It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly it happened, but the Armory this year is little more than a trade show for household decorations. In spite of the fair’s dramatic decline, New York is still a great city for art. For those of us tired of megafairs, here are our top alternatives for the weekend.
1. Bronx Museum
Martin Wong: Human Instamatic
A gay Asian-American, Wong’s expressive visual language tells a story of desire amid hardship. His meticulous depictions of urban ruins feels warm, rather than obsessive. It’s been a long time since we’ve encountered such sincere and visceral paintings. Before his young death Wong also, incidentally, owned the largest collection of graffiti in the world.
2. Whitney Museum of American Art
Andrea Fraser
Open Plan: Andrea Fraser
The photos show a cavernous space with river views that’s seemingly empty of art—but Andrea Fraser has filled it with sounds she recorded from a correctional facility. The installation suggests that the museum and the prison share more in common than one might think. It’s the first in an experimental five-part exhibition, that also includes Lucy Dodd and Steve McQueen among others, as the Whitney reinvents itself.
Mixing interactive installation and moving image, the works deal with Poitras’s research into surveillance, war and borders. Her concerns seemed prescient before, but now seem mundane—which might be just what we have to worry about. A safe show, but there’s no harm in seeing it.
3. The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Maria Hasabi: Plastic
It’s become very trendy for museums to commission live performances in response to the space or collection of a museum. Plastic “confronts” the viewers with the performers’ alternating stillness and movement, almost like GIFs made physical. Described by curator Thomas Lax as “pictures flooded with multiple references,” Plastic seems intended to go straight from the museum to your Instagram. The evocation of classical sculpture is lovely, but it hardly feels like the great risk Lax makes it out to be.
Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective
MoMA has been historicizing the 1960s for a while—it’s for a reason, since the decade continues to feel fresh. Young artists and collectors should definitely see Marcel’s video of himself writing with ink in the pouring rain. Or, for example, his absurd Analyse d’une peinture, a video that zooms into painting to the point of illegibility. The eggs and mussels he loved for their double meanings in French. That and more, all test the ambivalent boundary between institutional critique and the unfettered celebration of found objects.
Marcel Broodthaers, La Pluie, 1969.
Marcel Broodthaers, La Pluie, 1969.
4. Grey Gallery, NYU
Global/Local 1960–2015: Six Artists from Iran
A mid-sized show with elegant ambience—check Chohreh Feyzdjou’s installation Series E, which is patched together from fragments of paintings. The result is a monument that deconstructs the process of art-making, rather than celebrating history. It recalls the solemnity of work by Jannis Kounellis or Anselm Kiefer, without being as forced.
Chohreh Feyzdjou’s work.
Shahpour Pouyan, Projectile 10.
5. Moving Image
Better than last year’s. Check out Mika Taanila’s My Silence, a work of “reduced cinema” with wiped-out dialogue from a classic film by Louis Malle. Bereft of plot, the images become newly poetic.
Mika Taanila, My Silence, 2013.
6. Spring/Break Art Show
Supposedly the coolest young art fair—though it’s trying hard to grow older. Although there are a few interesting young talents, this year’s theme “Copy+Paste” seems like a derivative mix of art school textbook entries: Richter, Genzken, Flavin, Gober and Oldenburg are the order of the day. NOTE: If your art isn’t working, appropriation ain’t going to make it better.
Greg Haberny: Unhinged a Special Project curated by Catinca Tabacaru. Photo courtesy of Samuel Sachs Morgan and SPRING/BREAK Art Show.
Mutually Assured Destruction by Fall On Your Sword curated by Anderew Gori and Ambre Kelly. Photo courtesy of Samuel Sachs Morgan and SPRING/BREAK Art Show.
DRIP curated by Lalita Salander + Patrick Jaojoco. Photo courtesy of Samuel Sachs Morgan and SPRING/BREAK Art Show.
Chop Shop At SPRING/BREAK 2016, Curated By Magda Sawon
7. Volta NY
Maybe it’s because Volta is all solo projects, but the installations here appear too neat. Amidst the flood of painting and sculpture, Hsu Che-Yu’s 5-channel video installation Perfect Suspect weaves a melancholy animation into crime scene reenactments. Though perhaps not the most polished work, it’s the freshest.
Hsu Che-Yu, Perfect Suspect, 2011.
Hsu Che-Yu, Perfect Suspect, 2011.
8. Now back to The Armory Show
To say The Armory Show is boring is a cliché. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. Moving image works were rare as endangered birds. Shih Chieh Huang’s immersive installation transformed a booth into underwater depths populated with magical bioluminescent sea creatures.
In the context of rampant, state-sanctioned racism, the Armory Show Focus on African perspectives could have made a radical statement: it didn’t.
Booth View of London Vigo Gallery in The Armory Show Focus section.
Shih Chieh Huang’s Disphotic Zone at Booth 844.
