You might have thought that New York had reached the saturation point in contemporary-art fairs, but no. A new one has just arrived. It’s called Independent. And it is housed, quite attractively, in the old Dia Center for the Arts space in Chelsea, lately home to the utopian X Initiative.To some extent, the spirit of X Initiative lives on in Independent, which in its press material carefully avoids the term art fair, preferring to call itself a collective, a consortium and a “hybrid model and temporary exhibition forum.” The New York dealer Elizabeth Dee, founder of X Initiative, is a founder of Independent as well, along with Darren Flook, director of the gallery called Hotel in London. And here, too, the prevailing ethic is conscientiously democratic.
With only 40 galleries spread over three enormous upstairs floors, the atmosphere is open and airy. Sparing use is made of the kind of divider walls that make the Armory Show look like a million walk-in closets. Instead, territoriality is de-emphasized; it’s hard sometimes to know where one gallery space ends and another begins. With so few visual impediments, a visitor can take in much of each floor at a glance.
The conventional art-fair caste system, which gives certain power galleries privileged visibility, has been modified, though not eliminated. Moss/Westreich-Wagner, a Manhattan collaborative that blends art and design, gets a big separate room right inside the entrance to the second floor, and one of its members, Thea Westreich, is listed as a creative adviser to the fair.
But, over all, the Independent participants are on more or less equal footing. The V.I.P.-isms of the Armory Show — lounges for extra-special people, the whole language of exclusive this and that — are absent. So is any admission fee. Independent is free to all visitors.
It is still, of course, a money-making proposition, or so its participants must fervently hope. And in the end, success will depend at least as much on the novelty of the merchandise offered as on event packaging. There are some problems in this regard. A certain amount of the art here is indistinguishable from what you find at the Armory Show or on a regular basis in Chelsea galleries.
The selection at London’s Maureen Paley gallery of photographs by James Welling and Wolfgang Tillmans and paintings by the 2010 Whitney Biennial artist Maureen Gallace holds no surprises for New Yorkers. Nor does the lineup of Jutta Koether, Eileen Quinlan and Cheyney Thompson at Sutton Lane. These are good artists, but we see quite a bit of them.
It’s nice to have a fair where commercial and nonprofit spaces rub shoulders, though the rubbing doesn’t produce much heat here. The nonprofit Artists Space takes the opportunity of the fair to advertise an exhibition by the Glasgow artist Duncan Campbell that opens on Saturday in its SoHo gallery.
Two years ago Mr. Campbell made an extraordinary film about the Irish activist Bernadette Devlin. Recently he has turned his attention to the story of the ill-fated American carmaker John DeLorean, which accounts for the presence of a vintage DeLorean DMC-12 on Independent’s fourth floor, a blast from the past in industrial design.
Like many fairs, this one provides some valuable introductions, or reintroductions, to figures who don’t get the attention they merit. One is the British artist Edward Lipski, seen in generous supply at the Approach, from London. It’s great to stumble across an early Robert Breen film piece at the Parisian gallery gb agency and to find at McCaffrey Fine Art two marvelous vintage photographers, Koji Enokura (1942-95) and Jiro Takamatsu (1936-98), who have had relatively little exposure outside Japan.
But contemporary shows are really about discovering new art and unfamiliar galleries. Independent has some of each. For instance, the young artist Danh Vo, born in Vietnam and living in Berlin, is a huge deal in Europe, and you’ll find some of his work at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi.
Two graduates of the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” triennial, Haris Epaminonda and James Richards, turn up at Rodeo, a cosmopolitan space from Istanbul, along with tiny portraits by the Cairo painter Anna Boghiguian and a fascinating photographic essay by Andreas Angelidakis on the decayed and looted villa outside Athens once owned by the art dealer Alexander Iolas (1907-87). (There’s a real story here about the villa.)
It’s nice when a gallery brings a representative sampler of one artist’s work, as Mitterrand and Sanz does with Michael Phelan. The fair also can give first looks at art that will turn up in galleries later. A 2009 film by the accomplished young American artist Jordan Wolfson called “Con Leche” — platoons of animated milk-filled Coke bottles marching to a confessional, Internet-scavenged voice-over — is making its New York debut at Johann König. That Berlin gallery is in a partnership here with Andrew Kreps, a Chelsea dealer, who has brought a big, reflective, space-shattering piece by Jeppe Hein.
For figurative sculpture, you might track down a strange little doll-size nude by Francis Upritchard at Kate MacGarry; a Lothar Hempel cutout at Stuart Shave might also fill the bill.
Winkleman Gallery has the one example of installation art, a relic of a memorable 2009 show set in the 1960s Soviet Union by Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation. And Sabot, a Romanian gallery from Cluj-Napoca, has lots of things, including a painting by Radu Comsa that doubles as a carpet and a choice collection of kitsch ceramics assembled by Vlad Nanca. I like this gallery and suspect that it has quite a few oddball surprises to reveal.
But for me the most interesting Independent participant wasn’t a gallery but a printed journal — possibly a journal that functions as a gallery — called Farimani, founded by the 20-something artist Amir Mogharabi. Devoted to art, music and theory, and more specifically to the subtle ways in which these disciplines intersect, the journal has so far been published twice, in limited editions. A total of 11 issues are planned, each to be larger than the last. But since the first two appeared two years apart, the project could go on for a while.
In addition to its hard-copy form, Farimani has online text and audio components, both edited by Michael Capio, a critic and independent curator, who will be piping spontaneous readings of sound poetry and improvised music performances into the building’s stairways over the next three days. I couldn’t say exactly what’s going on in this project, but when you find the names Adrian Piper, Franz Kafka and Peter Frith mentioned in the same breath, you know something is.
And the project seems particularly pertinent to the context of this art fair. Farimani, with its streaming, tangling mix of words, images, sounds and ideas, exemplifies something like the “hybrid model” that Independent says its wants to be but is not, or at least not in any mold-breaking way. It’s basically art-fair business as usual with a little twist.
