Much anticipated, least visible: the Dark Fair, at the Swiss Institute in SoHo, includes Sue de Beer’s spinning zoetropes. More Photos >
If the health of an art capital can be measured by the number of fairs in town, New York is in pretty good shape. Nine satellite fairs are now orbiting the Armory Show, up from seven last year. (For those keeping score, that’s fewer than in Miami but more than in London.) It’s enough to make weary fairgoers hope for a market meltdown, or at least a little consolidation.
This year’s events have gone to great lengths to distinguish themselves from the Armory Show itself, and from one another. A sampling of them shows that there is a fair devoted to solo-artist projects, a fair of video art in trailers scattered throughout Chelsea and — the ultimate novelty — a fair without natural or electric light.
New this year is Volta, on the 11th floor of an office tower across from the Empire State Building. The fair, which has had a presence at Art Basel since 2005, is making its debut here as a collection of solo projects organized by Amanda Coulson and Christian Viveros-Fauné.
Solo-artist displays, a staple of the Miami Basel scene but less common at the Armory Show, promise relief from fair fatigue. Volta also benefits from its central location, and from its familial relationship to the Armory Show: both are owned by the company Merchandise Mart Properties, based in Chicago.
The thriving scenes of London, Berlin and the Lower East Side have numerous representatives at Volta, but most of the booths reflect international festivalism — none more so than the booth of the Stanton Street gallery Fruit and Flower Deli, where the aptly named collective International Festival has set up a functioning bar strewn with rainbow confetti.
Hamish Morrison, a New Zealand-born dealer based in Berlin, is showing eye-catching, talismanic abstraction by Ronald de Bloeme (an artist from the Netherlands). Kenny Schachter, from London by way of Greenwich Village, has a series of mixed-media works by William Pope.L that comment, with the artist’s typical candor, on the African-American experience.
At the Seventeen gallery in London, the artist David Ersser has turned the booth into a living room made entirely of carved balsa wood. At Hales Gallery, also from London, architecture-inspired drawings by Adam Dant seem to express the incongruity of a cutting-edge art fair in the heart of Midtown (one shows a toppled Chrysler building turned into a playground for medieval warriors).
Leaving Midtown for the West Village, Pulse New York fills Pier 40 with booths for 90 galleries, its largest number to date. Smaller Chelsea dealers like Freight & Volume, Magnan Projects and Monya Rowe are here, as well as the photography specialists Yossi Milo and Julie Saul. Exhibitors from out of town tend to be European, but Mexico City, Beijing, Toronto and Tel Aviv are also part of the mix. The stateless (in theory, at least) Saatchi Online gallery also has a booth here.
Japanese prints can be found at Catharine Clark, and a Henry Darger drawing at the Carl Hammer Gallery of Chicago. Graduate students at Parsons the New School for Design have been commissioned to create “Pulse Pause,” a reading room, which includes a revolving bookcase (by the artist Brandon Nastanski) that leads to a speakeasy.
The Pulse fair has also expanded its special programs to rival those of the Armory. In one of several events slated for “Pulse Performance,” members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will interpret music by Christian Marclay (Saturday at 7 p.m.). Parents, take note: Pulse is the only fair to offer a “V.I.P. Lounge for small collectors.”
Uptown, Scope New York is back for a sixth year, and a second year at Damrosch Park in Lincoln Center. Scope, which has fairs in four other cities, often seems detached from Chelsea trends — not necessarily a bad thing. Only 11 of the 50 or so galleries exhibiting here are from New York.
Art lovers who had hoped for a little more razzle-dazzle at the Whitney Biennial might find it here. Works at Scope tend to be flashy: Noh Sang-Kyoon’s giant, sequined Buddha heads at Bryce Wolkowitz’s booth are typical; so, too, Fawad Khan’s life-size Postal Service truck at 33 Bond; and Johnston Foster’s installation of a flock of seagulls, at the entrance to the Scope tents.
With just 15 galleries (14 from Los Angeles, and a guest from Mexico), the three-year-old LA Art in New York is the most manageable fair in town. It is noticeably smaller than last year’s, possibly because Los Angeles galleries have their strongest presence yet at the main Armory Show.
The emphasis here is on prints, photographs and works on paper, little of which feels new or specific to the West Coast. However, budding collectors looking for, say, a photograph by Martin Parr (at Rose Gallery), a Lee Bontecou drawing (at Daniel Weinberg) or a graphic, neon-hued collage by the emerging artist Eva-Maria Wilde (at Paul Kopekin) may appreciate the unhurried atmosphere.
Wall power is here, too, if you know where to look for it. Louis Stern Fine Arts, one of three galleries tucked away in the basement, has a refreshing selection of midcentury geometric abstractions by Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson and others.
The fair with the most buzz this year is, in one sense, the least visible: the Dark Fair, at the Swiss Institute in SoHo. It was organized by a group of artists that include the brothers Scott and Tyson Reeder and Scott’s wife, Elysia Borowy-Reeder, who in 2006 staged a fair in a Milwaukee bowling alley. This “subversive and experimental miniature art fair,” as they describe it, eliminates most sources of natural and electric light. The diner-style booths, painted black, were inspired by the seating at a favorite artists’ hangout in Milwaukee.
Several participating galleries, including White Columns, Leo Koenig and Marianne Boesky, have booths at the Armory Show but were intrigued by the challenges of exhibiting in the dark. Most are presenting site-specific projects involving oil lamps, glow-in-the-dark paint, manual-powered flashlights and plenty of candles. (Each gallery received a set of instructions, including fire-safety guidelines.)
Collectors who have already emptied their pockets at other fairs may be soothed by the soft glow of Tony Matelli’s unusual candle, at the Koenig booth. It looks exactly like a stack of $100 bills set on fire.
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