Folkert de Jong
The Death March: My Blood, My Oil, My Ass, 2007 [Installation view at
James Cohan Gallery booth at The Armory Show 2007] Styrofoam, adhesive
Dimensions variable
Image courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York
Monday evening February 26th:
“There’s paint on your left hand,” she said, as he extended his arm to receive a
bright orange wrist band for entry to Scope.
“I cleaned my right hy…and,” he replied.
“Why?”
“So I could shake hands with the dealers at the fairs.”
“Then why didn’t you scrub the left hand too?”
“I wanted to carry some reminder of where all of this art comes from.”
“All” was an understatement.
In the days since last Wednesday they had traversed countless square feet of floor space, looked up and down and all around the innumerable temporary walls and pedestals, even beds and dressers, rising perpendicular to those floors, all filled to near capacity - myriad canvases, sculptures and assemblages, works on paper, monitors, projections - brought to the New York art fairs from places as near as the next block to as far as South Africa, each waiting patiently to receive it’s allotted moment in the sun, and hopefully, more.
“Why do we go to art fairs?” he asked her.
“The same reason they have them?” she asked herself.
He looked down at his hands, left and right, and thought about his brain, right and left. Art and money, the business of art.
They watched as collectors dashed into waiting vehicles, carefully packed works in tow, and wondered which side of their brains they had used in making their choices, and, for that matter, if it had been the left or right brains of the exhibitors making the decisions about which artists to feature, and which pieces to display...
He rubbed his eyes.
Had their expectations been met? He had to think about this. Any disappointments, and, even more important, had there been any surprises?
At the Art Show, Cheim & Read had a beautiful booth of works by Louise Bourgeois - expected. Another presentation, this time of artist Suling Wang by Lehmann Maupin gallery, spectacular but predictable.
Then there was Pace Wildenstein’s booth…a series of abstract paintings or drawings, from a distance they thought, De Kooning, Pollack, maybe Hans Hoffman…approaching, they read that all were the work of Ad Reinhart.
Ad Reinhardt
Untitled, 1945, gouache on paper
19 x 23 " (48.3 x 60.2 cm)
Photo by: Kerry Ryan McFate / Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York
“Wow,” he said.
“That’s a surprise! ” she said.
“Not really,” he added. “After all, that's what you expect from Pace, isn’t it?Something different.”
It wasn’t until their last weary hour on the pier, when, footsore and bleary eyed, he was struck by a blast of color-saturated energy from museum-worthy canvas by Sean Scully, displayed by Timothy Taylor Gallery of London. His moment…
She thought about how so much of this past week had been spent in places they wouldn’t normally find themselves, two armories, for The Art Show and Pulse, hotels hosting Red Dot and DiVA, the Armory Show’s new single venue on the Pier, and Scope’s Pavilion on a park, and reflected how, only for this short time, those places had seemed like places they had been visiting forever, yet by tomorrow, with the art safely on it’s way to homes old and new, they would be utterly strange again, off their beaten track.
As they left Scope shortly before closing, a wave of moving fabric on the walkway floor reached out to their feet, then flowed back - a sculptural siren, beseeching them to remain.
On the way home, they passed the swarm of trucks surrounding Armory uptown, waiting for precious cargo. It was really over.
She tugged the prison-orange band on her wrist.
“It won’t come off,” she said.
He looked down at his own and said nothing.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Social Mirror 1983
photo courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery
links
Louise Bourgeois - Chiem Read
Folkert de Jong - James Cohan Gallery
Ad Reinhardt - PaceWildenstein
Mark Tobey - Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
By the Editors
resolve40 © 2007 all rights reserved
