5.27.24 — Skipping the Fairs
Is it Memorial Day at last, a time to embrace summer in the city and to put spring arts behind us? Allow me to do so as best I can in the rain, with a parting look back at the madness. But wait: could I have missed it?
After so many years and so many vows, I finally got up the courage: I skipped the New York art fairs. Well, not quite, but I did skip the massive, classy May leaders, Frieze and TEFAF. I felt the relief from the pressure to see it all, to record it all, and to pick winners. 
That is not what I think good criticism can and should do. Can I bring myself to skip the Armory Show and the mad rush in September?
We shall see, but for now I stuck to the alternative fairs, so forgive me a correspondingly brief report. As usual, a small fair for African and African America artists, I-54 (now in the Starrett-Lehigh building west of Chelsea galleries), provides a touch of diversity and invention. As usual, too, the Independent in Tribeca brings a much-needed quality and energy. It also comes a week later than the rest, as if to say that you missed nothing. That leaves what might, generously, be called the strivers. Are these really the alternatives in art now? Maybe not, but a new fair, Esther, heads across town to a nineteenth-century townhouse that welcomes and clashes happily with the art.
As ever, Salon Zürcher claims the title of a fair for a group show of eleven women. It includes rubbings by Margaret Cogswell that seem to dive into the wreck, a tight grid of holographic tape by Marietta Hoferer, collage abstraction with an emphasis on color by Phillis Ideal, and faces barely hiding their identity and anxiety by Judith Henry. They show the advantages of a curator’s choices, and a self-curated fair like Clio or Superfine can only drive that home. Not everyone without a gallery is too adventurous for the system, and tightly hung clusters of work barely rescues it from the trash. Still, the strivers within the system do drive the action, not least the members of the New Art Dealers Alliance. Whether as NADA House on Governors Island or again in the former Dia:Chelsea, where the Independent, too, got its start, it is a place for young old favorites.
NADA’s fair has expanded to a truly international gathering, including nonmembers, most with stripped-down versions of their current shows. Still, it may work better as a supporting network than a fair. So does the Future fair, despite some inviting selections of abstract art with Kathryn Markel by the entrance. Booths had me wishing after all for the game changers and market leaders at Frieze in the Shed. Still, as Maynard Morrow (with GAVLAK) has it in a text painting, The Future Tis Not Ours to Ruin. Morrow, though, appears in another fair entirely with a real future, the Independent.
For its fifteenth anniversary, its alternative fair takes three rooms for fifteen galleries and artists from past years. They make a delightful noise—in wild and wooly takes on figurative art in 3D. Better, though, are the uncrowded booths for enduring but still adventurous galleries, media, and genres. Abstraction appears as a dialogue, as Alan Uglow and Jane Swavely (with Magenta Plains) trade horizontals and verticals as bases for its space—and as Kate Spencer Stewart (with Bureau) shows just how far brushwork and color can go within near-monochrome darkness. Andrew Brischler (also with GAVLAK) constructs portraits in close-up, but with a moving psychological reserve. Their hand-painted dots belong to neither Pop Art and commerce nor the digital and AI, but rather to a vivid sense of the present.
And then there is Esther, like the sound of your mother calling and unseen voices answering back. Margot Samel, a small dealer with an Estonian heritage, met up with an Estonia dealer, Olga Temnikova, and invited friends. They set out a welcome mat reading Esther at the entrance to Estonian House, normally a private club. Samel herself places a ceramic flower pot as if it had always been there, among works by Kris Lemsala, Bertha Leonard, and August Krogan-Roley. Facing it, a blue robe from Lewis Miller and Jesse Wine (with the Modern Institute in Glasgow) hovers beneath the wood molding like a ghost. If you feel out of place climbing the stairs, you may sense the ghosts.
Claims aside, Esther has only modest emphasis on Eastern Europe. You may not even know for sure just what is from where, as the display relies on a map rather than labels—so forgive me if I fell prey myself to mistaken identity. Diagonal partitions confuse things that much further, although they enliven wildly cut panels by Ernesto Burgos with Simone Subal. Yet the surroundings do matter. Another Tribeca gallery, Andrew Kreps, sets out a painting of eyes, in work from Camille Blatrix and Hadi Falapishi, as if watching you and the artists alike. They look skeptical, but they are just part of the show.
A visit could be a tour for prospective members or a game of Clue. It even has a pool room, where Talia Chetrit and Skuja Bradner (with Kaufmann Repetto) set their ceramics on the pool table. Nearby, Tom Forkin (with Someday) removes the pool table from a noted painting by Vincent van Gogh, dragging his brush across versions in monochrome and color. On the piano of all places rests a monitor, like the ultimate collision of old and new media. On video, Bony Ramirez and Oliver Herring (with BANK in Shanghai) invite artists in China to take their moves to a construction site seemingly in ruins, where they seem less to dance than to roll in mud and white dust. From art fairs to nations, the future will not come easily or all at once.