Anne Spalter, Precession, 2016, curated by Elizabeth Keithline
When the curator becomes the primary product, nobody wins. This is the main takeaway from the fifth iteration of the SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, where crowds wrapped around the block on Tuesday to enter the disused office spaces above Moynihan Station, the largest post office in New York. In this case, the curatorial takeover comes down to a numbers game; with over eight hundred artists and one hundred curators competing for attention spans in ninety individual spaces packed into the two floors of the fair, the foot traffic naturally gravitates toward the busiest hangings, and emphasizing the biggest names. In fact, the curators’ names are sometimes printed so large on the walls that the vie for attention normally given over to the exhibition and artist. The result is that the fair’s independent and project-based spirit loses out to a sprawling disorganized mass of curatorial impulses.
Under the theme of ⌘COPY⌘PASTE, which the fair’s organizers suggest entails anything that is reposted, copied, or rebroadcasted, the doors were opened to what would presumably be a flood of art engaging the digital condition of life we live today. To whit, a floor-to-ceiling digital wallpaper of New York landscapes, multiplied as if through a kaleidoscope, wraps the show’s entrance. Titled Precession by Anne Spalter, the installation rotely follows the fair’s theme by objectifying the digital through video screens and copied images printed on canvas. Thankfully many of the curators and artists did not bite on the fair’s theme. Though there are plenty of stereotypical post-internet works, enough projects at SPRING/BREAK seem to reject the more literal digital side of the theme to keep things interesting.
They’re also better capitalizing on the space this time around, compared to last year when they were moved to the post office at the last minute. This year, with plenty of advanced notice, the curators and organizers relish in installations that call attention to quirks like glass-doored offices, run-down closets, and imposing vaults in various states of finish.
Yet with so many booths in such tight quarters, the well-thought exhibitions are vulnerable to a hostile takeover by the curatorial network economy, which rewards calculated market-friendly aesthetics, self-promotion, and bold egos. Too many exhibition booths are incoherent. SPRING/BREAK desperately needs to cull its numbers before the fair becomes a glorified LinkedIn group.
Below are some of the highlights which rose above the crowds and curatorial mass filling Moynihan Station to the brim.
Auxiliary Projects’ “BULLDOZE/CEMENT” features works by Sonya Blesofsky and Susan Hamburger that focus on the intertwined histories of Moynihan and Pennsylvania Stations.
The artists reflect on the site through an assembly of decorative architectural materials and statuesque portraits of former presidents of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company
Room environments are a constant and the trope of the domestic or bedroom scene recurs throughout the fair, but LA-based artist Genevieve Gaignard makes smart use of the post office’s existing decor. The retro-interior emblematized by “Apt#3104,” recycles the office’s original wood panelling to contextualize Gaignard’s Cindy Sherman-esque character amidst found furnishings.
While digital sculpture-painting-objects are a recurring theme, David B. Smith’s “Extruded Daydream” is one of the few coherent exhibitions of such digitally woven “paintings” and sculptures. The works are processed from open-sourced digital images and manipulated into soft three-dimensional Rorschach blots and coils of glitched fabric.
Caroline Wells “Chandler’s From the Well of Salmakiss,” curated by Jacob Rhodes, is a colourful respite to the plethora of computer-aided weaving and sculpture. Hand-crocheted rather than digitally printed, Chandler’s cartoonish wool figures with mix-and-match genitalia are smart and fun explorations of transgender identity. The characters dance across the walls and embrace fluid sexuality to reflect the morphing and fluctuating status of contemporary identities.
Siebren Versteeg’s “Nutflux (prosumer) (2016)” at NO GAINS ON SACRIFICE, finely curated by Claire Mirocha and Vanessa Thill, is a riotous computer program that is supposed to create a print of a tshirt based on whatever the viewer says into its microphone. However it seems to constantly mishear what it is told; see the above proof of “Art Bag City.”
Artists in the group show “You Can Call Me Baby,” curated by Myla Dalbesio, focus on content and devices which have been used to demean or devalue women and reappropriate them as empowering and challenging works. Erin Riley’s textile work “2015 09 12 12, 5 04 AM” (2015) takes up the format of an online pornography video still, replete with a view count and three-and-a-half star rating. This portrait of dehumanizing online space and uses the weave of textile to render the figures anonymous and draws attention to the play button and pornotube apparatus as a means of alienating the women behind the screen.
Curtis Talwst Santiago’s “Minimized Histories,” curated by Magdalyn Asimakis, feature scenes of recent racial conflict reinterpreted through miniature dioramas in small repurposed antique jewellery boxes. “The Rape” (2014) features a woman being carried through a forest, referencing the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women, while “The Execution of Unarmed Blacks” (2014) references Goya in a miniature version of the Michael Brown shooting.
“Light Show,” curated by Jonah Freeman, uses the tools of police work to overload the senses. One room features a ceiling mounted police light which fills the space with alternating red and blue light. An interrogation room on the other side of the building has oversized ziptie handcuffs and posted notices reminding officers to correctly process their arrest forms. A spinning siren-light, much like the red-blue police light, effectively evokes a tense phenomenological encounter with jurisprudence.
“MHOAUNTDH,” curated by Amanda Uribe and Ché Morales. Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos’s “Fifteen Pair of Mouths” is an installation of hands frozen in the gesture of texting. It is installed alongside her video/sound installation “In Conversation”, wherein artist and translation technology engage each other in an exercise about the inconsistencies of algorithmic word production and the loss of meaning in digitally mediated language.
Greg Allen’s “Chop Shop,” curated by Postmasters’ Magdalena Sawon, best addressed the theme of ⌘COPY⌘PASTE while maintaining a criticality towards it. Allen made an absurdist gesture by offering up fragments of copied masterworks of contemporary art for sale by the square foot, like pizza. “Now, you too, can have a piece of Barnett Newman, Gerhard Richter or Andreas Gursky” the Chop Shop advertised from the former vault of the post office, “We have the scissors.”
At the end of my visit a ghoulish group of mutants from “The Fly” joined Jaimie Warren for a performance of nostalgic love ballads. Outside, an equally ghoulish crowd dozens deep crushed to make its way into the fair; the line to get in had wrapped fully around the post office’s facade.
Comments on this entry are closed.