Left and Right: Anna Halprin’s workshop at Judson Church. (All photos: Ian Douglas)
HAD YOU WANDERED into Judson Memorial Church on Saturday morning you would have heard at least one of the following:
“Oooff.”
“Yeaow!”
“I am a buzzing dolphin.”
It would have taken a minute to extract such utterances from the cacophony that came from several dozen people growling, chanting, and yelling while dancing improvised solos that ranged from minute shifts to fluid phrases to spastic contortions.
In the middle of all this organized mayhem stood a compact woman with a weathered face and frizzy gray-brown hair, who looks to be in her late sixties. She is actually eighty-nine, and one of the most important figures in the history of American dance: Anna Halprin. A harmonica in one hand and a microphone in the other, she was running a one-day workshop (organized by Movement Research and copresented with Danspace Project) framed by the question “Does dance make a difference?”
In the 1950s and ’60s Halprin’s San Francisco workshops were a formative influence on choreographers like Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Meredith Monk, and Simone Forti. Amazingly, this was Halprin’s debut at Judson, the place where a generation of young dancemakers—including Rainer, Brown, and Steve Paxton—exploded conventional notions of dance in the ’60s, redefining the form through genre-defying experimentation that involved numerous collaborations with similarly minded visual artists and musicians. “When they say I’m a pioneer of postmodern dance—to tell you the truth I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” Halprin told her students. “I just dance.”
As she led them through an exercise in which drawings and words were used as dance scores, I thought of what Art Guerra, the founder of Guerra Paint and Pigment, had texted me about his time at her workshops in 1967: “Most of the time it looked like a mental ward.” And: “It almost broke up my marriage.” Half a century later, some things have changed (certainly no public sex, which once reportedly happened between two unruly Bay Area participants). Others haven’t.
Left and Right: Anna Halprin’s workshop at Judson Church.
“None of this is a radical break from her San Francisco days,” noted the longtime New York Times critic and editor John Rockwell, who danced with Halprin in the ’60s. “But there was more of an emphasis on performance then. She’s evolved to stress more and more the connection between dance and healing.”
Besides Rockwell, the ninety or so participants and auditors at Saturday’s sold-out event included established choreographers (Eiko and Koma, Juliette Mapp), influential artistic directors (Dance Theater Workshop’s Carla Peterson), successful young dancers (Trisha Brown Company’s Leah Morrison; Liz Santoro, whose resume includes Ann Liv Young and Jack Ferver), and people who looked as though they’d never set foot in a studio. “I love the fact that there’re old ladies here,” said the choreographer Moriah Evans. “Anna Halprin looks hot as hell as a ninety-year-old. Screw plastic surgery, screw botox.”
Evans and Santoro had mixed feelings about the actual content of the workshop, musing about a lack of sophistication yet feeling a charge from the mere fact of proximity to such an iconic figure. Both can now say they have danced with Anna Halprin: The seven-hour event ended with a simple, rhythmic work consisting of four circles moving in alternating directions and varying speeds. Each participant had to dance for something particular, which they announced as they joined the circles. Halprin named her husband, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who died last fall.
At the day’s conclusion, the writer Wendy Perron asked if the workshop’s question had been answered. Halprin looked puzzled. “Well, that’s up to you. Of course I think dance makes a difference; otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing it.”
— Claudia La Rocco
Left: Artist William Kentridge. (Photo: Brian Droitcour) Right: Dina Rose Rivera and Stass Klassen in Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose. (Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)
FEW HOUSES RISK staging Dmitry Shostakovich’s The Nose because of its daunting demands. With over eighty solo roles in a prickly, jittery score without memorable arias, climactic moments, or juicy soprano roles, the opera is every bit the work of an impish young genius swatting away the limits of an art form. It premiered in 1930, when the composer was twenty-three, and had a run of sixteen performances. A few years later, Shostakovich proved he could master a genre’s conventions just as well as flout them with Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, a truly operatic tale of adultery across class lines and impassioned murder; it drew huge audiences for two years until a notorious Pravda editorial in 1936 effectively banned it from Soviet stages. The quirks of The Nose ensured its run didn’t last long enough to get such bad press.
I’d only seen The Nose staged once before, at a modestly appointed chamber opera in Moscow, and when I navigated the crowds of furred ladies at the premiere of the Metropolitan’s production on March 5, I felt that something significant was happening. William Kentridge proposed directing The Nose when approached by Met director Peter Gelb, and in hindsight it’s easy to see that Gogol’s Major Kovalyov, a lowly clerk in the imperial government who desperately pursues his runaway nose, is a kindred spirit of Soho Eckstein, the South African lawyer of Kentridge’s animated films––another functionary haunted by an oppressive social hierarchy and random, inexplicable misfortune.
Full of allusions to early Soviet life, Kentridge’s production brushes up against a number of clichés. The idea that the fun-house mirror of Gogol’s writing can reflect the Bolshevik bureaucracy just as vividly as its czarist precedents has been around since Vsevolod Meyerhold’s hotly relevant staging of The Government Inspector in 1926, and the projected animation––with hand-drawn portraits of Stalin and Shostakovich, black-and-white footage of Communist functions, the red crosses of Suprematist painting, and the angled headlines of Constructivist posters––sometimes seems like a salad of things easily identified as Russian. Even prima ballerina Anna Pavlova appears for a spin with her torso topped by a nose.
But the curtain’s collage of newsprint from different eras and countries sets up more diffuse layers of reference. Projections scream WRECKERS, SELF-SEEKERS, CAREERISTS!––epithets uncommon in the United States today, but used as much in apartheid-era South Africa as in the Soviet Union of the ’30s. Other text projections on the stage use a half-dozen fonts from Microsoft Office. Rather than setting The Nose in a specific period, Kentridge evokes backward and sidelong gazes––his own, his audience’s, Shostakovich’s––that try to read history through art, by capturing the associations, pertinent or not, that crop up in the process. In doing so, he manages to elicit greater emotional involvement than the harsh score and choppy story line might otherwise have allowed.
Though art-world attendees (including Robert Storr, Adam Weinberg, RoseLee Goldberg, Jeffrey Deitch, Tino Sehgal, and Norman Rosenthal) were vastly outnumbered by the music patrons who frequent Met premieres, the ovation for celebrity conductor Valery Gergiev was dwarfed by the one for the celebrated artist.
— Brian Droitcour
Left: Artist Nedko Solakov and dealer Maurizio Rigillo. Right: Artist Daniel Buren and Jérôme Sans, director of the UCCA. (All photos: Cathryn Drake)
THE WEEKEND BEFORE LAST, a massive crowd of art-world denizens made the ascent to the Italian hill town of San Gimignano by plane, train, bus, and auto for the opening of five solo exhibitions at Galleria Continua: Berlinde De Bruyckere, Luca Pancrazzi, Arcangelo Sassolino, Nedko Solakov, and Chen Zhen. The tranquil Tuscan town, once a medieval Manhattan with one hundred towers signaling familial power, is the somewhat surreal site of the internationally prominent gallery. If you didn’t know it was there, you might pass right by its discreet door on the cobblestone street to enter the Museum of Torture and Medieval Criminology next door, mistaking it for one of the tourist shops that sell paintings of landscapes and sunflowers. The gallery’s three young directors, Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi, and Maurizio Rigillo, have been very effective in getting artizens to make the trip by having their mothers serve heaving buffets of Tuscan fare, often in and around installations, in the cavernous ex-cinema space.
Even so, European storms and strikes farther north prevented prominent curators Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hou Hanru, Udo Kittelmann, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev from attending a meeting of the “scientific committee” to discuss a future Chen Zhen catalogue raisonné, which took place that afternoon in the dollhouselike Teatro dei Leggieri. The panel included the ubiquitous Fiaschi; P.S. 1’s Tony Guerrero; Jérôme Sans, director of the UCCA in Beijing; Palais de Tokyo’s Olivier Kaeppelin; artist Daniel Buren; and Chen’s widow, Xu Min. (The intrepid Obrist—who rarely lets anything get in the way of traveling—participated as a ghostly apparition projected on a screen, until the technology broke down and he disappeared with a comically abrupt blip.) The rambling discussion, in French, went from debating the merits of realizing posthumous installations to Guerrero’s memories of the Chinese artist gathering cow dung in the French countryside as a mode of direct contact with the environment. “He used natural materials,” Xu emphasized.
“No pun intended,” the US Embassy’s Elizabeth Petrovski quipped as we left the theater, “but it was getting pretty deep.” Arriving at the gallery, we went straight into Pancrazzi’s all-white Temporundum Continuo, a maze of corridors full of clocks with faces obscured by broken glass (and sound installations by Steve Piccolo at each end). Halfway through, I found Julia Draganovic and Steven Music, founder of the Premio Celeste art prize, who blithely noted that the organizers “did well to get all of these people here for a conference on a book that does not exist!”
Left: Curator Lorenzo Bruni with artists Christian Jankowski and Jorinde Voigt. Right: Hauser & Wirth's Sara Harrison, Pinault Foundation curator Caroline Bourgeois, and dealer Lorenzo Fiaschi.
Emerging onto the balcony of the former theater, I looked down on Sassolino’s Aphasia 1 and jumped out of my skin as a glass bottle hit a steel plate at 900 kph. “At the Palais de Tokyo, it was the most democratizing experience to see the chichi fashionistas and punk rockers shit their pants all at once,” the artist’s Berlin dealer, Aaron Moulton, commented. I noticed some spectators below, including US cultural attaché David Mees, scampering away from the chain-link fence, and remarked on the fitting proximity of the neighboring medieval-torture museum. (One of the choice displays is a barrel that held excrement, in which the victim was to slowly rot.) “And here we have the metronome of terror,” Moulton added.
We set out for a quick breather and a drink on the piazza along with Pinault Collection curator Caroline Bourgeois and Guerrero, who reported that he was “on vacation.” By the time we returned to the gallery, the intoxicating perfume of wild-boar stew and warm Tuscan bread salad was emanating from the kitchen, and a mob was waiting to descend for dinner. People ate wherever they could around Sassolino’s shooting-bottle compound (now turned off), sitting either at tables or on the steps leading up to the stage. I, however, could not get my mind off the artist’s Aphasia 2, a sealed steel capsule onstage holding nitrogen pressurized to 250 bar, which I imagined could explode at any moment.
Left: Steve Piccolo, curator Oxana Maleeva, and artists Elena El Asmar and Luca Pancrazzi. Right: Delphine Randet at Teatro dei Leggieri.
As usual, Cristiani was one of the first on the dance floor, jumping up and down in his singular pogo dancing style. I noticed that the DJ stood right next to the ominously silent capsule, but nobody else seemed to care, many of them up onstage waving their hands in the air. Talking about the remarkable success the gallery has achieved from its base in the middle of nowhere, artist Arthur Duff, who resides in equally picturesque Venice, commented on the impossibility of reproducing such a model. We were standing at the wine table, in front of a large, breathing PVC lung by Sassolino that had stopped. Solakov mentioned that he is afraid of flying, so he had driven all the way from Sofia, which took two days and a night in Zagreb.
When we left, well after midnight, the streets were completely silent and all the shutters closed. We walked through a long covered passageway to look beyond the city walls, where only the muted chirping of birds could be heard, before making our way back to our rooms. The next day, we did not hit the streets to get our first coffee until noon. We asked the local barista whether he had heard the racket coming from the gallery the night before. He looked at us mirthfully: “You did well to stir up some action in this dead town.”
— Cathryn Drake
Left: Critic Jerry Saltz. Right: Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman. (All photos: Miriam Katz)
THE BUZZ OF CONVERSATION forms a constant aural backdrop to every Armory Show, but little of it ever rises above the level of sales pitch or insider gossip. At this year’s fair, a series of events curated by Stamatina Gregory and dubbed “Open Forum” offered limited respite from the money talk and a chance to hear from some people with a little distance from the art of the deal. Most promising of the seven events staged on Pier 92 (the remainder were downtown at Volta) looked to be Friday afternoon’s opener, “The World Is Not Enough: The Future of Biennials.” Moderated by art historian Katy Siegel, the panel boasted a weighty lineup featuring Prospect New Orleans curator Dan Cameron, Whitney curators Gary Carrion-Murayari and Elisabeth Sussman, Quadrilateral Biennial curator Christiane Paul, and Singapore Biennale cocurator Trevor Smith. Taking my seat in the (regrettably unsoundproofed) “lounge,” I clocked critic Jerry Saltz (who’d announced his planned attendance on his Facebook page), 303 Gallery director Mari Spirito, and upcoming Harlem Biennale curator Muriel Quancard among the modest crowd.
Siegel kicked things off by suggesting that the generally positive reviews enjoyed by the Whitney’s “2010” might have been scored in the context of lowered expectations and wondered about the role of a diminished market in shaping the emphases and reception of biennials generally. Carrion-Murayari, responding first, dismissed reports (in the New York Times, specifically) that a lack of money had been a key factor behind the decision to include fewer artists in this year’s show, suggesting that the battered economy might rather have influenced the tenor of the work. Cameron felt Carrion-Murayami’s pain, insisting that the smaller number of participants in the forthcoming Prospect.2 was nothing to do with budgetary downsizing—but admitting that it had been a consideration in the show’s postponement to 2011 (at which a few inexpertly suppressed sniggers of schadenfreude issued from the crowd).
Had there been a shift in biennial curating toward paying greater attention to local audiences, Siegel asked. Paul opined that recent reductions in curatorial travel allowances might have been influential in this regard but pointed out that the danger of art-world self-indulgence persisted whatever the state of financial play. Siegel seemed unsatisfied and repeated the question, but the panel wasn’t having it. “I want to change the subject,” interjected Sussman, rerouting the debate toward the problems of the thematic biennial. Smith was suspicious of the form, aligning it with a generalized fear of openness, muttering darkly, “We’re living in paranoid times.” Cameron was similarly skeptical, preferring clever but open-ended titles (“Poetic Justice,” “Dirty Yoga”) to potentially restrictive topics. Paul was less dismissive of the thematic model (“I’m all for a healthy mix”), reserving her distaste for competitive, fashion-led biennials. (“I’d prefer less ‘best-in-show.’”)
Left: Quadrilateral Biennial curator Christiane Paul. Right: Singapore Biennale cocurator Trevor Smith (left).
Pitching her local/global line from another angle, Siegel asked the panelists how they approached foreign situations. “With my gut!” asserted a swaggering Smith. “I learned to trust my instincts.” Sussman, for her part, recalled frustration that the most interesting things she came across in Sydney in 1995 fell outside her remit as the city’s biennial curator that year. “The rules can be stultifying,” she complained. Citing Rosa Martinez’s inclusion of a Greenpeace boat in the 1990 SITE Santa Fe Biennial and his own inclusion of Mardi Gras Indian costumes in Prospect.1, Cameron wondered who it was that imposed such restrictions: “Is it us, as curators, stopping ourselves?” Siegel fished for a way forward. “The more engaged biennials are with local communities, the better,” responded the studiedly on-point Carrion-Murayami, “but even bad shows are part of the dialogue.” Paul was more positive still: “Biennials have a bright future,” she risked, “though I’d like to see the hype and sensationalism taken out.” Sussman, however, seemed to have had enough altogether: Borrowing an image from Smith, she sighed, “My gut says that there should be no more.” Cameron leaped to her aid, referring to her 1993 Whitney Biennial—rubbished by Michael Kimmelman at the time with the three little words “I hate it”—as “one of the most important exhibitions ever made in the US, even if it’s take us seventeen years to realize it.”
Curator and critic Carolee Thea opened the brief Q&A by comparing an apparently theme-driven Istanbul Biennial with the more open-ended “2010.” A second speaker, apparently dazzled by James Cameron’s recent big Oscar loser, asked whether biennials ought not to include more animation along the lines of the “beautiful” Avatar. And a third, virtually inaudible until eventually handed a mic, moved from a passionate if hard-to-follow speech “in the name of South America” to a plea for restraint in the name of the planet: “We need reduction!” she railed. “Less paper, less oil, less . . . installation!” An unusual take, perhaps, but nothing if not future facing.
— Michael Wilson
Left: Bruce High Quality Foundation's Always Be Closing. (Photo: Kate Sutton) Right: Independent cofounder Darren Flook (right).
ON THURSDAY EVENING, the former Dia, now former X Initiative space, in Chelsea witnessed the dawn of Independent, a “hybrid model” or “transparent financial cooperative” (read: fair with benefits) masterminded by, among others, dealers Elizabeth Dee and Darren Flook. Originally, the idea had raised eyebrows—does anything new or of interest in the art world not?—but by the time of the opening, most visitors seemed convinced by the project’s unconventional format and celebrated its dearth of walls, which gave way to an appealing alloverness. (So long as we had something to talk about besides New Museum ethics and Armory economic forecasts.)
“I don’t care if this is a onetime experiment or a recurring event,” participating dealer Maureen Paley said. “I’ve always loved this building and always wanted to show here.” For his part, Flook appeared to have found his calling: “I know what my job is now,” he noted to a friend. Independent made the most of its open floor plan—some even thought it had the feel of a down-and-dirty museum show—and it certainly made for a stark contrast to the claustrophobic, cubicle format of the average fair. “Art fairs typically feel so tight,” curator Ute Meta Bauer noted. “Not here.”
The aesthetic extended beyond the architecture. The four-day event had that young, fresh vibe that satellite fairs aspire to but rarely achieve. Commercial galleries mingled convivially—and, that word again, “democratically”—with nonprofits (White Columns, Artists Space), curated projects and journals (October and Farimani), and razzle-dazzle design-based projects (Moss with Westreich-Wagner). On the first floor, visitors were greeted by a flashy Rirkrit Tiravanija Ping-Pong table, while nearby the now ubiquitous Bruce High Quality Foundation erected one of those giant inflatable rats used in union disputes (and at the climax of An American Tail, as we reminisced with some of the collective’s members). Upstairs, a Jeppe Hein construction of rotating mirrors sent visitors spinning, while Artists Space presented a DeLorean, part of Duncan Campbell’s film Make It New John.
Left: Swiss Institute director Gianni Jetzer. Right: Dealers Alexander Hertling and Daniele Balice. (Photos: Kate Sutton)
Later that night, I ignored text-message reports on the Friedrich Petzel/Christian Jankowski afterparty at a gritty Eastside bar (“The kind of place where the pool players brought their own cues,” according to NuMu curator Massimiliano Gioni), choosing instead to conserve on cab fare and hit the Standard’s Boom Boom Room, where artist Jordan Wolfson and dealers Andrew Kreps and Johann König were celebrating their shared space at Independent. Late on, when the party had dwindled to about ten people, a tall blonde plucked a piece of wood from the fire and proceeded to mark everyone’s foreheads with Lent crosses, adding two additional marks to König for good measure. “Now you’re saved!” she exclaimed jubilantly, before security forced her to return the log to the fireplace.
While she made for a doubtful prophet, the second half of Armory week did bask in a general sense of relief, with the more or less steady sales (not to mention the return of the prodigal sunshine) bolstering moods. As occasional New Yorker Daniele Balice put it, “America is fun again!”
I wasn’t sure about that, but the tone was outright boisterous the following evening at the Balice Hertling dinner, where Seth Price tested out his Gavin Brown impressions—accent and all—while the dealer egged him on. The dinner was held at Yoyo Friedrich’s place, where gallery artist Nikolas Gambaroff rents a room; he merely smiled when guests such as Beatrix Ruf and Clarissa Dalrymple spilled out of the dining area and into the studio space, colonizing the worktables and couches with plates of chicken and couscous and breaking into reserve bottles of Petit Coeur. The studio was at the top of a flight of stairs so long they were positively Potemkin, assuring guests were breathless on arrival and prompting concerns that the trip down might take, in heels, much longer (or worse, much shorter).
Left: Art historian and curator Joachim Pissarro, collector Steve Cohen, and art adviser Sandy Heller. Right: Artists John Tremblay and Seth Price. (Photos: Kate Sutton)
Joining a lively crew (including the Swiss Institute’s Piper Marshall, ascotted artist John Tremblay, and Provence’s Tobias Kaspar), we eventually did make it back down the stairs and uptown to Wade Guyton’s former studio space Burning Bridges, where Fabrice Stroun had curated a show of works by Emanuel Rossetti and Balthazar Lovay. Amid projections of glossily marbleized, computer-generated bagels, a rowdy crowd of pretty, young hipsters—Peter Halley in tow—swigged tequila. (I was relieved when genial host Guyton suggested we toast our Tennessee roots with some of his secret-stash Jack. Who says you can’t go home again?)
The next morning I made a quick stop at former Gavin Brown director Alex Zachary’s debut space on West Seventy-seventh Street. The gallery may rub shoulders with neighbor Michael Werner, but the space assumes its uptownness cheekily, with pastiche panache. (Dank carpeting, check. Bathroom with tub and bidet, check.) I caught a bit of Ken Okiishi’s entertaining update on Woody Allen’s Manhattan and then sped off to the ADAA fair. A decidedly older crowd filled the chairs in the stately aisles, munching on sandwiches or self-consciously scanning suites of Kippenberger drawings. “Oh, it’s lovely, all those pensioners!” dealer Vita Zaman agreed. “It’s like you’re in Lausanne or something. Such a wonderful suspension of chic.” On my way out, I ran into art adviser Sandy Heller and collector Steve Cohen, both boasting MoMA stickers on their jackets, a reminder that I was running late for the installation-in-progress VIP preview of “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present.”
At the museum, Abramovic was midperformance on the second floor, while those with the proper papers were given special access to the retrospective’s “dress rehearsal” on the sixth floor. There, a smattering of impossibly fit young men and women re-created five of the artist’s older performances (Imponderabilia, for which visitors have to squeeze through a pair of naked people, being a favorite). I considered hanging around for an intriguing-sounding panel on “re-performance” with exhibition curator Klaus Biesenbach (and Martha Rosler, Francesco Vezzoli, Janine Antoni, and curator Jens Hoffmann), but four days of couscous and gallery-grade Prosecco was beginning to take its toll, and I decided to try to get in a nap (or at least a full meal) before the evening’s openings.
Left: Artist Wade Guyton, curator Fabrice Stroun, and artists Balthazar Lozay and Emanuel Rossetti. Right: Dealer Maureen Paley. (Photos: Kate Sutton)
The nap, of course, never happened. Instead I went to Artists Space to get a better look at Duncan Campbell’s documentary and then to the Swiss Institute, for Tobias Madison’s “Hydrate+Perform,” a Vitamin Water–inspired set of pseudoscientific, business-lobby-like sculptures subtly restaging the sponsor’s advertising campaigns. There was also a selection of artist books by Andro Wekua, which I pored over with curator Clare Staebler.
The two institutions held a joint afterparty in a “Neighborhood Watch” shindig at downtown eatery China Chalet—“the best bar mitzvah ever,” according to adviser Joe Sheftel, who stood surveying the back room and its green-lit mirror ball. The giddy, junior-high feel (Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants”—really?) took a Gregg Araki–style turn when the music abruptly cut and a girl wearing (only) pink pumps, pink socks, and tiny yellow running shorts took the mic. Her name was No Bra, which spoke to truth in advertising, and she spewed a set of songs that ranged from biting to baffling (an exchange of casual boasts between art-world friends escalates from “I ran into David Blaine at Opening Ceremony” to “I caught syphilis once in Top Shop”). I tried to avoid making eye contact with Michael Stipe, who stood to the side, occasionally sending out appreciative smiles. If the preparty had promised a night of teenage kicks, things got decidedly Euro after the concert, driving the crowd of New Yorkers and friends to the other section of the bar, where I spotted Darren Flook, Michael Portnoy, Sarina Basta, Negar Azimi, and Pati Hertling amid the booths. During those fleeting moments, America did indeed seem fun again.
— Kate Sutton
Left: Dealer Johann König and Artists Space director Stefan Kalmár. Right: Swiss Institute's Piper Marshall with artists Craig Kalpakjian, Josephine Meckseper, and Richard Phillips and the Swiss Institute's head of development, Leonie Kruizenga. (Photo: Kate Sutton)
Left: Collector Dakis Joannou and artist Jeff Koons. Right: New Museum director Lisa Phillips, U2’s The Edge, and collector Peter Brant. (Except where noted, all photos: Linda Yablonsky)
NEW YORK IS A MOST ACCOMMODATING HOST for art people. It has yellow cabs, black cars, chic hotels and dark bars, world-class museums, hundreds of galleries, thousands of artists. As if that weren’t enough, this week it also offers a few art fairs. (Upward of seventeen, by some counts.) Not that anyone needed another trade show to occupy recession-sensitive wallets, but the critical mass of parties, performances, and personalities they brought to town did more to make a native feel as restless as a guest than ever before.
On Monday, as a prequel to festivities to come, artist John Bock treated early birds arriving for the opening of his new show at Anton Kern Gallery to one of his mad lecture-with-sculpture performances, accompanied by an equally mad dance by first-time collaborator Colin Stilwell. There was the inevitable party afterward (at the Bowery Hotel), but that was a minor event compared with basketball star Shaquille O’Neal’s debut as a curator for collector Glenn Fuhrman’s Flag Art Foundation on Tuesday night, when this mountain of a man held court at a reception for the exhibition “Size DOES Matter.” Sure seemed like it.
“I love art,” Shaq told reporters, favoring a bandaged hand that had seen surgery the day before. “Everything I love is art. This cast is art.” So is Shaq, who appears in a life-size portrait made for the show by his favorite artist, Peter Max. “How long did it take to make that painting?” he asked the Pop illustrator. “Oh,” Max said, scratching his head, “about four or five hours, I guess.” Even Shaq looked small next to what he called “the big man,” a sculpture by Ron Mueck, but when photographer Todd Eberle persuaded him to climb onto a chair of Robert Therrien’s enormous dining-room set, he was nothing short of gleeful at finding a piece of furniture that made him feel like a toddler.
Left: New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni with curator Tom Eccles. Right: Curator Shaquille O’Neal.
This was definitely a night for giants. There were several among the artworks chosen by Jeff Koons, making his own curatorial debut that night at the New Museum, where the opening of “Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection” brought a record two thousand guests through the doors (including one hundred Joannou pals who flew in from Athens). This is the show that made the Little Institution That Could into front-page news in the New York Times last November, when the very idea of asking the most prominent artist in the collection of one of its trustees to organize a show loaned by said collector stirred up widespread debate on ethics.
No one at the opening cared a whit which way the winds of cultural politics were blowing, certainly not any of the chosen artists present, who are only too happy to be embraced by one of the art world’s most agreeable patrons. And Koons’s one-hundred-plus-piece take on the collection, which now numbers at least fifteen hundred works, found many admirers for his color-coded, pedal-to-the-metal installation on all four exhibition floors. This being the art world, there were detractors as well. “It looks like a fucking auction house,” said one young artist, who added, “Of course, I’m not in the show.” But the collector whose ego the museum was vigorously massaging was all warmth and smiles. “I’m blown away,” he said, embracing Sue Webster—an artist who is part of the show. And New Museum director Lisa Phillips, guiding the Edge through it, pooh-poohed the whole “non-troversy,” as she put it. “Dakis developed his collection together with artists,” she said. “So it’s only right that the first one should organize this show.”
I thought Koons did a pretty handy job of masking the sterility of this mausoleum-like building. His emphasis was obviously, perhaps predictably, on what he often calls “the biological” (read: sex and death): Maurizio Cattelan’s erect JFK in his casket; Paul McCarthy’s orgiastic tabletop tableau, Paula Jones; Janine Antoni’s crawling rawhide woman, Saddle; and Cypriot artist Haris Epaminonda’s working-vulva video, Nemesis, being just a few examples. Also predictable for someone who blows up balloon dogs to gargantuan proportions, Koons went for gigantism (Terence Koh’s white-chocolate twin towers, Roberto Cuoghi’s twenty-foot-tall winged demon, David Altmejd’s fuzzy take on Michelangelo’s David, and Charles Ray’s statuesque fashionista).
Left: Pawel Althamer’s Schedule of the Crucifix. Right: Artist John Bock with dancer Colin Stilwell.
The genial Koons did have moments of modesty (see Adam Helms’s inked silhouette on Mylar and Christiana Soulou’s penciled costume sketches). “It was all pretty intuitive,” he said of the show. “A lot of the work was black or white, so I put in some color.” The crowd in attendance provided even more. Among the fans lining up to give him congratulatory hugs and handshakes were collectors Jason and Michelle Rubell, Peter Brant, Christie’s Amy Cappellazzo, Sotheby’s Lisa Dennison, and Cyndi Lauper, as well as fellow collectees like Webster and Tim Noble, Urs Fischer, and Andro Wekua, who admitted that he had made a “small adjustment” to the installation of Sneakers 1, one of his two abject works in the show.
Appearing on one of her last nights of social interaction before mumming up for her Museum of Modern Art retrospective next week, Marina Abramovic grew increasingly worried about the health of the actor bound to Pawel Althamer’s Schedule of the Crucifix. The poor loinclothed lad hung from the cross so long his feet and legs turned blue. “You must ask him to get down,” the endurance queen told New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni. “I know better than anyone what that is like, and even I can’t take it!”
Moving down the stairwell between the fourth and third floors, I found the Edge entranced by Nathalie Djurberg’s brilliant video It’s the Mother, which debuted last year at the Venice Biennale. “Who did the music?” he asked no one in particular, hooting at the sight of babies crawling back into the womb. A moment later, a woman tapped the U2 guitarist on the shoulder and asked whether he was Robert something-or-other. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, when he shook his head. “I thought you were someone else, a musician I know.”
Left: Artists Cecily Brown and Elizabeth Peyton. Right: Artists Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili and Andro Wekua.
Just after 9 PM, the crowd started ambling up the street to the party Joannou was throwing for the museum at the Bowery Hotel. No one was expecting dinner, the times having inured many of us to passed-hors-d’oeuvres affairs, but we should have known better. Joannou is nothing if not generous. “There’s quite a big spread inside,” dealer Maureen Paley told me as I lunged, famished, at a tiny cheese tart on a passing tray. “It’s a very good party.”
In fact, it was a fantastic party, much like those Joannou gives at home in Athens. Drinks flowed, tables were laden with pasta, roast vegetables, and sushi rolls, and conversation bubbled over the loud music that eventually would get some of the more hard-core revelers to the dance floor later in the evening. Hundreds of people in town for the Armory Show and the new Independent fair crowded every available space.
Some people were comparing the Koons show to the Whitney Biennial. “That’s like comparing a chandelier to a shoe,” scoffed Biennial curator Francesco Bonami. He didn’t say which was which. At the bar, Webster was drinking cosmopolitans and paying homage to Sex and the City. “I think it’s brilliant,” she said. “My favorite show. It’s inspiring. I mean, I have a man in my life, but I don’t know what I’d do without my girlfriends.”
Left: Studio Museum director Thelma Golden and curator Rochelle Steiner. (Photo: Linda Yablonsky) Right: Dealer Leo Koenig. (Photo: John Arthur Peetz)
The art world travels in packs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many people as the thousands who attended the Armory Show’s vernissage the next day. “It’s a good fair,” I kept hearing people say. But it turned out all they meant was that it was better than last year’s, which was dismal.
Who was there? “Everyone you would expect,” more than one dealer said. “You know, the Rubells, the De la Cruzes, Mike Ovitz, Sofia Coppola, Beth Rudin DeWoody, and Dakis, of course.” Joannou was among the first to arrive, though he was still at his party when I left it the night before. Perhaps he came straight over.
Personally, I was most impressed by the single-artist presentations: Josephine Meckseper at Elizabeth Dee’s booth, James Nares at Paul Kasmin’s, Adam McEwen at Nicole Klagsbrun, Kris Martin at Sies + Hoke, Nancy Chunn at Ronald Feldman, Tony Feher at PaceWildenstein. Most depressing was the food situation. It may seem as if I care about little else, but no one can spend an entire day negotiating monsoons of people and art without something more than a sixteen-dollar glass of bad champagne.
There were a few sandwiches in the so-called VIP Lounge (a crowded corner of a tented area), but what was more invigorating were the Icelandic artists supporting I8 Gallery. They included the jolly Ragnar Kjartansson and Björk, who was literally wearing a hair suit—a sweater festooned with fake hair. “I got it years ago at a thrift shop,” she said. It was the most unique object I saw all week: anonymous, intimate, and funny. And not for sale.
— Linda Yablonsky
Left: David Por Jonsson, Björk, artist Ragnar Kjartansson, and Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir. Right: Dealer Marc Foxx with artist Maurizio Cattelan.
