SUNDAY FEATURE ARTICLE: To Be With Art is All We Ask

8 days. 6 art fairs. 8 museums. 6 panels. 1 studio visit.

Touted as the most important art week of the year in New York, collectors, curators, and artists descended upon Manhattan for Armory Arts Week and the city did not disappoint. With a plethora of satellites, fairs boasting more galleries and more square footage than ever before, and the ADAA Art Show scheduled to coincide with the Armory, this was a big test for the art market and, at least anecdotally, it seems to have passed with flying colors. The aisles were filled with the who’s who of the art world: the Mugrabis, Margulies, Carolyn Christov Bargiev, Beatrix Ruf, Don and Mera Rubell, Jerry Saltz, etc. The walls at all the fairs, but particularly the Armory, declared that painting is alive and quite well: Yayoi Kusama and John Korner at Victoria Miro, Mel Bochner at Two Palms, Hernan Bas and Angel Otero at Lehmann Maupin, and at White Cube painting reigned supreme with Gary Hume, Gabriel Orozco, Georg Baselitz, and one of the much-hyped Damien Hirst blue paintings. Sculptures with glitz or reflective surfaces—often best sellers in Miami—made appearances at Jack Shainman (Nick Cave and El Anatsui), Hauser & Wirth (Isa Genzken), Lehmann Maupin (Nari Ward), Lisson (Anish Kapoor), Toby Webster Ltd. (Jim Lambie) and 303 (Jeppe Hein).

As you’d expect, each fair had a few stand out pieces that transcended the rest of the visual noise:

• Kim Dorland’s color-saturated canvases with sculptural build-ups of paint in New York gallerist Mike Weiss’s booth at Scope and Mark Moore’s booth at Pulse, who is having a solo show of Dorland’s paintings at his Los Angeles gallery later this month.
• William Powhida’s tour-de-force Art Basel Miami Beach Hooverville (2010) at Charlie James’s booth at Pulse. The 40” x 60” drawing (graphite on paper) transports the art world’s most notorious “characters” from their suites at the Fountainebleau to a shanty town of chaos and debauchery outside the Miami Beach convention center. No one is above reproof in Powhida’s epic parody of the art world: mega collectors Margulies, Rubell, Saatchi, and Broad huddle to cheer on their respective “horses” Koons and Hirst; Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith are mobbed by angry bloggers; the Bruce High Quality Foundation is having a bake sale, and Lady GaGa performs. The reaction from those parodied is a bit of a mixed bag with people like Jerry Saltz recognizing the importance of this type of institutional critique, while others express outrage. I’d like to see Douglas Fogle commission Powhida to do the next Hammer Projects installation in the stairwell/foyer of the Wilshire museum – imagine the possibilities.
• Solo presentations of Willem de Kooning and William Kentridge, at L&M Arts and Marian Goodman respectively, were the showstoppers at the ADAA fair, held at the Park Avenue Armory. The South African Kentridge was the toast of the town for his staging of “The Nose” by Shostakovich at the Metropolitan Opera, and his fantastic traveling retrospective at MoMA.
• The Independent, in it’s first iteration and spearheaded by gallerist Elizabeth Dee, was a breath of fresh air. It eschewed the categorization as an art fair and preferred the terms collective or consortium. It was essentially a 40-gallery fair without booths. The open layout allowed for broader dialogue between works of art, since they weren’t limited to the aesthetic selections of a single gallerist. Witty use of language was plentiful with works like “Hot Mess, Fierce Tranny Maverick Train Wreck” knitted on a black & gold cheerleading outfit (Lisa Anne Auerbach at Gavlak) and “Shit happens on Saturdays” at (Michael Phelan at Mitterand + Sanz). Large-scale installations were also in abundance: a giant inflatable rat (standard fare at union protests) by Bruce High Quality Foundation; Jeppe Hein’s rotating mirrors (Johann Konig); and a full-sized stainless steel DeLorean to accompany Duncan Campbell’s Make It New John, a narrative of the failed futuristic automobile and it’s creator (Artist’s Space), among others.

At the end of this week of art mayhem—often characterized more by VIP cards and glamorous parties than the art itself—my most memorable experiences weren’t in the Boom Boom Room at the Standard or on the roof of the Soho House, but sitting in silence with Marina Abramovic at MoMA, a philosophical dialogue with a stranger at the Guggenheim, and being transfixed by the light and space in James Turrell’s skyspace at P.S.1.

This feeling was confirmed on Wednesday night at the Guggenheim, where Sir Norman Rosenthal and Jeffrey Deitch conversed about having dedicated their respective lives to art and how fulfilling it has been.  I was struck by one of Rosenthal’s comments, in particular, in which he talked about  how art may be for an elite audience, but still anyone is welcome to join.  I realized then, after spending an entire week in the midst of some of the most powerful figures in the art market, and even the ‘art world,’ that it’s not about wealth or record prices, because when confronted with a work of art, everyone is on equal footing; and to quote Gilbert and George, and title of the Rosenthal and Deitch conversation—to be with art is all we ask.

- By Rebecca Taylor