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Pulse
Art in America, May, 2008 by Janet Koplos
What Pulse sacrificed in subway access and pedestrian convenience in its move from the 26th Street Armory to Pier 40 on the Hudson, it gained in space. The 90 exhibitors (up from 65 last year) enjoyed supplementary spaces where large works could be shown, such as Leonardo Drew's Number 90 (2003), a 20-foot-long assembly of display cases stacked up to the ceiling fixtures. Inside each was one or more cast-paper objects--chair, tricycle, radiator, electric mixer--gently collapsing (Finesilver, Houston).
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At the fair's entrance, some 12,000 visitors passed through a 110-foot-long, plastic-walled "color sensory immersion tunnel" by Brooklyn designer Julian Lwin. The afterimage of its intense pink and orange hues distorted color in the special display room that followed. Lwin's work introduced one of the serendipitous "themes" that emerged in this fair: light effects. Among other artists manipulating light was Shih Chieh Huang with a polychrome kinetic installation of inflating and deflating thin plastic bags (Virgil de Voldere, New York). A second happenstance "theme" was borrowed pornographic imagery; one of the more imaginative examples was Carlos Aires's Love in the Air, a wall arrangement of silhouetted porn performers, soldiers/hunters, birds and a devil, all cut from vinyl records (Kinz, Tillou + Feigen, New York). Another "theme" was labor-intensive objects or installations using everyday materials. Jennifer Burkley Vasher's installation consisted of a white-cushioned fainting couch surrounded by a veil of 550,000 white Tylenol tablets hanging on strings (Richard Levy, Albuquerque). On the other hand, Laura Ford had a subject entirely her own in Armour Boys (2007), a set of five dark bronze knights in armor, collapsed in a heap or dangling from three white shelves: they were at once funny and, with contemporary associations, chilling (Pippy Houldsworth, London).
One of the most striking displays was the nearly empty space of DNA Gallery (Berlin), exhibiting a single small leaf/figure bronze sculpture on one wall and a sequence of videos on the opposite, all by Mariana Vassileva. The room was elegantly austere, especially during her all-white video of a woman pouring milk from a vessel that never emptied into a bowl that never overflowed. Perugi artecontemporanea (Padua) offered a single work spread across the two walls of an open corner booth: Laurina Paperina's cartoon woman spilled her voluminous pink brains on the walls and over a hut in which played a pretend-violent video cartoon, Braindead/Apocalypse. There was also faux violence in the booth of RuArts (Moscow), where Alina and Jeff Bliumis's Language Barrier consisted of plasticky, wordless faux books. Photographs showed them in the landscape, blocking a road or a stream. The books were piled in the booth, with the pale legs of a mannequin in cut-off jeans emerging lifelessly.
Special features included Pulse Play>, a video and technology lounge with programming curated by Bill Arning of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Pulse Pause, a reading room displaying works by MFA students from Parsons, curated by Jeffrey Walkowiak. There were also performances, and a children's lounge designed by Jenny Marketou.
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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
