art fairs/biennials
artblog goes to documenta, miami basel, carnegie international, and the usual new york suspects.
Recession-year Armory and Volta – ok, not fantabulous
Pre-recession art fairs were imbued with a circus-y vibe that kept you walking down the long aisles looking for the next bright shiny new (or outrageous) thing. But the halcyon days of big budgets and splashy installations at the fairs are over and that irrational exuberance may never be back. This year we went to Volta and the Armory (contemporary pier) and while the art mostly was nice enough we missed the hunt for nuggets of gold. And at the Armory, on a Saturday afternoon, with a big crowd around us, it felt a little like prime time at the ... More » »
Friday picture post – Peephole from Armory
We are always checking for trends when we go to the art fairs. This year’s trends included peepholes! Those dreamy environments by Patrick Jacobs were in evidence at both Volta and the Armory. We’ll have a report of what we saw on Sunday.
Friday picture post – Outside/Inside the Box at the Icebox
Rachel Udell‘s “The Shapes of My Dreams and of My Nightmares” hangs at about eye level in the middle of the Crane’s Icebox Project Space. Part of Fiber Philadelphia‘s big juried art exhibit, the piece is a carnival of crocheted yarn, thread, heirloom clothing, fabric, felt and fiberfill. We love its Dr. Seuss-ian ambiguity — is it good? is it going to gobble you up? And it got us thinking about the late Mike Kelly, perhaps the first to use stuffed animals in his installations. artblog’s first art safari went out last Friday to see this show and some others. ... More » »
A Whitney for you and me – enjoyable, lyrical, musical!
Not a whimper of controversy surrounds this year’s Whitney Biennial. It’s an uptown show to the New Museum’s downtown triennial. If there’s activism, it’s in the curatorial choice to dedicate a humongous amount of space and time to performance for music and dance. And if there’s politics, it’s mostly about art, in the commissioned essay by artist Andrea Fraser, whose point is that everyone in the art world is compromised via money and insider politics, and yet that might make the art world the perfect place for art on the subject of money, politics and complicity. (The photographs and videos ... More » »
Philadelphia is the place for fibers – a peek at Fiber Philadelphia 2012
The eight artists of “A Sense of Place” introduce you to fiber art as perhaps you’ve never seen it: royal ceremonial raiment made of pounded tree bark from Hawaii by Wendeanne Ke’Aka Stitt; hogs’ gut-covered tree “teeth” found on the forest floors of Maine by Pat Hickman; shredded remains of Vietnam War-era nurses uniforms turned into a hammock by Ke-Sook Lee; and a doll house by Amy Orr that is shingled inside and out with discarded credit cards. This metaphorical and entertaining group show at the Philadelphia Art Alliance is part of Fiber Philadelphia 2012, the two-month long international ... More » »
Not so ungovernable, the triennial roundup at the New Museum
When the New Museum created its signature show, the triennial of emerging artists, in 2009, it laid claim to territory that was once the exclusive realm of the Whitney Biennial. The inaugural exhibit, “Younger Than Jesus” sprawled through the museum and actually had the feel of a Whitney Biennial — there were a lot of artists making sprawling installations, and you were familiar with a lot of the names. This year’s triennial “The Ungovernables” feels radically different. Here the New Museum separates itself from the Whitney by being truly global — with seemingly 99 percent of the artists from outside ... More » »
People’s Biennial – outsiders and insiders together in a good big show
THE WHITNEY Biennial in New York claims to take the pulse of the country’s art scene every two years, but the mother of all American art exhibits rarely digs deeper than New York or Los Angeles. For the radical “People’s Biennial” now at Haverford College, curators looked elsewhere. The exhibit eschews work from major art centers in favor of five regional outposts (including Philadelphia) chosen through a jury process open to all. Organized by artist Harrell Fletcher of Portland, Ore., and curator Jens Hoffmann of San Francisco, People’s Biennial originated when the two brought their idea for a nontraditional biennial to Independent ... More » »
Art Miami and Design Miami, 2011
On the way to Art Miami, held this year in the midst of a group of other fairs in Wynwood, across the bay from Miami Beach, I ran into Jason Mussen who was heading off to see a friend at Scope, one block south. Jason had come to Miami to do Hennessy Youngman Presents: His History of Art at the NADA fair on December 1, and commented that the entry price to Art Basel Miami Beach was prohibitive. It was. I mentioned that those of us in Philadelphia wish him well, but also wish his descriptor, living in New York ... More » »
Art Basel Miami Beach 2011
I decided to take it easy at the fairs this year, assuming that, as with large conferences, I’d certainly discover interesting work but was unlikely to predict ahead of time just where I’d find it. One obvious new feature of Art Basel/Miami Beach this year was the prominence of furniture. Some of it was part of the work on display, such as Dan Peterman‘s Running Tables at Klosterfelde, Berlin, despite the fact that the staff were sitting on the built-in seats to eat their lunch; I assume his recycled plastics can handle the wear.
Chirp without the buzz – FIAC comes and goes in Paris
The Art Fair Bird alighted in Paris about three weeks ago in the form of the FIAC. What was “in” then is probably already “out” but here is a brief and patchy survey of the scene.
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