{"id":13996,"date":"2017-03-07T11:15:27","date_gmt":"2017-03-07T10:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/?p=13996"},"modified":"2017-03-07T17:12:38","modified_gmt":"2017-03-07T16:12:38","slug":"armory-show-2017-are-site-specific-works-the-remedy-against-art-fairs-monotony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2017\/03\/07\/armory-show-2017-are-site-specific-works-the-remedy-against-art-fairs-monotony\/","title":{"rendered":"Armory Show 2017: are site specific works the remedy against art fairs&#8217; monotony?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t<style type=\"text\/css\">\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 {\n\t\t\t\tmargin: auto;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 .gallery-item {\n\t\t\t\tfloat: left;\n\t\t\t\tmargin-top: 10px;\n\t\t\t\ttext-align: center;\n\t\t\t\twidth: 33%;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 img {\n\t\t\t\tborder: 2px solid #cfcfcf;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 .gallery-caption {\n\t\t\t\tmargin-left: 0;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t\/* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes\/media.php *\/\n\t\t<\/style>\n\t\t<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-13996 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2017\/03\/07\/armory-show-2017-are-site-specific-works-the-remedy-against-art-fairs-monotony\/munoz_deitch_booth_tas_2017-2\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"120\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Munoz_Deitch_Booth_TAS_2017-2-480x384.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-14005\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-14005'>\n\t\t\t\tThe Florine Stettheimer Collapsed Time Salon, Jeffery Deitch , Photo by Vicente Munoz.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2017\/03\/07\/armory-show-2017-are-site-specific-works-the-remedy-against-art-fairs-monotony\/chloe-wise-at-deitch\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Chloe-Wise-at-Deitch-480x320.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-13997\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-13997'>\n\t\t\t\tChloe Wise at Jeffrey Deitch.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2017\/03\/07\/armory-show-2017-are-site-specific-works-the-remedy-against-art-fairs-monotony\/lawson\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"119\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Lawson-480x380.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-13999\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-13999'>\n\t\t\t\tDeana Lawson, Hotel Oloffson Storage Room, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2015. Inkjet print, mounted on Sintra, 36 \u00d7 46 in (91.4 \u00d7 116.8 cm). Edition 2\/3 + 2AP, Rhona Hoffman Gallery.\n\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><br style=\"clear: both\" \/><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2017\/03\/07\/armory-show-2017-are-site-specific-works-the-remedy-against-art-fairs-monotony\/takekawa\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"105\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Takekawa-337x480.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-14001\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-14001'>\n\t\t\t\tNobuaki Takekawa, Miss Created, 2017, Ota Fine Arts.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2017\/03\/07\/armory-show-2017-are-site-specific-works-the-remedy-against-art-fairs-monotony\/nengudi\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/NENGUDI-320x480.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-14000\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-14000'>\n\t\t\t\tSenga Nengudi, R.S.V.P. Reverie &#8220;Scribe&#8221;, 2014. Nylon mesh, sand, and found metals, 91 \u00d7 54 \u00d7 67 in, 231.1 \u00d7 137.2 \u00d7 170.2 cm, L\u00e9vy Gorvy.\n\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2017\/03\/07\/armory-show-2017-are-site-specific-works-the-remedy-against-art-fairs-monotony\/coupland-at-armory\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Coupland-at-Armory-480x320.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-13998\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-13998'>\n\t\t\t\tDouglas Coupland, Lego, 120 \u00d7 48 \u00d7 48 in\n(304.8 \u00d7 121.9 \u00d7 121.9 cm), 2014, Daniel Faria Gallery.\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl><br style=\"clear: both\" \/><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/2017\/03\/07\/armory-show-2017-are-site-specific-works-the-remedy-against-art-fairs-monotony\/turrell-2\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/CFA-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Turrell-320x480.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" aria-describedby=\"gallery-1-14002\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt>\n\t\t\t\t<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-1-14002'>\n\t\t\t\tJames Turrell, Diamonds (Squares on point), 2015. L.E.D. light, etched glass and shallow space, Runtime: 2 hours 30 minutes\n88 \u00d7 88 in\n(223.5 \u00d7 223.5 cm),\nKayne Griffin Corcoran.\n\t\t\t\t<\/dd><\/dl>\n\t\t\t<br style='clear: both' \/>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p>The <strong>Armory Show<\/strong> returned to New York this past week with a new director, a new design and renewed sense of purpose. Spread across two enormous piers on the Hudson River, the latest edition of the art fair, which was founded in 1994 by a small group of art dealers, featured 210 international galleries from 5 continents and 30 countries.<\/p>\n<p>The new floor plan, designed by Brooklyn architectural firm Bade Stageberg Cox featured wider aisles and larger booths for the five distinct exhibitor sections\u2014Galleries, Insights, Presents, Focus and Platform\u2014that smartly integrated modern and contemporary art across the two piers. By locating the VIP Lounge at the end of Pier 92, the designers gave the show a more navigable grid, while the addition of a \u201ctown square\u201d on Pier 94 broke up the boredom of endless booths and provided visitors a welcomed spot for contemplation and repose.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI wanted to strip everything away and start again,\u201d The Armory Show director Benjamin Genocchio\u2014the former Editor-in-Chief of Artnet News, Art &amp; Auction and Artinfo.com\u2014told the press at the preview, \u201cand put a town square, a kind of sacred heart, in the middle of the fair, and put an artwork there. I wrote to Yayoi Kusama and asked her to create a work for it and she basically sketched something on a napkin, sent it back and we said, \u2018great.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Kusama\u2019s Guidepost to the New World, presented in the Platform part of the fair, offered eleven candy-red, polka-dot sculptures, which resembled giant mushrooms from a fairy tale setting, displayed on an artificial green lawn. Equally powerful\u2014and twice as shocking\u2014was a massive, multi-paneled painting of naked young girls, by Japanese bad-boy artist Aida Makoto. Straight out of Otaku culture (a cult populated by obsessive fans of anime and manga), the mural-like canvas captures teenage sirens in a pixelated field of butterflies, sea creatures and the ominous crosshairs of video games.<\/p>\n<p>Kusama\u2019s installation was a key piece in the Platform section, which was curated by Eric Shiner\u2014formerly the Director of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and currently a Senior Vice President of Contemporary Art at Sotheby\u2019s\u2014but there were plenty of other noteworthy projects displayed throughout the show. Jun Kaneko\u2019s massive, striped Mirage painting on the outer wall of the VIP Lounge and Douglas Coupland\u2019s Towers, a scaled down urban landscape that was completely constructed from Legos, colorfully caught our eye, while Fiete Stolte\u2019s interactive photo-booth project captured participants\u2019 silhouette reflected in the pupil of their eye for a passport-sized photo, which could be purchased on site.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe set about breaking up the monotony found at fairs by installing site-specific and large-scale works at various points of the show,\u201d Shiner shared with Conceptual Fine Arts at the opening. \u201cIt was simply a matter of figuring out what piece would look best where and what impact we wanted to make at different points of the fair. I always imagined the Jun Kaneko painting leading into the lounge and also purposely put Abigail DeVille\u2019s Sarcophagus Blue, an old boat loaded with mannequin legs sporting torn tights\u2014which she assembled onsite\u2014front and center at the entrance to Pier 92 for maximum effect. Kusama\u2019s installation was the most monumental work and took the longest to organize, as it was conceived and fabricated especially for the fair.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Jeffrey Deitch\u2014participating in his first art fair since reopening his innovative gallery\u2014was strategically situated directly on Pier 94\u2019s dynamic town square. Presenting \u201cThe Florine Stettheimer Collapsed Time Salon,\u201d which references Deitch\u2019s initial art fair exhibition in the Gramercy International Art Fair (The Armory Show\u2019s precursor) from 22 years ago, as well as the idiosyncratic American modernist artist Florine Stettheimer, who will have a survey show at the Jewish Museum in May.<\/p>\n<p>With the entrance draped by cellophane curtains and the interior set with period furniture, the pink walls of Deitch\u2019s booth displayed an important, centrally placed painting by Stetthiemer, surrounded by a lively selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures by such celebrated contemporary artists as Elizabeth Peyton, Philip Taaffe, Karen Kilimnik and McDermott &amp; McGough, along with newbies like Grace Weaver and Chloe Wise, a sensational selfie-painter with 55,000 Instagram fans.<\/p>\n<p>Other highlights at Pier 94 included Mel Bochner\u2019s large-scale monoprints of hard-hitting words that expose the politics of language at Two Palms; Mike &amp; Doug Starn\u2019s new paintings on old LP album covers and a giant glass work that riffs on one they recently created for the American embassy in Moscow, at Wetterling Gallery; Nobuaki Takekawa\u2019s glass space rocket and mannequins turned drag-queen astronauts at Ota Fine Arts; and Shinique Smith\u2019s graffiti-inspired, energetic collage paintings and bale-like sculptures made from dyed and tied together clothes at David Castillo Gallery.<\/p>\n<p>Over at Pier 92, the Armory mixed modern and contemporary art to entertaining ends. Kayne Griffin Corcoran exhibited large-scale, geometric abstractions by Mary Corse that beautifully use a white, monochromatic palette and two radiant light works by James Turrell that were seamlessly embedded into the walls of the booth. Levi van Veluw\u2019s exhibition at Galerie Ron Mandos, featuring design-inspired charcoal drawings and wooden wall-works, also had an immersive element in the form of a cube-like structure that visitors entered to meditate in a monochromatic, gridded environment displaying raw bits of mined coal.<\/p>\n<p>Deeper into Pier 92, Richard Taittinger Gallery presented an exhibition dedicated to the early years of the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery and in particular to the pioneering abstract painter and sculptor Nassos Daphnis, who had a phenomenal 17 solos shows with Castelli. The display featured works by John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg and Salvatore Scarpitta, as well as a compelling selection of minimal, hard-edged abstractions by Daphnis. A few additional paintings by the artist were on view in the VIP Lounge.<\/p>\n<p>Nearby, the fair\u2019s Focus section\u2014curated by Jarrett Gregory, a former curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of Art and New Museum\u2014offered an assortment of solo shows by 12 artists from 10 countries. The exhibition, titled What Is To Be Done?, was introduced by the first two booths, with Johan Grimonprez\u2019s film Blue Orchids, which examines the covert activities of the global arms trade, at Sean Kelly and Mathilde Rosier\u2019s Loose Alphabet, a 7-minute video that captures costumed dancers in Kenya performing in the desert. Ironically, the video is projected upside down\u2014as though Africa is literally on the other side of the world.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Focus section has always been defined by geography, such as African art last year and Middle Eastern galleries in 2015, but I don\u2019t think artists really identify with regional profiles,\u201d Jarrett Gregory told us during the preview. \u201cI actually wanted to go the opposite way by making something very international and work with some artists to explore the idea of global connectedness through shared policies. It ended up being a somewhat political section, but it\u2019s less overt and more subtle and nuanced.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rounding out our favorites from Focus, Rhona Hoffman Gallery presented Deana Lawson\u2019s big color photographs of people who are part of the African diaspora; L\u00e9vy Gorvy and Thomas Erben Gallery teamed up to show poetic pieces in a variety of media, including surreal sculptures made from stretched nylon stockings filled with sand, by Senga Nengudi; and Teresa Margolles examined the economy of death in Hispanic communities through sculptures and photographs, including a black-and-white image of a transgendered sex worker that the artist documented just five months before she was brutally murdered, on view at Galerie Peter Kilchmann .<\/p>\n<p>The Focus section had a more open floor plan, which created a community of galleries\u2014one where works could be observed side-by-side and ideas could be considered in dialogue with one another. As a model for display, it was quite stimulating, and one that we hope to see the new Armory Show team explore more vigorously in years to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Armory Show returned to New York this past week with a new director, a new design and renewed sense of purpose. Spread across two enormous piers on the Hudson [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14005,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1796],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mapping-the-artscape"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conceptualfinearts.com\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}