Armory Show 2012 By Rachel Corbett
Give people a little extra legroom, some champagne and theyll be happy
. That seemed to be the attitude at the VIP preview for this years spruced-up Armory Show at Piers 92 and 94 in Manhattan, Mar. 8-11, 2012.
Facing stiff competition with the launch of Frieze New York on the horizon, May 4-7, 2012, the Armory fair hired architects Bade Stageberg Cox to add more seating areas, design a sound-proof VIP lounge and reroute foot-traffic into
an easily navigable loop.
Dealers across the board at yesterdays preview seemed grateful for the upgrade. At the contemporary section of the fair on Pier 94, winnowed down by 25 percent to 120 galleries, the bigger booths and wider walkways have made
casual browsing easier for the window shoppers, such as director John Waters, who arrived yesterday declaring, My only plan is to go wandering.
Armory Show co-founder Paul Morris said the redesign means well see more solo shows, which require the extra space to show an artists range. Some dealers are saying that you can have a show at a gallery for five weeks, or
you can do it here for five days.
Thats what one big holdout from last year is doing. David Zwirner, who has returned to the fair this spring noting that everything looks much better, has sparsely curated his booth with a wallpaper installation and three silkscreen
panels by the German artist Michael Riedel. We sold everything in the first 20 minutes, he said (not including the wallpaper, which isnt exactly for sale unless someone wants a commission). Each work went to a separate
collector for $45,000 apiece -- not a bad price considering Chinese-Indonesian collector Budi Tek bought three nearly identical works at last falls Frieze Art Fair in London for $150,000.
Sprth Magers director Andreas Gegner said the European powerhouse has only now returned after 11 years because of the more boutique redesign. It seems to have served him well -- by the time the doors opened at noon, Gegner
said the gallery had already presold five works, including one of Cindy Shermans famous film stills. It may have also helped that the gallery didnt take too many risks with its selection of market stars from the 1980s, including a
Barbara Kruger text photograph, an Andreas Gursky photo of Niagara Falls and a red Rosemarie Trockel wool picture.
Theres a rising interest in the 80s. Its just being looked at again, said Gegner. However, the gallerys planning a more contemporary booth for Frieze New York, he said, as celeb art advisor Kim Heirston whisked him away.
But not everyone is mesmerized by the new layout. Its not fundamentally different, said New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl. Art fairs are all the same. Thats probably a hint at the nature of his next article for the magazine, on
art fairs as a phenomenon, about which he sighed, Im bewildered by the research. Schjeldahls last entry on art-world sociology, a consideration of the boom in biennials, for which he coined the term festivalism, is still being
talked about.
At Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, a single or two-person show has long been the norm. This year the front half of the booth is devoted to Brooklyn artist Cameron Martin, and by mid-afternoon the gallery had already sold a few of his
white-veiled photorealist landscape paintings for $10,000-$20,000 each. These pale beauties contrasted sharply with works by Kanishka Raja, whose neon Bollywood-inspired panel paintings in the back had yet to find homes at
$4,000 to $20,000 a pop.
Extra space or not, plenty of group shows were still to be found. Nearly a dozen artists had work at Brooklyns Pierogi gallery. One of them, Williamsburg artist Jonathan Schipper, was even on hand to talk about his kinetic
installation Slow Room. Its a tractor winch tied to pieces of furniture that get pulled in until everything starts breaking. Schipper admits the work is inherently a tough sell, but he has sold several videos, for $1,000 each in an edition
of 20, of a similar installation he made for Art Basel Miami Beach.
We like to have the energy of the artists here, said Pierogi director Susan Swenson about her guest. Im not sure that all the other galleries do. Thats probably true, although Michael Riedel was stationed at Zwirners booth and
Theaster Gates, the Armory Shows official artist, has been hanging out near Kavi Gupta Gallery, at a table he built from desks thrown out of a south-side-of-Chicago school.
When they can, dealers frequently capitalize on the big museum exhibitions coinciding with the Armory Show, like the Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, whose work was spotted at too many booths to
count, or the Whitney Biennial, Mar. 1-May 27, 2012.
Zach Feuer had five scrap-material assemblages, which look like strips of a deconstructed house, by Kate Levant, who is in the biennial. They were still for sale in the morning for $6,000 each, but Feuer said to check back later in
the day. Its not like in Miami, he said. People like to do a walkthrough first. Indeed, by 6 pm, everything in the booth had sold, including a painting by Mark Flood for $20,000 and other works by Kianja Strobert and Florian Schmidt.
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