to clarify (or perhaps intensify) the historic confusion, Fountains Art Fair takes place at the 69th Regiment Armory at 68 Lexington Ave, at 25th Street, the locale of the historic 1913 Armory Show from which the whole jamboree takes its name.  Bob Clyatt shows new sculpture at Lambert Fine Arts while Dacia Gallery features Tania Marmolejo among others.

Many arts organizations think beyond the box of any fair location.  Art Middle East, for instance, presents Amir Baradaran’s augmented reality installation, SamovAR and “The Tempest in the Teahouse” at 10 Downing Street on March 10 from 6-8 pm.

Neighborhoods entice visitors on themed days. The Lower East Side has its Armory Arts Week Day on Sunday March 7, featuring on the hour guided tours of the neighborhood leaving from the New Museum from noon to 3pm.  Saturday sees Soho Night: The Phaidon Store, for instance, at 83 Wooster, previews their newest collectors edition from Pawel Althamer.  And on March 10th it’s Brooklyn Armory Night in Williamsburg where selected Parker’s Box artists will project videos at local bars Banter’s, Clem’s and Iona, amongst them John Bjerklie’s Do Not Be Afraid, 2006.

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