Edgy Armory Show in the spotlight

Art in America, May, 2004 by David Ebony

Once again this year, the "Armory Show," the annual international fair of new am managed to add some heat to a particularly chilly and dreary New York winter. Held Mar. 12-15 on Manhattan's Hudson River Piers 90 and 92, the fair featured works of cutting-edge art from 189 galleries from around the world. This year's installment drew 38,000 visitors, almost 15,000 more than last year. Some 2,000 guests attended the opening night preview party, which raised $500,000 to benefit the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition fund. According to fair director Katelijne De Backer, most galleries reported brisk sales, totaling more than $43 million; and the entire run of 3,500 copies of the show's catalogue, featuring a cover and designs by painter Lisa Ruyter, was sold out before the fair closed. This year's catalogue came with a separate insert, a tribute to the late Pat Hearn and Colin de Land, two of the Armory Show's founders.

New to the fair this year was "The ARCO Forum at the Armory Show," a series of free panel discussions on collecting strategies. A collaboration with Madrid's ARCO, Europe's largest contemporary art fair, the program featured well-known art-world figures such as Dan Cameron, Lynne Cooke, Jeffrey Deitch, Thelma Golden, Glenn Lowry, Arnold Lehman, Paul Ha, David A. Ross, and Don and Mera Rubell. Held during the course of the weekend in the VIP lounge of Pier 90, the panels were enthusiastically received and were attended to capacity.

In years past, the Armory Show often coincided with the uptown "Art Show," presented by the Art Dealers Association of America [see "Front Page" Apr. '04]. This year, however, the Armory Show took place during the opening weekend of the Whitney Biennial. A similar diversity of mediums and moods prevailed at both events. And, as mentioned by Lee Rosenbaum in the Wall Street Journal, the Armory Show offered works for sale by 68 artists who are also featured in the Biennial. The Armory Show also coincided with Scope New York, a fair focused on works by emerging artists.

Visitors to the Armory Show expect to be provoked as well as informed, and this year did not disappoint. On Pier 92, Thomas Hirschhorn presented Twin Tear (2004), a large piece protesting the war in Iraq. The work's bright red bladder-like shape, suggesting a huge blood-filled bag, dominated one area of Barbara Gladstone's booth. Collaged photos clipped from magazines showing violent episodes in the war-torn country since the U.S. invasion last year cover the object like so many bandages. A smaller, seemingly related piece by Hirschhorn, Nail Sculpture (2003), was one of the standouts in the booth of Paris's Galerie Chantal Crousel.

Elsewhere, Anish Kapoor's arresting relief sculpture, A/ha (2003), a large magenta, concave lacquered stainless-steel disk, at Lisson, conveyed a meditative mood. Similar in shape and size, but more concerned with optical effects, Cerith Wyn Evans's mirrorlike sculpture, Perverse, Inverse, Reverse (1996) was a giddy highlight at White Cube/Jay Jopling. Equally dizzying, a kinetic light work by Conrad Shawcross, Light Perpetual I (2004), featuring a large, spinning wooden wheel in a cage, outfitted with a swinging light bulb on a cord, added a lively tone to Entwistle's display. Among other light sculptures were wall pieces by Tatsuo Miyajima, incorporating both neon and LED numbers; they were presented by SCAI Gallery, Tokyo, and also by New York's Gavin Brown. A target sculpture, Neon Circles (2003), by John Armleder, glowed from Sandra Gering's booth.

Sam Durant's multipart work Proposal #2 for Monument at Altamont Raceway, Tracey, CA. (2003), presented by L.A.'s Blum and Poe, was at once wacky and engaging. The installation centered on a large white polyurethane-foam blob splayed out on a long wooden table; it emanated Rolling Stones music. More elaborate was Brian Dewan's installation at Pierogi, in which he created a classroom lined with blackboards and filled with old-fashioned school desks. Visitors were invited to sit through the artist's slide show and lecture.

A team of brothers from Germany, Tobias and Raphael Danke, presented an intriguing installation at the booth of Aachen's Adamski Gallery. In this work, the jagged shapes of black monochrome abstract wooden floor sculptures were echoed in a large, quasi-cubist landscape painting on the wall, which recalled a work by Lyonel Feininger. One of the most striking installations at the fair, Team Work, was by another pair of brothers, MP & MP Rosado, a Spanish duo showing at Seville's Pepe Cobo. An imaginative merger of surrealism and existentialism, the work shows two life-size and lifelike male mannequins in street clothes, each suspended upside down, wedged between a faux-brick wall and the booth's wall. Another remarkable piece, Lara Schnitger's installation of a brick-patterned cloth enclosure guarded by a tall fanciful fabric figure, at Anton Kern's booth, also had a surrealist flavor.

A glittery installation by Sang-Kyoon Noh, at Seoul's Galerie Hyundai booth, featured a large figure of the Buddha covered entirely with bright blue sequins; this was placed on a pedestal before a vast monochrome canvas covered with yellow sequins. Shanghai's Shanghart Gallery featured a large, delicately stitched fabric piece by Zheng Guogu, showing Chinese characters taken from neon advertising signage, while London's Stephen Friedman Gallery displayed big, bright circular paintings on textiles by Yinka Shonibare.