Brian Andrew Whiteley’s “National Bigfoot Sanctuary” at SELECT
There were a handful of projects at SELECT that we were looking forward to seeing, and a few pleasant surprises. Unfortunately, finding any art that we wanted to see involved running a gauntlet of sights, sounds, and crowds that were cramped at best and abrasive at worst, perhaps even dangerous. (Frankly, we’re surprised some of the night’s performances didn’t attract the attention of the fire marshal.) Mostly, the space was not designed to accommodate booths, and trying to shoehorn an art fair into the former Dia building was not a good idea. Exhibitors ended up with awkwardly small spaces that they generally tried to cram too much stuff into. On the busy opening night, circulation was next to impossible. Add to this already-claustrophobia-inducing floor plan a bunch of overlapping performances occurring in the same small room, and it’s a recipe for an art-viewing disaster.
The fair occupies the building’s second, third, and fourth floors, plus some programming on the rooftop. Overall, the art on view often reveled in the puerile—perhaps a reflection of fair curator Brian Andrew Whiteley’s taste. Whiteley, an artist himself, created an installation set in a national park that includes two Bigfoots—or are they “Bigfeets”?— fucking.
The second floor was pretty standard satellite art-fair work: punny pieces, self-referential painting, and pop-art influenced decor.
The third floor looks like Whiteley tried to shove a commercial version of Burning Man into someone’s apartment. Performers were everywhere. So much so that we couldn’t tell which performers were part of which performances—a group in elaborate dresses made from milk cartons seemed stuck between a duo scrubbing latex off of each other’s naked bodies in a tub of what might also have been milk and a man violently swinging a guitar over everyone’s head to produce what might have been the worst sound we have ever heard. That’s not a compliment.
The rest of the weekend’s programming promises to keep things weird. We’re looking forward to an interactive installation by Lisa Dillin, whose work we reviewed and loved a few years ago. On Saturday at 6 p.m., Transmitter is presenting her Allogrooming Lounge, which invites attendees to engage in social-grooming rituals inspired by our primate ancestors. Starting today, the Marina Abramović institute and FRIEDE & Co. are co-presenting a durational performance by Millie Brown. It was announced with what could quite possibly be the most eyeroll-inducing press release in the history of art fairs:
Over the course of four days, Millie Brown will immerse herself in a room of light and looping sound, while grains of sand gradually fall onto her head and body until she is completely covered. The performance will result in Brown buried in a pyramid of sand, physically marking time. Brown explores elements of stillness, time, and meditation in this work, while inviting the public to share moments of deep concentration. Through four cycles of the sun, Brown will continuously submerse herself in light, allowing her body and mind to absorb its energy in all forms: physically, sonically, and symbolically. Focusing on the actual sound of the sun, she aims to transcend into a state of pure light.
We’re not really sure how one sonically absorbs the energy of sounds the sun makes from inside a building, or what that has to do with sand, but we’re mostly wondering how she’s going to poop. This harkens back to Marina Abramovic’s pee-in-the-pan news stories from the Artist Is Present. How did she pee? Eventually she answered the clamoring crowd. She held it in.
As for the fourth floor—it’s a welcome refuge from the performance zoo downstairs. Mostly Brooklyn galleries occupy the space, many of which had thinned down their shows into coherent presentations. Rhombus Space put together a thoughtful abstract painting show curated by Katerina Lanfranco. Aaron Williams’s pairing of the carpet pattern from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining laser cut into a red board turns improbable historical references into formalist fodder. Beside Williams, slashes of white paint on a large surface by Shawn Powell disrupted carefully taped and painted horizontal stripes. Beneath it, you’ll see a green background that merges into blue; it looks like a landscape as seen through a damaged CRT screen, or simply an abstract painting. As with all strong abstraction, you get what you put into it.
One booth over, Transmitter, a new Brooklyn gallery created library-like shelves to display small paintings by artists Gilbert Hsiao, Meridith Pingree, and Emmy Mikelson, among others. Those looking for a good overview of serious emerging artists working with abstraction will find it here. And Pioneer Works is showing Christopher Kardambikis’s absurd mythology for the future through a series of meticulously rendered drawings, posters, and pamphlets. What’s in store for mankind isn’t entirely clear—the project combines the aesthetics of scientific papers with those of conspiracy theorists so the details are largely unintelligible—but we know it involves an asteroid and a big wave. It’s an obsessive, weird project that we enjoyed for the artist’s dedication to its premise.
Projects like these are great to see, but can easily be overshadowed by how chaotic the fair is. It would be nice to see SELECT mature in coming years to suit its name—a more curated program that provides more breathing room to fewer galleries. There’s great potential to provide a platform for serious emerging galleries and artists, but expecting viewers to navigate an obstacle course of schlock might be asking too much.
Highlights below.
SECOND FLOOR
Of all the work we saw on the second floor, this painting with the words “Today is Friday” fingered on it was the only one we liked. Installation view: Claudine Maidique Gallery
THIRD FLOOR
It was a little hard to see the film loop Skowhegan presented during opening night—they were directly in front of the guy hurtling his electric guitar attached to a bungee cord into space—but the line up looks great: Mike Calway-Fagen, Jonathan Ehrenberg, Amy Finkbeiner, Victoria Fu, Meredith James, Andrew Ellis Johnson, Siobhan Landry, Sarah Lasley Dan Levenson, Ann Oren, Chris Sollars, and Cheryl Yun.
Lisa Dillin’s stuffed rocks on fur
Upon close inspection, we noticed Lisa Dillin’s plants were real. Normally, she makes trompe l’oeil versions of the plants in her work, a level of detail we missed here.
Millie Brown’s cordoned-off sand. We’d call this more of a reference to what we wrote above than a highlight.
FOURTH FLOOR
Odetta Gallery
Shawn Powell (left) and Katherine Keltner (right) at Rhombus Gallery
Transmitter Gallery
Pioneer Works
Steven Gagnon shows cutout silhouettes of women and fills them with shoes. Some of the women are also wearing shoes that look like the shoes that they are filled with.
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Select Fair is a waste of time. It’s embarrassing to see legit organizations like Franklin Furnace participating in such a lo-brow affair. A lot of the newbie Brooklyn galleries (and their followers) were seduced by the art market frenzy, but it ends up hurting everybody because the wacky performances and poor quality control is such a turn off for informed audiences.
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