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Mega art fairs

Jessica Peri Chalmers, South Bend Events Examiner May 4, 2011 - Like this? Subscribe to get instant updates. Add a comment Email Print

What is ART CHICAGO? Its an art fair. And what is an art

David Wojnarowicz Credits: David Wojnarowicz Rating for Art fairs:

fair? I know a few things about them, none of them definitive. First, that it doesnt have any purpose but selling art. Second, that the art being sold has not been appraised by critics and curators, but by the market. This Midwest art fair, perhaps the biggest and bestest as advertised, wants to be more. Art Chicago wants to be everything. It wants the allure of the cutting edge and the old guard both. It wants to be a gallery, a museum, a conference, an exposition, an arcade. Growing up in Greenwhich Village, NYC, there was a yearly art fair in Washington Square Park that always drew a measure of disdain by dint of its folksy presentation. Now celebrating its 81st year, this fair was crafty, with an emphasis on drawing and painting, hand-made items, jewelery. At a time when the avant-garde was energetically defining itself, the art fair seemed genteel, a thing for ladies rather than the fierce gents who were busy impaling themselves for truth.
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Mega art fairs - South Bend events | Examiner.com

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I never wanted to be a lady. I understood the choice: you were either a crafts person or an artist, a lover of

watercolors or a follower of grit and melancholy. You were, in other words, either cute or you were real. On the vast floors of the chic international world of art-fairing represented by Art Chicago, the easy oppositional terms that had been established for me as definitive in the 1970s were upended. In the high-end commercial milieu, cute was expensive and items from the heroic avant-garde of the 1970s, when they appeared, had a price-tag that reflected their value as something like antiques. Held on the sprawling floors of a new, green building called the Merchandise Mart, this was no hippy dippy crafty experience, but a high-art festival of precious objects from leading galleries across the world. On the other hand, the absence of a curatorial eye was obvious. Though the sheer volume of art seemed at first to compensate, this lack of guiding vision made the experience seem fruitless, in a way. If a curators role is to make art using the art of others in other words, making an intelligent selection of artworks to hang and display - here was art without theme or interpretation. The works at the art fair were hung without more explanation than the artists name and the title of the work. The price? As in any gallery: you had to ask.

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Randomly, I chose one gallerist in one vending cubicle to ask: Evan Lurie, who turned out to have owned a gallery a block

across the street from my first apartment in the East Village in New York City in the 1980s. Now he was running a gallery in the burgeoning Indianapolis art scene (who knew?), selling works by Alexander Calder and Joseph Cornell and others, many of them Latin American. The lowest price-tag, he obligingly revealed, was in the thousands.

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In another booth, the black-clad Swiss artist Marck was sitting chatting amongst his creations. How cool, these plasmascreened boxes of light, one felt, wondering a little about the fact that they all showed entrapped women. There was a woman, naked, in water, looking up blankly. A woman, naked, on her knees, semi-visible in a glass box. A woman rising and falling like a trapped doll inside a pachinko game. Plus a change, I thought -- but the technology was

http://www.examiner.com/events-in-south-bend/mega-art-fairs-review[9/15/11 10:26:34 PM]

Mega art fairs - South Bend events | Examiner.com

remarkable. Later, I attended a panel on Edgy Art in a nook set off slightly from the flow of the crowd. Edgy art: a euphemism for the avant-garde. The panel turned out to be a kind of farewell to the edgy that has been happening in the past decade or more, in various forms.

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The talks were loosely focused on the National Portrait Gallerys recent removal of a video by David Wojnarowicz

from one of their exhibitions. The video by this 80s artist contained an image of ants crawling on a crucifix. Offensive to the Catholic League, it was upheld by two of the speakers as the work of a complicated artist who was grappling with his religious upbringing in the age of AIDS. The speakers, of different generations, spoke from the perspectives of their peers.

Kunst 11 Zrich
17th International Art Fair, 17-20 November 2011
www.kunstzuerich.ch

The talks started with Patricia Hills, who, at around 70 years of age, has been professor of art history at Boston University for many years. She is also, notably, a white woman who specializes in African-American topics in art history. Hills had the familiar look and feel of her professorial generation: not hippy dippy but hippy casual. She had longish bright-white

hair and a tone of genteel indignation that could be heard above the rising din of the browsing crowds only with the help of a microphone. Her contribution to the topic was a list of censorship events in history, starting with the arrest of three artists at Judson Church, New York in 1969, for illegal uses of the American flag. Barry Blinderman, a curator and teacher at Illinois State University, Normal, spoke next about Wojnarowicz, whom he had also known personally. They called me a promoter of degenerate art, he said proudly, referring to a memo about Wojnarowicz that went to members of congress in the late 80s and contributed to the climate of culture wars and the ensuing backlash against public arts funding. In his early-tomid fifties, Blinderman was also a familiar generational type. He was goofy-smart. Bald, gay, plastic glasses. If Hills sounded an older note of indignation against the System (with corporate evil at its front), Blindermans note of outrage came straight from that moment in the late 80s when public funding suffered its most terrifying squeeze. He showed the Wojnarowicz film that had been cut and listed the triggers, as he put it, for censorship in recent history: religious or patriotic or sexual triggers. His use of the word trigger pointed to his outlook. Censorship as addiction. Finally, a graduate student in her 20s, Lauren Rosati, who

was there representing Papo Colo and Jeanette Ingbermanof Exit Art, the large, unfussy NYC gallery of total edginess founded in 1982. Rosati gave a powerpoint in which she

argued against censorship and for discussion. Unlike the others, she spoke explicitly as a member of her generation, to her generation. Young artists, she said, have a mandate to represent their times. She said it firmly and, as is the fate of the young, without apparent knowledge that it had already been said before, so many times, to so many new batches of

http://www.examiner.com/events-in-south-bend/mega-art-fairs-review[9/15/11 10:26:34 PM]

Mega art fairs - South Bend events | Examiner.com

young. The nice thing was that, to her, being avant-garde was not a moral imperative in the same way as it was for the

others. The indignation of the others was infused with nostalgia for older oppositions -- between the progressive and the normative -- and familiar battlefields. For Rosati, who was learning about these fields as the content of a graduate education, the imperative was simpler: be fearless.

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By Jessica Peri Chalmers South Bend Events Examiner Jessica Peri Chalmers has written articles for The Village Voice, Flash Art and other publications. She is a playwright and filmmaker with a PhD...

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