The Armory Show
(At Least There are Paintings)
Kudos to the folks running The Armory Show for attempting to manage the crush of people attending the annual art fair on the west side of Manhattan. (Last year was a total mess, with lines into the street, shuttle buses canceled, and taxis confused about where to go.) However, they only earn a “C” for execution. It seemed at first that the decision to purchase tickets online ahead of time was a smart one: my wife and I went straight to the E-ticket line and avoided about 200 feet of outside line-waiting. But, for some unfathomable reason, once inside the building we were shuffled from one queue to another, finally waiting about 10 minutes to move four spots on line to reach the single staffer who was equipped to scan our E-ticket.A maddening start to the show.
Unlike the Whitney Biennial, The Armory Show has lots of paint. I guess it’s easier to sell a painting than it is to sell an installation piece of golf balls, Gatorade, and flowers. Alas, though, there really wasn’t all that much to catch the eye. And yet, “The Art Newspaper” (handed out at the entrance) reported that sales were strong, much stronger than had been anticipated by dealers who worried about the economy’s meltdown.
There were at least a few delights throughout the show. A Swedish gallery (Brändström & Stene, I think) showed five paintings by Glen Rubsamen, similar to the ones exhibited at Robert Miller Gallery in December 2006: Landscapes with a brightly colored background and snippets of foreground at the bottom of the painting in silhouette. I don’t really know why I find these pieces interesting, except that they remind me of various photographs I’ve taken in the past.
Jon Kessler had an interesting sculpture entitled Hanging Swan. It was an assemblage of twisted, torqued metal that resembled a mask in a Picasso portrait. Hanging as part of the sculpture about a foot away from the “mask” was a mini camera, pointed right at the mask, with the video from the camera displayed on a monitor hanging on the wall. Viewers would raise their face into various configurations of the mask and watch as their visage appeared Picasso-esque on the monitor. (The “Swan” piece is a part of a series that is apparently a commentary on TV makeover shows.)
Perhaps the most interesting pieces in the fair were Zan Jbai’s untitled near-white portraits (see Jbai’s site for an example). These two oil on canvas works at first read as solid white, but upon further inspection you see that through a variety of brushstrokes, changes in the glossiness of the paint, and perhaps an underpainting that’s been painted over in white, you see that the works are actually very subtly toned, low contrast portraits.
Another near-monochrome piece, by Jason Martin, was also worthy of closer inspection: dark oil paint brushed with perhaps a 12” brush over a purple underpainting on a large aluminum panel read as wavy dark hair (you can see a similar piece here).
Galerie Gebr. Lehmann exhibited a nice Ellen Harvey piece, taken from her ongoing Museum of Failure series ($35,000), though it didn’t have the complexity of the piece on view at the Biennial.
A nice Sol LeWitt gouache on paper was already sold for $45,000 (for some reason, “red dots” to mark sold pieces seemed to be out of fashion at The Armory Show this year and almost none of the galleries had prices posted on the walls).
Pace Wildenstein had a “greatest hits” group show with lots of favorites: a great Bridget Riley stripe painting, a nice blue Robert Mangold column structure painting, some Michal Rovner animated-people-on-stone-tablets (I always get a kick out of these), and a quaint but delightful James Siena “powers of two” painting.
But for $30, I would have hoped to find more at the show to like. In the end, I’m left with the feeling that The Armory Show of 2008 was not worth the price of admission. Most of the work on display shows better in a traditional gallery space than it does in these makeshift “white boxes.” It costs nothing to walk around the galleries in Chelsea and it’s much less of a hassle.
Tags: Armory Show, Art Fair
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