of London’s annual Frieze Art Fair, which makes its debut in New York in May, wants to be more than just another place to see and buy contemporary art. Using its unusual and remote location – the 256-acre Randall’s Island, in the East River between East Harlem, the South Bronx and Astoria, Queens – it has commissioned eight artists to construct what is calls “a temporary pop-up village.’’
Cecilia Alemani, the director and curator of art on the High Line, has organized the initiative. The artists participating include John Ahearn, Uri Aran, Latifa Echakhch, Joel Kyack, Rick Moody, Virginia Overton, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. and Ulla von Brandenburg.
Most of the projects will be outdoors and will react to the island in one way or another. Mr. Kyack, for instance, plans to create a country-fair game trailer, while Ms. Echakhch will turn a patch of grass into a “three-dimensional still life” with hundreds of the tumbleweeds more commonly found in the American southwest, and Ms. Overton plans to install flexible mirrors among the trees.
The gentrification of contemporary art itself is an old story in two parts. Part one is about a 20th-century model of an avant-garde, with artists as feisty cultural delinquents and idiot savants who set themselves outside the mainstream to make baffling things and think deep thoughts.
In part two, set in the 21st century, the model has changed. Now artists, whether they know it or not, are worker bees in an art-industrial hive. Directed by dealers and collectors who dress like stylish accountants, they turn out predictable product for high-profile, high-volume fairs like Frieze.
The fair is nothing if not smoothly run, starting with the logistics of getting there, which is fun. You can board a ferry from a pier at 35th Street for a 20-minute ride up the East River, or catch a school-bus shuttle on Third Avenue between 125th and 126th Streets that will drive you to the island. The fair itself — nearly 180 galleries, along with restaurants, bars, V.I.P. lounges, an auditorium and a bookstore — is installed in one
long, curvaceous white tent.
The architectural equivalent of a white stretch limo, the tent was designed by the Brooklyn firm SO-IL, and has the advantage of letting in lots of natural light, which makes the art look good. It’s also fairly roomy. The three parallel rows of booths feel commodious and flexible, an improvement over the city’s annual
Armory Show, where everyone’s always penned in tight, and from which Frieze took inspiration and learned much.
Like most fairs its size, this one is technically international, with a small handful of participants from Asia, and one each from Africa and the United Arab Emirates. Mostly, though, it’s European and American big guns, interspersed, for the sake of edginess, with a certain number of newish galleries and a special section, called “Frames,” made up of solo installations by artists represented by galleries that opened in or after 2001.
With all of this demographic leveling, and suffused light, and organizational finesse, what do you get? A standard big art fair that just feels a bit cooler than most.
Some galleries have tried hard to create a look or an atmosphere. (There’s an incentive: a $10,000 prize to the booth judged, by a Frieze art-star jury, to be the most innovative.) In general, simple works well. A solo hanging of Marieta Chirulescu’s pale abstract paintings at Micky Schubert from Berlin create a reflective mood; a floor-to-ceiling installation of little, colorful Joshua Abelow paintings at James Fuentes have similarly uniform effect, in this case of nonstop visual chatter.
Being by temperament a content-seeker, I find myself drawn to spaces with work that seems to require close looking and reading. I was rewarded at Broadway 1602 with a selection of small pieces by several remarkable female artists who had visibility decades ago, only to drop out of sight. One of them,
Alina Szapocznikow (1926-73), who worked in ceramics, has recently come back into view. Others —
Evelyne Axell,
Penny Slinger,
Nicola L. — are waiting in the wings, and this gallery is doing its share to prepare the stage for their re-entry.
Experimenter, a gallery from Kolkata, India, has in interesting, topically inflected lineup in Naeem Mohaiemen, Bani Abidi and the Turner-prize nominated Otolith Group.
And at Moscow’s Regina Gallery I was able to renew, and extend, my acquaintance with Evgeny Antufiev, the young Siberian artist whose doll-like stitched figures were a highlight of the New Museum’s great
“Ostalgia” show last year.
The booths I’ve mentioned are all on the small side. So are the solo installations that make up the “Frame” section, located at almost the exact center of the tent. The array here is attractively varied, from stylistically quite different photographs by Michelle Abeles and Talia Chetrit to jewelry made from gold and recycled trash by Liz Glynn, to a concrete sculpture by Justin Matherly that has the bulk and muscle of a shattered and illogically reassembled
“Laocoön.”We get compelling tours of German painters from the 1980s at Michael Werner, and of current Romanian figurative work — by Razvan Botis, Ion Grigorescu (also in “Ostalgia”) and the team of Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor — at Andreiana Mihail Gallery from Bucharest. Both displays provide valuable updates, which is the main function of art fairs for many of us.
As is usually true these days, there’s a heavy sampling of abstract painting, a lot of which suggests sleek, generic hotel-chain filler. And inevitably, there’s a fair share of plain, gross, look-at-me stuff, on the order of Anselm Reyle’s wall-filling, Warholy whatsits.
Somebody, someday will write a social history of 21st-century art fairs, which will also be a history of the art of an era. I hope that history will give a sense of how engulfing the phenomenon is and of the Stockholm syndrome-like mentality it has produced: almost everyone says in private how they hate fairs, but everyone shows up at them, smiling anyway, and hangs out, when they could be visiting studios, or going to offbeat spaces, or taking trips, to Kolkata, say, or Bucharest, or Rio, or Cape Town, where all kinds of serious, in-touch-with-life work is going on.
But the fairs say: don’t bother. We’ll do the editing. We have what you need.
As a peripheral attraction for its New York debut, Frieze commissioned several projects, some of them interactive, and all but one outside the tent. The one inside is of particular interest. For it, the New York artists John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres were invited to make, in a workshop environment, plaster portrait casts of visitor’s faces in very much the same way that
they made portraits of their neighbors in an embattled South Bronx in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
These artists go back to the wild-and-woolly avant-garde model, but here they are, temporary guests of the new one.
And whatever you think of the current
Whitney Biennial, which has been greeted with the usual complement of cheers and jeers, it too, in a way, sets its sights on an earlier model of modest-size, personalized art-making, but ends up being the most fair-friendly Biennial in years. Most of its carefully calculated approximations of outsider weirdness make for ideal, booth-size, cash-and-carry retail.
A final note: tickets for admission to New York Frieze are available only online. This effectively denies entry to anyone without computer access, which means a not-small number of New Yorkers. Outside, after I saw the fair, I thought of the poor, the crazy and the criminal who once, whether they wanted to or not, called Randalls Island home. Their ghosts must be looking at that big white worm of a tent, at the Wall Street suits, and at this stuff called art that you can do nothing with but buy and sell, with wondering distrust. I’m looking at it all that way myself.
Frieze New York remains at Randalls Island Park through Monday. Tickets available online at friezenewyork.com.
in 1835, it was the site of a poorhouse; a reformatory for juvenile delinquents; and a hospital for “Idiots and Children.”
The first
New York edition of the London-based art fair Frieze, which opened Thursday and runs through Monday, offered all of the above in an unusual location: a 250,000-square-foot white tent designed by the Brooklyn firm SO-IL set up on Randall’s Island, a small land mass east of Manhattan that is home to a track and field stadium and various athletic fields.
Inside the tent, the event worked against expectations in other ways. Many of the galleries’ booths — there were about 180 — seemed less congested than the one-stop-shopping mini-emporiums of other big fairs. The buzzword for this approach is “curated,” suggesting (if not always delivering) a museum-like emphasis on quality over quantity.
Yes there were the familiar, high-impact sort of attention-getters that work so well in fairs: a bright sun of a yellow disk sculpture by Anish Kapoor that plays an optical trick, receding before your eyes, or a jacked-up and radically rebuilt low-rider (a mix of a 1987 Trabant and a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino) that artist Liz Cohen rigged to give passengers a very bumpy ride.
Other galleries resisted the art-fair overload by giving over their booths to a single artist. David Kordansky Gallery in L.A., for instance, dedicated its main walls to a handful of abstract oil paintings by artist Jon Pestoni, whose richly layered surfaces work the territory between the aggressive markings of
Gerhard Richter and the imperfect geometries of Mary Heilmann.
Gallery director Stuart Krimko said they could have squeezed in more work by more artists but decided to focus on Pestoni instead as a prologue to Pestoni's first solo show in his hometown of L.A., at the gallery in November. “There is a typical art fair experience the bling people expect,” said Krimko. “But part of doing the art fair now is challenging expectations. So we wanted to do something more serious.”
At the very least, the booth isn’t just about making sales off the wall. Krimko said the gallery sold the nine available paintings by the artist for $14,000 to $22,000, based mainly on jpegs, after announcing its representation but before the fair even opened.
The solo show idea also won over New York gallery owner Andrea Rosen, who devoted the lion’s share of her booth to new work by L.A. artist Elliott Hundley, with a sampler of other gallery artists around the corner. “Doing a one-person show as opposed to having a piece here and there, you have a chance to make a real impression,” she said.
Half of Hundley’s eight works were in his signature collage-style painting, in which he uses pushpins and wire to suspend on canvas material as diverse as coconut shells and photos. The rest were oil on linen paintings. Rosen sold the eight works for $85,000 each early on. “We informed people before the fair, but for the most part people like to see them in person.”
The fair also has a section called Frame for less established or younger galleries, devoted to solo exhibitions or projects. “It’s a great way to introduce an artist to a client and also curators,” said Atsuko Ninagawa, owner of the Tokyo gallery Take Ninagawa. She brought 10 “painting-collages” by the versatile Japanese artist Shinro Ohtake, which sold around $20,000 each. By the end of the first day all but one had sold; the last was on hold, she said.
“I like Frieze because it’s not like business-business too much, so you can focus more on the art,” she said, noting that the open feeling of the tent architecture helped. “In a tall building in Manhattan, you would feel the power hierarchy more.”
Gabrielle Giattino of Bureau gallery in New York had a booth nearby, also part of Frame. Hers featured a 1,500-pound sculpture in cast concrete by Brooklyn artist Justin Matherly based on the monumental, multi-figured Roman sculpture Laocoon from the Vatican. Matherly’s gritty and rough-edged take on the marble original, known for its broken limbs, sold the opening day of the fair for $35,000 to a European collector who knew about the piece in advance. “He came and saw it in the first 10 minutes of the fair, and that was it,” said Giattino.
So what’s the purpose of doing the fair now that she’s sold the work? “It’s about building relationships for me, and it’s also an exhibition for Justin," she said.
Cindy Sherman at MOMA, Museum of Modern Art. New York
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