Fairs After Fairs

John Haber
in New York City

NADA House 2019, Portal, and Frieze Sculpture

Hate the art fairs for never seeming to end? Allow them to linger for months, only starting with Frieze week.

Three fairs draw their public out of doors, starting even before the usual run of New York summer sculpture. NADA House and then Portal GI take to Governors Island, where visitors tired of the fairs can enjoy instead the landscaping and the history. Yet Frieze has outgrown its island as well, with Frieze Sculpture in midtown. If it makes a poor fit for Rockefeller Center, so these day do New Yorkers rather than tourists. Still, together they expand the very idea of an art fair. So what if the fairs are already, thank you, overblown enough?

New York's county fair

Hate the art fairs, too, for their unending commercialism and their fierce pressure on artists and dealers to survive? Consider an escape—to an art fair. NADA has given up the game, if only for now, apart from a residency on Governors Island well into summer. It remains modest and accessible, with fewer than fifty dealers in three houses on the island's Colonel's Row, most with just one artist per room. In its second year as NADA House, it is also making itself at home. That home may look awfully run down. Still, compared to fair booths, it helps contributors look more relevant as art.

The artists are making themselves at home, too. They take over the former officers quarters as if making them over for a fresh start. They add draperies and wall painting, like Ayana Evans (with EFA Robert Blackburn), Denise Kupferschmidt (with Halsey McKay), and Joseph Hart (with Romer Young). They fill cabinets and closets with their paintings, like Billy Jacobs (with False Flag) and A.I.R., the women's collective. Ethan Greenbaum (with Lyles & Kin) boards up old walls or, depending on how you look at them, creates new ones as part of the shifting ground of his reliefs. Mournful silhouettes in anything but mournful colors by Emma Kohlmann (with Jack Hanley) happily ascend the stairs. The remaining paint is still peeling, but Zach Martin (with Fisher Parrish) adapts to that, too, with a smoky gray.

Martin also supplies furniture, only in a slippery resin—as do Tony Pedemonte (with Creative Growth), only bound up in yarn, and Paul Gabrielli (with New Discretions), only in miniature. Others offer table settings, like Katy Fischer (with Geary) in shelves of broken pottery and Laurie King (with Franz Kaka), who fills metal bowls with . . . I hesitate to say. James Hoff (with Callicoon) is already recycling glass and plastic, to keep up with what he calls a "marketing revolution." Sophie Stone (with Safe) takes care of area rugs, although her coarse weave also extends to walls. Kristin Walsh (with Helena Anratha) brings bedroom clocks, although they tick ominously in cold steel. Fernanda Fragateiro and Shahrzad Kamel (with Josée Bienvenu) stock a "reading room" for books on the Cold War, while used saddles serve Ilana Savdie (with ltd los angeles) as a backyard swing.

Maybe, they suggest, art just needs a real fair after all, rather than collectors swooping in for the weekend and swooping out to the next global city. (Whether buyers will bother with the ferry to the island is another matter.) Like a craft fair or county fair, they invite one to linger over warm summer months and to feel part of a community. New York already had that model, with the Governors Island Art Fair at the end of the season. NADA House merely fills the gap in time and responds more effectively to its site.

It also responds to obvious trends. The New Art Dealers Alliance favors emerging and midlevel dealers, many from New York's Lower East Side, that art so desperately needs. Yet to them this is business as usual. It has its fabric and ceramics. It has its creepy allusions to the human body. Gender appears explicitly with fierce pussy, the AIDS activists (with Essex Flowers), and African Americans with Bailey Scieszka (with What Pipeline)—in gilded portraits much like those of Titus Kaphar. The fluid boundary between painting and sculpture enters faces in relief by Anya Kielar (with Rachel Uffner) as well as the installations.

Still, it mostly steps around political art. The island's history as military and Coast Guard base appears only obliquely as well. Tyler Healy (with AA/LA) does place a colonial era sword and uniform past a blue tarp and curtain of shells that he might have gathered from New York's harbor. Yet the most haunting reminders come, of all things, with a visitor from Dubai. Sara Rebar (with Carbon 12) turns old leather into a battered flag and old rifles into dark sculpture. If Louise Nevelson had sought a very different revolution than her own, she might have found it here. She might also have found a home.

Fences and portals

The Governors Island Art Fair has become Portal GI—with good reason. For all the island's military history and the run-down charm of its Colonel's Row, it was never much good at looking back. Like most alternative fairs, its contributors would rather look within, with art as portals to the imagination. Like most artist-centered fairs, too, its portals may not lead much of anywhere beyond video games and pop culture, but it has improved. Like NADA House shortly before, it gives each artist a room in which to play, through weekends in September.

Not that many are all that site specific, although Patty Gone brings her Kitchen Sink Drama to a kitchen, while Anne Muntges and Unhee Park redecorate living rooms, Muntges with penciled brickwork. Eliesha Grant has her unmade bed, annotated by newsprint, as Pain Is Pain. More often, they hope to dive deeper. BB Devan Symone Worth has her purple "escape room" even before Claudia Hart in new media, Federico Muelas, Simona Prives, and Michael Coffino their dark grottos. They can be showy, like Rene Gortat with a pink Volkswagon, Rose Deler with aluminum clothing, Sherri Hay with "performing fabric," Bobby Anspach with a tent of fur balls, Mark Lora with cardboard trestles, Will Kurtz with a preposterously oversized bulldog, Michelle Frick with long-necked birds, and too many rooms of artificial flowers. Every so often, though, they take flight.

They have their domestic drama, like Tara Kopp in paint and Cynthia Ruse with her Pages from the Book of Light. David Siever accompanies his model lighthouse with a catalog of heroes and villains. African American portraits in photographs by Phenomenal Lewis are more elusive still. They have a fondness, too, for nature, if not the view out the window. Aerial photos by Jonathan Ellis look onto a strangely empty American heartland. Biota cover oriental screens by Michael Henley, foil by Shiri Mordechay, and decorative frames by Gig Chen.

More than in past years, as organized by 4heads.org, the fair goes beyond painting and obvious genres. Sizhu Li has kinetic sculpture, with its tape output a slow wave, while Petar Sapundjiev translates rain into digital sound art. Video can become overbearing. It escapes its limits most fully, though, on the lawn outside. Sure enough, the imagery there runs to barriers and portals. Just try to decide which is which.

Fences and points of entry alike become markers of slow, organic growth. A segmented arch by Jeremy Munson sure looks like a gateway, but it serves as a tower for wind chimes—heavy ones that toll the hours in a world that can no longer tell time. Four gates by Sarah E. Brook present a light and lovely Minimalism, until kids climb over them. Perhaps their parents are the ones converting a dark pool of rubber tires by Nicole Hixon into a hammock. A running fence might keep them out or in, but James Long has built it from young shoots. Black cords suspended from and embracing a wood circle, by Abraham McNelly, might be their gathering point in a silent ritual.

Others, too, build on Minimalism—like dark and dismembered trees by Heinrich Spillman that approach heavy slabs for Michael Heizer. Miggy Buck has a loopier kind, with a loose chain in the bright red of Alexander Calder or Mark di Suvero. Aaron Li-Hill adapts his gateway arch to human purposes, with life-sized photos that rise and fall in an extended stop-action leap. Male bodies appear as well for Patrick Hugh LaVergne, who gives "Men at Work" signs suggestive poses. They appear implicitly, too, with Kimberly Walker, as bags for military gear pile up like body bags. Come back to the island soon for its new LMCC Art Center, and come back next year to see whether Portal can do as much to look outward.

Fair grounds for sculpture

I may have to steel myself for the art fairs, but I can always look forward to installations that take art away from the competition and into the aisles. At the Armory Show, one work even spills out the door. Not that the taxi stand, ceilinged walkway, and exhaust from the West Side roadway add up to a sculpture garden. Last year in London, though, Frieze brought sculpture to Regents Park, and one can glimpse a still greener world outside the fair pavilion on Randall's Island in New York. Then again, people would have to get there to see sculpture, and art would have to come down when the fairs close. So Frieze Sculpture lands instead in Rockefeller Center.

Now if only it seemed to belong there—or made a point of not belonging. Ibrahim Mahama replaces the flags surrounding the rink with brown jute made in Ghana. They make for a drab and limited tribute to diversity. Three others, including Walter de Maria with modular rearrangements of shiny cylinders, slip into lobbies, for a reminder that art has been here before in classic sculpture and murals. The fourteen artists range from Joan Miró to a younger scene today and their galleries from such blue chips as Gagosian to Miguel Abreu on the Lower East Side. Yet they all fall victim to tourist crowds, old ideas, and arbitrary placement, like ever so much public art.

Jaume Plensa puts a bad face on things facing Fifth Avenue, with one of his slim but enormous white heads, here with hands covering its eyes. Its monumentality and glistening white reduce its pretense of pain to pabulum. Turning from Easter Island to Wonderland, Kiki Smith rests a lamb on a sleeping Alice as birds on a wire fly overhead. Anywhere else it would be allusive and endearing, but here it had me longing for the more playful Wonderland statue in Central Park. Rochelle Goldberg envisions a "post-ecological reality" and an "apocalyptic Noah's ark." Yet her child's head and paired lizards lack the promised scale, multiplicity, and foreboding.

Indoors at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, modest blocks by Pedro Reyes frame the lobby desk and the mural by José Marîa Sert behind it, American Progress. Like Oscar Murillo at The Shed, they hope to call attention to the censorship that replaced an earlier Mexican mural by Diego Rivera, banished because it contained V. I. Lenin. Their tongue and eye will have to stand for a jaguar and a seer—and their high purpose for site-specific art. Inside 10 Rockefeller Plaza, Goshka Macuga tackles Dean Cornwell's Depression-era History of Communications. The heads of Yuri Gargarin, the cosmonaut, and Stephan Hawking in garish green may not take things past the fall of the Soviet Union, but they signal an International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation. So why do they look in such pain?

The rest land behind the rink, in the shadow of Paul Manship's towering Prometheus. Miró's chained doors look forlorn but ominous, and they call attention to the conservatism of Aaron Curry, with a pretend Isamu Noguchi. Paulo Nazareth further suggests the limits of public sculpture, with great moments in history, such as the black power salute at the Mexico City Olympics. His appropriations are literally and figuratively flat. Nick Cave stages an African American protest, too, by connecting a bronze gramophone speaker to a raised fist—only it grows out of the arm's elbow rather than the hand. Cave could almost have dropped it there by mistake.

Sarah Sze and José Davila turn instead to another trope of outdoor sculpture, that of nature and culture. Sze splits a rock, creating faces for pixilated postcard sunsets, while Davila binds a rock between two white concrete blocks with a bright red belt, like gift wrapping at Christmas. Only Hank Willis Thomas at last adds public space to a great public plaza, like Jean Dubuffet before him. Comfortably off to the side, he uses the outlines of kapow! and speech balloons in comic strips as colorful benches. Kids climb on them, even if adults may yet have second thoughts. The rest stand on the brink of breaking out, only to stumble against the art fair and the site.

jhaber@haberarts.com

NADA House ran on Governors Island through August 4, 2019, and Portal GI through September 29, Frieze Sculpture in Rockefeller Center through June 28.