Recent
Archive
News
Picks
Film
Newest Headlines
Left: Dealer Lisa Spellman with artist Karen Kilimnik. Right: Artists Space director Stefan Kalmar with musician Alan Vega.
THURSDAY, MAY 4TH. The calendar is daunting—and impressive. Frieze New York is underway, the contemporary auctions are just ahead, and tonight, with so many visiting collectors and curators around, more than fifteen galleries in Manhattan are opening new shows, with dinners to follow. Creative Time is holding its annual benefit gala at Roseland. Artists Space is hosting a party at SubMercer, as it is every night for the run of Frieze. The New York art world is a horn of plenty and the whole town is digging in.
Rachel Harrison is heading toward Greene Naftali. It’s still early, only a few people around, better to see the rough, color-drenched totems on view. “It’s all about greatness and suffering,” she says, tying up the evening in one neat bow. Back on the street, steady streams of art people—there’s Jacqueline Humphries! Stuart Comer, in from London! Vincent and Shelly Fremont!—are making the sidewalks of Chelsea nearly impassable.
At Gladstone Gallery, the artist—Anish Kapoor—is not yet present, for his first show in New York in four years, but his heaping new sculptures at the West Twenty-fourth Street space call plenty of attention to themselves. None are smooth or shiny. They’re entropic concrete pillars encrusted with tangled masses of what look like shells, penile forms, and entrails that have been pushed out of a pastry bag, fossils of indeterminate age.
Left: Artist Anish Kapoor. Right: Artists Thomas Demand and Rudolf Stingel.
A few steps down Twenty-fourth Street, at Matthew Marks, Gary Hume’s “Anxiety and the Horse” paintings are magnificent distillations of current events in poured enamel. Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides is at Marks on West Twenty-second, where his friend Thomas Demand is showing a captivating stop-motion film. In it, the furnishings of an ocean liner’s café slide and tumble as if they were extras from the Poseidon Adventure. There’s a line outside Gagosian on West Twenty-first, people pushing past the guards to get inside, where architect David Adjaye has constructed curving walls and pointed niches for the display of Richard Avedon’s mural photographs and contact sheets. Several walls are bare. It wasn’t easy for this gallery to leave blank white space between the works, he says. The place is so crowded no one can see them anyway.
On Washington Square, in art consultant Mark Fletcher’s homey new viewing space, Helmut Lang is introducing a group of phallic rubber sculptures. A little further downtown, the inimitable Sturtevant is holding court at Gavin Brown, surrounded by appreciative artists (Alex Katz, Pablo Bronstein, Spencer Sweeney, Elizabeth Peyton), dealers (Nicky Verber, Marc Foxx, Niklas Svennung, Toby Webster), and curators (Beatrix Ruf, Daniel Baumann) from hither and yon.
At Gavin’s, dinner is served upstairs, while Fletcher welcomes guests to his soiree for Lang in the penthouse of the Paul Rudolph–designed house on Beekman Place. But there’s room for (nearly) everyone in this art world, and Marks has taken many—Jay Jopling, Terry Winters, A. M. Homes, Mirabelle Marden, Sarah Thornton, Jessica Silverman, Suzanne Cotter, Tacita Dean, and Rudolf Stingel, among a hundred or so others—to his communal dinner for Hume and Demand at Il Buco Alimentari and Vineria. There’s more than anyone can possibly eat.
Left: Architect David Adjaye. Right: Literary agent Lyn Nesbit with author Jeffrey Eugenides.
At midnight, the dance floor at Roseland is emptying of survivors from Creative Time’s dance marathon, Karl Holmqvist is in the throes of his spoken-word performance at Alex Zachary Peter Currie, and the most underground party of all, in the cellar at SubMercer, is starting up for any nonclaustrophobes who want to burrow down for the night with Princess Julia.
Before anyone can turn a head, Saturday is upon us. This is Kehinde Wiley’s day to debut at Sean Kelly, where a documentary film crew is attending his every word and move. Models for his new paintings—of black women this time, not men—whom he plucked from the street to dress in Riccardo Tisci couture and pose in the manner of a Gainsborough, Sargent, or David, are milling in the crowd. It’s easy to see why they were attractive to Wiley. One, named Treisha, has an insouciant smile and patches of multihued hair forming a floral pattern on the shaved side of her dyed-blonde head.
On West Twenty-fifth Street, the Pace Gallery has erected a tent outside the door, where a bartender is serving drinks and cleverly giving visitors to Loris Gréaud’s theatrical debut with the gallery unobstructed views of his heavy-breathing movie set of an installation. “It’s about an unveiling,” says Gréaud, whose face lights up when Centre Pompidou president Alain Seban walks up to give him a manly hug.
Left: Curator Sylvia Chivaratanond and artist Sturtevant. Right: Dealer Andrea Rosen and artist Gary Hume.
Fran Lebowitz is at the door of Mary Boone’s gallery, where Francesco Clemente holds court—one of the several Italians (Fontana, Penone, Calzolari, Gnoli, et al.) with shows in New York just now. David Salle is there, while artist Luca Buvoli is squiring Laura Cherubini and Mila Dau. “The Italians,” says Dau. “We used to be great. Now we’re back!”
So is Tauba Auerbach, in her first show with Paula Cooper, happy to have found so elegant a home for her new woven fabric wall works and trompe l’oeil “Fold” paintings. There’s only one artwork on the walls of Artists Space Books and Talks, a recent lighted sculpture by Suicide’s Alan Vega, the artist and musician whom the forty-year-old nonprofit is honoring at its Annual Friends of Artists Space Dinner. The artists among the 180 guests—T. J. Wilcox, Tony Oursler, Liam Gillick, Sarah Morris, Jutta Koether, Hume, Holmqvist—are outnumbered by the Friends, patrons who contribute, board president Allan Schwartzman says during a cocktail-hour speech, 25 percent of the gallery’s funds. “We’re happy to have a dinner to give you and not an event to charge you,” he says, and the crowd troops to its tables for food prepared by Fergus and Margot Henderson, of St. John in London.
Left: Artist Francesco Clemente. Right: Artist Loris Gréaud and Morgane Dubled.
Luckily, my dinner partners include art historian Irving Sandler, who came up with the idea for Artists Space, after asking a bunch of artists what they needed most. “A gallery,” they said. After persuading the New York State Council on the Arts to support it, Artists Space was born. The early programs consisted of those with going careers proposing shows by younger talents. That was before Helene Winer took over as director, transforming the gallery into one of the most vital exhibition and performance spaces downtown and giving birth to the so-called Pictures generation.
Sandler goes back a long time. “In 1952,” he says, “this room would have been the whole art world.” “It still is!” a nearby curator quips. Before this repartee can continue, Emily Sundblad appears at the mic to give a full-throated performance of two obscure ballads that enthrall everyone. Then it’s Diego Cortez’s turn to toast Vega, only he propels musician Arto Lindsay forward to read his speech instead. “Artists became artists because they’re bad at everything else,” he begins, characterizing Vega’s music as “a microphone smashed against your head.” A standing ovation for the silent, red-bespectacled Vega follows, with an emotional, impromptu testimonial by Kim Gordon. “After seeing Suicide,” the Sonic Youth bassist and vocalist says, “I was scarred for life.”
Left: Dealer Barbara Gladstone, artist T.J. Wilcox, and collector Barbara Jakobson. Right: Musician Ric Ocasek.
Sunday dawns, none the worse for wear. At Salon 94, new terrariums by Paula Hayes are on show for a book signing and brunch that precedes the Karen Kilimnik exhibition at collector Peter Brant’s foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut. Here, it is clear that the art world has far expanded its 1952 borders. The barn and the lawn swarm with artists, collectors, and dealers invited to lunch beneath an enormous tent erected beside Brant’s polo field. One of Urs Fischer’s monumental lumpen “torsos” stands tall on the grounds, Jeff Koons’s melancholy flowering Puppy just beyond.
The minions return to Manhattan just in time for the opening of the New Museum’s pack of spring shows, all by women: Klara Liden, Phyllida Barlow, Tacita Dean, Nathalie Djurberg, Ellen Altfest, and Stanya Kahn. “I’ve been around too long and seen too much,” says Peter Schjeldahl, before being swallowed up in a crowd still hungry for the art on view.
“This is a turning point for women,” New Museum director Lisa Phillips tells everyone seated for the Burberry- and W magazine–sponsored dinner at the Bowery Hotel, the closing event of an art-addled week. But it isn’t really over. From the way it looks now, it will never end. The auctions are here. There are more shows opening, more dinners to attend. Documenta is on the near horizon. The Hong Kong and Basel art fairs are nipping at our heels. And art will live long after the rest of us have gone to bed.
Left: Curator Masimilliano Gioni with artist Klara Liden. Right: LA MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch.
— Linda Yablonsky
Left: Dealer Gavin Brown with artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and Mark Ruffalo. (Except where noted, all photos: Linda Yablonsky) Right: Outside the Frieze Art Fair. (Photo: Billy Farrell Agency)
THEY TOLD US it would be big but it wasn’t. It was huge—a mile-long tent that snaked along the East River on Randall’s Island, home to a kids’ soccer stadium and a hospital for the criminally insane. What better place for the first Frieze New York?
Ever since Frieze cofounders Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp chose the site for the London fair’s New York sibling, people have been calling them mad. Who would go to this remote and seemingly sinister place? How many people had even heard of it? No one knew how to get there. And if people did go, how long would they want to stay? Wasn’t Armory Arts Week over just yesterday?
All question of the fair’s viability was put to rest on Thursday, May 3, when ten thousand visitors streamed its way by car, train, bus, ferry, and, in the case of Maurizio Cattelan, bicycle from Chelsea. VIP cardholders could opt for a chauffeur-driven BMW 7, featuring three sound works—by Martin Creed, Frances Stark, and writer Rick Moody—commissioned by Frieze Projects curator Cecilia Alemani.
Union rats protesting the fair’s use of nonunion labor greeted us at the south entrance to the fair, but in this context it was easy to mistake them for a failed Bruce High Quality Foundation project. The undulating worm of a tent, designed by Brooklyn-based SO – IL (Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu), was far more welcoming. It had superhigh ceilings free of ductwork, let in plenty of daylight, and accommodated three long, curving aisles and a dispersion of good local eateries all around the sides.
Left: Dealer Daniel Buchholz. Right: Architect Florian Idenburg and New Museum curator Masimilliano Gioni.
I saw Armory Show chief Paul Morris wearing a concerned expression, and Art Basel codirectors Marc Spiegler and Annette Schönholzer in whispered huddles throughout the day. Everyone else—dealers, shoppers, browsers—took it all in with obvious pleasure. Has ever an art fair been more humanizing and congenial? “It’s great,” said collector Raymond Learsy. “The best I’ve ever seen.”
Because of its amenities and broad open spaces, including the sculpture-appointed park outside (where there was also a beer garden, a Roberta’s pizza joint, and several mobile kitchens), the fair also felt more like a mall than a convention. It certainly induced nonstop shopping. “People really came to buy,” said the Modern Institute’s Andrew Hamilton, from a stand that opened onto one of several capacious lounge areas. “We’re doing great!” (I guess it helps when your gallery has a Turner Prize finalist on its roster for four years in a row.)
The day went by smoothly, with only one contretemps—a showdown between critic Jerry Saltz and collector Adam Lindemann, pronounced enemies who found themselves in the 303 Gallery booth at the same time and drew a crowd of camera phone–wielding videographers. Otherwise the loudest sound was the whoosh of air kisses.
Dealers, said Andrew Renton, the English curator turned Marlborough London dealer, took the fair seriously enough to bring the work that attracted cash-dispensing clients from Europe and South America as well as the UK and New York. He was also impressed by the effort New York galleries made to time spring shows by attention-getters like Dana Schutz, Liam Gillick, Hanna Liden, and Ryan McGinley with the fair and the auctions. “It feels like New York has finally joined up,” he said, as if this gallery-rich city had been slow to cotton on to the global art feast.
Left: Dealers Toby Webster and Andrew Hamilton. Right: Artist Roe Ethridge.
“I sold that piece to New York, that one to an English collector, that to Brazil, and another to Australia,” said a perspiring Alex Logsdail, indicating the cadmium yellow Anish Kapoor, a Ryan Gander, and two sound-and-light works by Haroon Mirza on the Lisson Gallery stand. Likewise, Sadie Coles couldn’t seem to write up sales fast enough. Gisela Capitain had no trouble unloading a Kippenberger painting. Many other works were small to medium-size, with a concentration of cash-and-carry painting and sculpture and several examples of the sort of showmanship that is endemic to fairs.
Michele Maccarone made one of the more amenable showcases, with a suspended log by Oscar Tuazon and Elias Hansen in front of a wall of beautiful Ann Craven paintings. Greene Naftali chose to display a cutesy-pie monster of rags, plastic buckets, lampshade, and other colorful detritus mounted by gelitin on a vehicle that couldn’t drive a straight line. Salon 94 featured Liz Cohen’s clever Trabantimino—an amalgam of a Trabant and an El Camino—with the artist on hand to demonstrate the cream-colored car’s ability to expand and contract, raise and lower, for ease of parking and stowing.
Tracey Emin also made a personal appearance, stopping at the White Cube booth with ICA London director Gregor Muir to check on the installation of a recent neon. “So how’s your love life?” she asked Muir. “I see you have your cat,” he deflected, noting the maquette of a new series of sculptures clutched in her hand. She had just come from the foundry in Brooklyn, she said, where they are being cast for her upcoming retrospective at the Turner Contemporary. “I met the queen,” she said, of that museum’s opening. “She shook my hand, which was only proper.” It wasn’t a boast. The once-beleaguered girl from Margate was clearly proud to have buried old demons.
Dealer Jocelyn Wolff was more circumspect about having won the $10,000 prize for best booth, for his Hans Schabus entry in the fair’s multigallery “Focus” on single artists. Opening the jeroboam of Pommery champagne that came with the award, he said, “Such a cliché to give the champagne to the French gallerist.”
Left: Collector Andy Stillpass with artist Joel Otterson. Right: Dealer David Kordansky.
But many dealers went all out with their presentations, Andrea Rosen, Eva Presenhuber, Regen Projects, Victoria Miro, Kurimanzutto, and Elizabeth Dee among them. A prize for austerity should have gone to Reena Spaulings’s show of single works by Jutta Koether and Klara Liden. Lest anyone forget that art began before yesterday, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres revived the ghost of Fashion Moda, the scrappy 1970s collective, with painted plaster casts from their “South Bronx Hall of Fame,” the only work in Frieze Projects inside the tent. Ahearn was also casting portraits of anyone at the fair willing to fork over $3,000. “Do you know how long it’s been since any art person came knocking on my door?” he said, satisfied with the response his project was getting.
That was nice, but when I left, the one booth that stuck in my mind was Gavin Brown’s. The dealer was serving spicy wursts, gratis Rirkrit Tiravanija, with his separated-at-birth look-alike, actor Mark Ruffalo, also his neighbor upstate where the drinking water is endangered by fracking. The performance was to call attention to the problem, and to raise funds for Water Defense, an organization fighting the practice. “I’m doing this because I don’t want my children to grow up drinking poisoned water,” Ruffalo said. (Tiravanija’s limited edition of single boxed silver sausages, stuffed with shredded copies of the federal Water Pollution Control Act, chewed up the sales column.)
On the way out, I passed dealer Lisa Spellman. “If I have to hear one more person say how much they love this fair, I’ll start hallucinating,” she said. No wonder. By that time, Randall’s Island looked less like a park than a mirage in a landscape of greenbacks, and Frieze just another art fair on the run to Hong Kong and Basel and . . . and . . .
— Linda Yablonsky
Left: ICA London director Gregor Muir and artist Tracey Emin. Right: Whitney Museum curators Scott Rothkopf and Donna De Salvo with Whitney trustee Fern Tessler.
Left: Artist Courtney Love. (Photo: John Arthur Peetz) Right: A celebration for The Pocket Guide to Politics at the Standard. (Photo: Billy Farrell Agency)
DEAR ARTFORUM DIARY, your brave correspondent spent May Day with the 1 percent.
In the trenches! First was the press preview for Courtney Love’s art show at Fred Torres Collaborations. Who doesn’t love celebrity vanity art? Especially if there’s some wreckiness involved. The odds of that were good, if Love’s prolific Twitter activity and outfit-blogging (which I enjoy on www.whatcourtneyworetoday.com) and her general history are any indication. I wasn’t expecting her to actually attend this thing, so when I arrived I was surprised to be told she was on her way.
There were a lot of works on paper. They looked like tween doodles of roughed-up, sexy, baby-doll chicks with Courtney’s free associations scrawled across the page like graffiti: phrases like “I’m a celebrity get me out of here,” “Fuck you all,” “I want my baby, where is my baby.” What you would expect. The drawing was stilted and “adolescent,” I kept overhearing that word, but I thought it was good Courtney Love celebrity art. Press started to fill the gallery. The always fabulous Lynn Yaeger looked like a mature version of the artist’s kewpie doll–type figures.
“You must see the dresses,” she said.
Love had included two objets: one a white bridal dress with “Not my cunt on my dime mister” embroidered on it in red; one vitrine displaying a “glass slipper” and a lacy garment machine-embroidered with “Fuck yes tell me it doesn’t hurt/it feels good/fuck me . . .” While I was taking this in (Cinderella art?), the celebrity had somehow slipped in the back room of the gallery and we were told to wait because she owed Yaeger an interview. Fine, we waited. And waited. I wasn’t even expecting the star to be there but now that she was there she had set up a VIP room situation, making us wait. Ugh. In any case, she never came out. (I did sneak a peak: She was talking to a camera held by a fashiony looking guy. She was wearing a demure black frock with a white Peter Pan collar, looking pale, skinny, and happy—not scary-mode.)
Left: Artist Aurel Schmidt and André Saraiva. Right: Audrey Gelman and filmmaker Lena Dunham. (Photo: Billy Farrell Agency)
Only the early Tom Wolfe could do justice to the next event: “Celebrating The Pocket Guide to Politics”—a collaboration between D4D (Downtown for Democracy) and OHWOW—at the superglamorous Top of the Standard Hotel. Instead of “radical chic” it was “status quo chic,” a well-meaning but utterly clueless attempt to energize the Democratic base among high-end hipsters—on May Day, when people are swarming the streets precisely because the two-party system is broken. Hello??
The earnest “pocket guide” is a hiply illustrated high school civics–level primer on how government works larded with Democratic Party talking points. (Don’t they know Obama has given himself the power to assassinate anyone he decides is a terrorist? What about the bank bailouts? Endless wars? No accountability for war crimes/banksters? Our slide into corporatocracy?) Thumbing through it, I couldn’t help but think it’s kind of sad that even people who are well intentioned will get no clue if they only read the corporate media (which account for all the book’s sources).
The invite masthead branded the event with Art-meets-Fashion-meets-Socialite downtown glitz: from Terry Richardson to Gavin Brown to children of famous artists (you get the vibe). As a mental fashion victim moment it was up there with a Fashion Week event I fondly recall from the 1990s: “Supermodels Steppin’ Out Against Hunger.” (Yes, that really happened. I was there!)
I took in the cultural contradictions along with the champagne, chatted with whoever, and parked myself on a sleek banquette. As I gazed at the stunning Hudson River view, the lameness of the event wafted over me. On May Day, of all days, when the Occupy movement is trying to reenergize. A connoisseur of perversity would savor this delicious flower of decadence. As Nietzsche would say, “Encore! Make it even more disgusting!”
In parting, the ladies’ room at the Top of the Standard was a gift, a perfect metaphor for the 1 percent: the toilet crazily close to a floor-to-ceiling window—vertigo-inducing if you have a fear of heights (which I discovered I do not but wonder if anyone has freaked out there). You are totally exposed to this breathtaking view uptown: You basically flash the city from on high, and then you pee on it.
— Rhonda Lieberman
Left: Photographer Terry Richardson and Theophilus London. (Photo: Billy Farrell Agency) Right: A protester at Madison Square Park.
Left: Kim Gordon. Right: Artist Corinne Wasmuht and Gallery Weekend Berlin organizer Michael Neff. (All photos: Kito Nedo)
IT’S FRIDAY AFTER MIDNIGHT, and we’re standing on the stairs overseeing the dancing crowd at Times Bar. A DJ team plays Smurf techno and the go-getter, post-Net-art faction of Neukölln’s expat community throws their arms into the air. Times Bar is part of what was, until recently, a well-oiled system of artist dives along the north-south route of the U8 subway, including the now defunct Atlas at Kottbusser Tor and Smaragd in Pankstraße. Tonight at Times it’s a special occasion: Artist Marlie Mul has hung one of her disturbing, cute silk paintings riffing on tobacco culture and pregnancy behind the bar. Next to us, in a moment of drunken Situationist revelation, artist Britta Thie asks the weekend’s fundamental question: “What do we do with this city?” Pure rhetoric, of course, but it felt fitting. The feedback that Kim Gordon and her niece, dancer Elle Erdman, let out at Harlekin in Schöneberg, next to Mathew Gallery, still echoed in our heads.
As usual, it’s hard to remember where this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin actually began: Maybe on Tuesday night, when the 032c socialites gathered on the third floor of the Brandlhuber building at Brunnenstraße to celebrate a presentation of dealer Alexander Schröder’s private collection. The evening, which was not officially part of the Weekend, offered more evidence that, like his role model Andy Warhol, 032c inventor and German Interview editor in chief Jörg Koch loves to be around beautiful people: models, artists, architects, heirs, soigné creative types.
Left: Dealer Bruno Brunnet of Contemporary Fine Arts. Right: Dealer Alexander Koch, artist Alice Creischer, and architect Arno Brandlhuber.
The air was stale and the iPod delivered a crude mix of electro-post-punk. In a twenty-six-foot-long Konstantin Grcic–designed display cabinet, Schröder presented a mélange of Asian antiques and contemporary art: rolled-up Persian carpets, Chinese and Japanese tea sets, and Mao’s Little Red Book, as well as art by Danh Vo and lunch-box objects by Rirkrit Tiravanija. Schröder spurned the chance to “show off,” flaunting instead his disregard for the pervasive imperative for transparency. Nevertheless, this evening the drama felt a little habitual, a vibe matched by the worn carpets on display. We came back to the first floor of the same premises on Saturday morning, when artist Alice Creischer and her dealer, Galerie KOW’s Alexander Koch, performed a reading from Creischer’s new play. The subject? The illusion that scientific knowledge is unbiased by ideological power (prominently featuring a bunch of lab mice, of course).
In one way or another, most of the things that happened during the latest iteration of Gallery Weekend thematized the very idea of routine and, subsequently, offered lessons on how to cope with bad habits. The Weekend, now in its eighth year, opened alongside the Seventh Berlin Biennale. The novelty and excitement of each has attenuated. Both are professionalized affairs, but each has different strategies for dealing with this. The biennial—cocurated by Polish artist Artur Żmijewski and Joanna Warsza and associate curators Voina—felt like a case of auto-aggression. Instead of artists showing their work, Żmijewski invited Occupy activists to camp inside the ground floor of the Kunst-Werke during the biennial’s two-month tenure. But the revivification of social sculptor Joseph Beuys as globalization protester (sponsored by 2.5 million euros from the German Federal Cultural Foundation) came off thin. The motto was: “What can art do for real politics?” But in reality it looked like politics only; the art seemed lost on the way. An exemplary statement by Voina, distributed on Wednesday during the biennial press conference, read: “Exhibitions are harmful to contemporary art. Artists only think about what and where they can exhibit. So, the less exhibits at the biennial, the better.” For Ingo Arend, the critic of the leftish-liberal daily Tageszeitung, the biennial succeeded in discrediting political art. Its failure proved to be just another sad example of the “disturbed relationship to aesthetics of many leftists.”
Left: Magician Freddie Rutz and dealer Isabella Bortolozzi. Right: Dealer Johann König (left).
Accordingly, there was a schism between the opening of the biennial and the Gallery Weekend: Although the two events took place in venues throughout the city, one felt one had to make an either/or decision. (Additionally, of course, there were many alternatives to both, such as the excellent Tarkovsky-inspired, post-Fukushima group show “La Zona” at Kreuzberg’s NGBK.) The only moment of intersection between Gallery Weekend and the biennial came early Thursday evening. On one side of the Augustraße, in the backyard of the former Jewish School for Girls (now a clone of the restaurant Grill Royal), there was the inaugural Gallery Weekend cocktail. Across the street, at the Kunst-Werke, the biennial’s opening commenced. “Here are the 1 percent—over there the 99 percent,” the critic Dominikus Müller joked. Was it really that easy? Probably not. Shortly after the opening, the group Rosa Perutz published a strong critique of the biennial’s radical-chic impetus: “In their appeal, the biennial reproduces the usual appeals to God, nation, and state as safe factors of collectivization and recalls reactionary stereotypes of repressive mass art, which seeks to ensure a community cohesion of their audience by emotional overwhelming.”
As for Gallery Weekend, well, that’s a different matter. The event that began in 2005 with twenty-one participants has come of age (and then some). With fifty-one participating galleries this year, it feels saturated. Big, waterproof exhibitions with Julian Schnabel (Contemporary Fine Arts), Jenny Holzer (Sprüth Magers), and Robert Longo (Capitain Petzel) were symptomatic of the event’s glossy, fail-safe side. The more progressive, adventurous shows were to be found at Bortolozzi (a group exhibition that included local magicians who share the gallery’s building), Croy Nielsen (Andy Boot), and Supportico Lopez (Gino De Dominicis). On Saturday, 1,300 dealers, collectors, artists, and critics attended the now traditional gala dinner, which this year took place in the grand foyer and staircase of a Jugendstil courthouse near Alexanderplatz. It was a casual, buffet affair, and the whole thing buzzed like a beehive. We enjoyed the mundane setting. But somehow we couldn’t resist asking the sponsor’s shuttle service to take us to the Smaragd Bar for our last drink.
— Kito Nedo
Left: Nationalgalerie director Udo Kittelmann, dealer Esther Schipper, collector Charlotte von Koerber, and Christina Weiss of the Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie. Right: Artist Robert Longo (right) signs books.
Left: Dealers Mathieu Paris and Xavier Hufkens. Right: Artist Thilo Heinzmann. (All photos: Cathryn Drake)
THE FORECAST FOR THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY of Art Brussels was an unpromising series of raindrop icons all lined up in a row. But fortunately the local weather is as undependable as the country’s collectors are dependable, and when I arrived for the opening day of the fair, April 19, the sun was actually shining on the silver lining.
At the fair that evening, I stopped by Peres Projects to get the scoop: “The high-octane beer here is dangerous!” a director informed me. Otherwise everything was going well: Javier Peres himself was off at a meeting with an important collector, and the Rubells and the Schwartzes had been spotted making the rounds. Before long, art adviser Francesca Ferrarini rounded up a group of artists and dealers, including Magnus Edensvard of London’s Ibid Projects, and Swedish dealer Johan Berggren, and we all headed for dinner in the city center on the Metro. “The transportation system here is confusing—well, it’s very Belgian,” artist Sammy Ben Yakoub explained. “It’s like they want to organize it so much that they make it too complex—bad for transportation, but good for art.” At the elegant Art Deco brasserie Taverne du Passage, most of us ordered the house specialty, eel with green sauce; when asked if it came with fries, the waiter replied: “Everything in Belgium comes with fries, even the men.”
The next day I walked to the Sainte-Catherine quarter for a private tour of collector Frédéric de Goldschmidt’s exhibition “Subject/Matters.” The refrain among dealers at Art Brussels is always, “Belgium has very good collectors,” and de Goldschmidt is a good example. The show’s skillful juxtapositions worked at the perception of physical textures, materials, or sensations: Rosemarie Trockel’s white wood painting doubled a drawing of wood grain by Carine Altermatt; the lines on the sinewy back in a Robert Mapplethorpe photo mirrored winglike double swoops by Thomas Bayrle.
Left: Dealer Johan Berggren. Right: Collectors Karel and Martine Hooft with Lorenzo Benedetti, director of De Vleeshal.
Romanian artist Magda Amarioarei and I commenced Brussels Gallery Night with a tour of the downtown neighborhood’s galleries, starting with Dépendance, where Thilo Heinzmann showed all-white paintings with luscious porcelain glops. The German artist himself was more interested in a couple hundred vintage records he had just purchased; taking a Bobby Bland reverently out of its transparent sleeve, he declared, “The greatest singer who ever walked the earth.” Amarioarei observed: “It is interesting to talk to artists, but not about art.” The Alice Gallery, a “temple of street art,” presented the multiple-city incursions of French artist Invader in the form of “Space Invader” mosaics; later we came upon one on the front of a café without even trying. I finally made it to Gladstone Gallery for “Prima Materia,” a compelling show of ceramics by nine artists.
A bunch of us then took the shuttle uptown to MSSNDCLRCQ, where the group show “Particles” continued the theme of the duplicitous nature of reality. At Xavier Hufkens, Evan Holloway’s curious shamanic exhibition “Trees, Heads, Molds” included metal sculptures of branches formed into geometric grids and totem poles of stacked heads with lightbulb noses. Upstairs, collectors Karel and Martine Hooft considered works by two Belgian artists: Michel François’s totem of goose eggs anchored in a chunk of coal, and a wall composition representing a poker hand by Jan Vercruysse. When I asked Martine what she thought a “good collector” was, she replied, “One with a personal outlook.” And that right there seems to define the Belgians.
Left: Curator Dorothée Dupuis and dealer Arnaud Deschin. Right: Curators Alberto García del Castillo and David Evrard, artist Yann Gerstberger, and curator Sonia Dermience at Komplot.
With 182 exhibitors, Art Brussels is a big fair, but it is deceptively laid-back and manageable, and on Saturday the place was busy but not as frenetic as expected. When asked how it was going, one dealer replied succinctly: “Not good enough.” The Young Talent and First Call sections comprised an intriguing and diverse selection of galleries, and the sales (and attitude) seemed to pick up there. Brussels is the only non-Asian fair Indian dealer Abhay Maskara plans to do this year. “Even before asking the price the Belgian collectors really engage about the art,” he said. “You know that for those five minutes they are really with you.” First-time exhibitor Kerry Inman agreed: “The collectors here are very curious and willing to look at artists they’ve never heard of.” Italian dealer Geraldine Zodo blurted, “They know everything!” But another dealer was not so enthusiastic: “We did much better in Mexico and Dubai. Europe is a disaster!” Perhaps all of this is simply a confirmation of the crisis market, where the middle suffers.
Somehow we made it from there to a screening of Pierre Huyghe’s hallucinogenic The Host and the Cloud. We were back in the lobby after an hour. Someone mentioned its similarity to Eyes Wide Shut, at which curator Natacha Carron-Vullierme said, “You should watch the ending; it gets very erotic and transgressive.” Then it was on to Komplot, just down the street from the Wiels Contemporary Art Center. Komplot’s exhibition spaces were dedicated to a group show celebrating the launch of the 2012 edition of the annual art zine Year. Yann Gerstberger had assembled whimsical sculptures out of various evocative materials, including cow dung, economically appealing but logistically challenging. “The weather has been too damp for it to dry, and the other artists were complaining about the stink.” Dorothée Dupuis, director of Marseille’s Triangle France, arrived and announced that she and Gerstberger are moving to Mexico City. We toasted their trip with glasses of organic wine and set off for the fair party at Wiels.
There, Rosemarie Trockel’s exhibition “Flagrant Delight” was ruled by memento mori. The uncanny juxtapositions in the artist’s collages, with titles like Nobody Will Survive, rip open pop culture to reveal the discontent seething just under the surface. A wall covered in hot stovetops hints at modern household horror. Downstairs the party was definitely hot, and decidedly heaving, with large quantities of Belgian beer cooling down the crowd. Peres Projects’ Nick Koenigsknecht was gamely keeping up with the locals; dealer Hannah Barry was jubilant, having sold a monumental sculpture at her first fair; and all the young dealers seemed to be there and up for anything.
— Cathryn Drake
Left: Dealer Alice van den Abeele. Right: Dealer Abhay Maskara.
Left: Dealer Jan Mot and artist David Lamelas. Right: Artist Gabriel Kuri and dealer Jose Kuri.
THERE’S A SMALL ALTAR off to one side of Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral. Compared to the massive, baroque church organ across the aisle, or the statues of Mary with ashen skin, it’s unassuming and easy to miss. The altar is covered with a tangle of padlocks, an offering to San Ramón Nonato, protector of anyone imperiled by gossip and rumor. Visitors attach their own locks to the display, while praying that they’ll be delivered from the evil of wagging tongues. The week before last, despite all of Raymond Nonnatus’s powers, the art world conjured itself to the Centro Banamex a mere eight miles away. The occasion was Mexico City’s annual contemporary art fair, Zona Maco. Though, to be just, there was something relatively pure about the whole week, at least as far as art fairs go.
“I came in 2009 and realized you have to bring all your own tools. In 2009 I had to wait like six hours for a ladder,” said one exhibitor featured in the fair’s nuevos proyectos section, where galleries mounted small shows by emerging artists. He wasn’t the only one flying by the seat of his pants. Dealer Janice Guy grappled with the sunlight that poured indoors from a loading dock and blotted out her gallery’s poetic video by Patricia Esquivias, with its shots of a hand lighting matches in the darkness. And Galerie Thomas Schulte would have shown a video by Miguel Angel Rios, except the gallery had had all its equipment stolen the night before. Meanwhile, a scramble to remedy a shortage of chairs preceded Marc-Olivier Wahler and Lourdes Morales’s talk on programming as a medium.
Left: Architect Pepe Rojas, dealer Fernando Mesta, and Portikus curator Sophie von Olfers. Right: Dealer Pamela Echeverria.
Even so, most everyone agreed that Maco, after several years of growing pains, had become an echt art fair (even if one that inexplicably included a frozen yogurt stand amid its booths). But it was the various venues around town that offered the most eye-catching shows in eye-catching spaces. Two initiatives launched near Casa Luis Barragán in Tacubaya: There, crowds moved between an ecumenical exhibition of design objects at the new Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura (architect Fernando Romero’s former workshop) and Pedro Reyes’s playful show at Labor’s airy new gallery across the street. In San Miguel Chapultepec, Jan Mot featured David Lamelas and Robert Barry, among others (hung in his gallery’s maze of open-air spaces full of peeling paint and ivy), and Proyectos Monclova showed Tania Pérez Córdova in its sunny room above a small café. Then there was Kurimanzutto Gallery, with its wood-beamed ceilings and garden of succulents, displaying the work of Gabriel Kuri (the brother of proprietor Jose). It rained the night Kuri’s show opened; attendees mingled in the covered courtyard out back. Per usual, the crowd included a mix of those esteemed for being everything at once, like Rosario Nadal (art consultant, professor, princess, and Valentino muse), and those esteemed for being everywhere at once, like artist Saâdane Afif. And then there were the random drunks—those of us who’d underestimated the strength of the Casa Dragones tequila and were beginning to pay the price. We stumbled on to OMR gallery, in a Spanish Colonial building in the Roma neighborhood, for two openings: a group show and a high-tech solo exhibition by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
Traffic going south the next day was rough, as an intimate group led by Artists Space director Stefan Kalmár headed to the Anahuacalli Museum, the Mesoamerican pyramid built by Diego Rivera to store his collection of nearly 59,000 Mexican artifacts. Until July 8, the museum is also home to new work by artist Sarah Lucas, who that morning was busy installing her now-trademark “Nuds”—polyester stockings stuffed with cotton and twisted into limblike forms. Her UK dealer, Sadie Coles, looked on. “It’s a tough space. I was a bit daunted at first,” said Lucas. She spoke so understatedly that everyone had to laugh—because, really, how does an artist respond to a temple built from black volcanic stone that has windowpanes made of translucent pieces of agate and walls embellished with mosaics depicting Aztec gods? Lucas rose to the occasion. She placed her Nuds on pedestals made of cinder blocks bought from Oaxacan craftsmen, connecting her work to Rivera’s investment in Mexican artisanship. And her Trotsky portrait—a line drawing whose lines comprised cigarettes glued end to end—appeared right under the watchful gazes of the Lenin and Mao depicted by Rivera in his sketches for the 1952 mural Nightmare of War, Dream of Peace.
Left: Artist Sarah Lucas with Artists Space director Stefan Kalmár. Right: Dealer Sadie Coles.
We went the next day from Lenin and Mao to the heart of industry: the Jumex factory, on the city’s outskirts, where juice tycoon Eugenio López exhibits art from his collection. The Drawing Center’s Claire Gilman and the New Museum’s Richard Flood were among those taking in the exhibition on view, “Poule!,” curated by Michel Blancsube. Exhibited artists ranged from Urs Fischer to Iñaki Bonillas. The juice bottles that caterers handed out along with tapas had a bit of art as well: Carlos Amorales had been commissioned to create labels with odd hieroglyphs to replace the letters JUMEX.
Here’s a tip I learned in grade school: If you’re ever lost in New York, go to that giant clock in the middle of Grand Central and things will be OK. Similarly, if you’re ever separated from your herd at Zona Maco, head straight for the seafood restaurant Contramar. Everyone will be there. Everyone was there, for lunch, having returned from the trek to Jumex. It was 3 PM or so, and bright and breezy, the awning fluttering outside, the tables laden with tuna tostadas and limes. Everyone was partaking: Clarissa Dalrymple, Barbara Gladstone. The Guggenheim’s Ari Wiseman. House of Gaga’s Fernando Mesta. Dealer Spencer Brownstone, holding down fort outside. And on and on.
But we hadn’t even made it yet to the day’s headline event: a party in the massive main hall of the Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico. Upstairs, Minerva Cuevas had mounted a solo show that included a reprise of her stacked cans of Del Monte tomatoes relabeled to read PURE MURDER (a critique of a CIA-led coup in Guatemala that ended the nation’s attempt to nationalize the United Fruit Company). Meanwhile, on the main floor, agoraphiles and lots of people in their twenties stood shoulder to shoulder, drinking in the teal and purple strobe lights. Seeing all this, I couldn’t help but think of the John Giorno text piece that hung in the home of collectors Patricia Martin and Julio Madrazo, who had hosted a dinner earlier on for a handful of lucky guests. WE GAVE A PARTY FOR THE GODS AND THE GODS ALL CAME, read Giorno’s piece. He must have been referring to a different party from a different time. Everyone I came across last week, at least, seemed to be dripping with mezcal, stuffed with food, and very much mortal.
Left: Dealer Euridice Arratia and artist Pablo Rasgado. Right: Artist Yoshua Okón.
