Art Fair Review: The Armory Show
As one walks through Manhattan’s West Side to the Hudson River, the wind becomes stronger and the historic Armory Show comes into focus, a billowing white-sheeted structure that spans the long boardwalk between Piers 90 and 94. Upon entering the gusty walkway, one is immersed in a cocktail of trendy international art-collectors in disposable ear-looped masks and eccentric artists in a chartreuse cape or Baroque-era fascinator. Queued to check their coats and roam the piercingly-bright lounge area are distinguished patrons looking to furnish their Hamptons homes. A glass of champagne is $24 and a ketchup and mustard paint-splattered canvas – which couldn’t have been larger than the size of a vinyl record – is going for half a million dollars. As my first time attending this show, I wish I had worn my pearls.
The Armory Show is one of New York City’s premier annual art fairs. Every year, it marks the beginning of Spring for art fans and collectors as much as the Punxsutawney groundhog does for the hoi polloi. However, this opening had a decidedly different mood, as the impending COVID-19 outbreak baffles the city’s spirit and alters the normalcy of social engagement. After suffering last year’s late-breaking drama surrounding a structurally unsound pier, The Armory once again braced for unforeseen chaos.
Those in the art industry are understandably concerned about what the virus means for their well-being, as well as for the health of their galleries. As Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency on the final day of the art fair, those at The Armory substituted cautious elbow taps for handshakes and cheek kisses. That being said, in an era where the artists’ social engagement is primarily online, large art fairs during Armory Week remain critical hubs for the art community.
This year, 183 galleries set up their booths across Piers 90 and 94 with an eclectic array of paintings, sculptures, installations, and other works. Despite a slightly more subdued crowd, and many patrons garbed in latex gloves in lieu of the quotidian leather, dealers reported satisfactory sales at the end of the VIP day. This year’s fair, for the first time, dedicated an entire pier to curated projects, presenting exhibitions by curators Jamillah James, Nora Burnett Abrams, and Anne Ellegood in the Focus, Perspectives, and Platform sections.
The fair featured noticeably fewer photographers than years prior and overwhelmingly more painters than any complicated installations or technology. With the café gouging pockets and red dots stamping every other canvas, a sinister take would be that The Armory was nothing more than a commercial venture. Yet, in an atmosphere darkened by the international pandemic, an especially divisive presidential election, and the general unease of our environmental, social, and political climate – the show also exhibited a fair amount of activist art.
For instance, tucked in the nucleus of Pier 94, Sean Kelly’s presentation of photographer Dawoud Bey’s acclaimed series “Harlem U.S.A.” (1975–1979) took the viewers on a journey through Bey’s historic neighborhood. As a young man growing up in Queens, Bey was intrigued by his family’s history in Harlem. “It is in those relationships and the lives of the people that these pictures recall that the deeper meaning of these photographs can be found,” Bey wrote in 1979 about his series – which are small, documentary, monochromatic photos taken with a handheld 35mm camera.
In another booth, which similarly recontextualizes architecture and landscape of places close to our hearts, Viktor Popović’s photographic display in C24 Gallery at Pier 90 juxtaposed archival images and new photographs of Split, Croatia. Using old postcard images of the Croatian coast, a destination for vacationers and travelers, overlaid with new photographs of the post-war ruins, he ventured through politics inherent in physical space. With luscious textures and neon pigmentation, the simple but effective message on the extensive effects of war explored our perception of memories and impermanence.
Hales Gallery, at Pier 94, presents the 1976 Christopher Street series, photographed by Sunil Gupta, which captures a specific moment in history – the contradicting madness of perhaps the most dynamic community in New York City, which both was thriving and dying rapidly during the 70s.
Born in India and moving to Canada as a teenager, it was not until Gupta arrived in a post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS Greenwich Village that he first saw openly gay people. Gupta cruised the gay mecca of Christopher Street for subjects and lovers. Suited in the trendiest fashions, moving through space with a swagger and comfort of community, their visibility and documented flourishment is a distinct and poignant period of public consciousness of LGBTQ people in NYC.
There were two booths that particularly caught my eye, chromatically and compositionally. The photographs of Cassils performing in the dark with a giant block of clay are at Ronald Feldman at Pier 94 were a spectacle, to say the least. Cassils is gender non-conforming and transmasculine, drawing on conceptualism, feminism, body art, gay male aesthetics. Cassils’ extreme physical training – from weightlifting to Muay Thai martial arts – the artist pushes the definition of a "biologically female body” without testosterone or surgery, transforming into a series of powerful, performative acts.
Large scale color photographs depicted Cassils contorting, sweating, and undulating through the air – like a one-ton clay pendulum. The strobe photography added an saturated turbulence to the aggression of the photos. The visual critique around gender identity, was entrancing in its beautiful gruesomeness, attracting the largest in-person viewership at the pier.
Lastly, also at Pier 94, in a visually lush and chaotic but visually-pleasing ceramic color printing on glass, APALAZZOGALLERY presented Jonas Mekas’ In an Instant it All Came Back to Me. With 768 original slides, 768 frames from the films released between the ’60s and the ’90s are, for the first time in the artist’s career, impressed on 32 monumental glass plates. Lithuanian poet and movie-maker, Mekas, presented a visually-stimulating experience with hues of violet and delphiniums, like the cool wash of glacier ice rushing past you.
Conclusively, The Armory Show, while massive in structural grandeur and opulence, had notable work from prestigious artists that deserved attention and recognition from patrons and collectors, alike. In a press release, organisers of The Armory Show said the next show would move locations, offering exhibitors and guests easier access, superior facilities, and proximity to The Highline, the Chelsea Arts District, and Hudson Yards. Could it be Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg’s $250 million “Little Island” on Pier 55?
Images by Joe Rovegno
