I quickly encountered the myriad of haughty, elitist crowds that you associate with the art world. ("Gourmet" sandwiches costed $10+...and they had mere vegetables on them and were on your average wheat bread. Ridiculous.) However, regardless of these elitists, the art felt very attainable (and obviously this is the main purpose of the galleries in the Armory Show -- to sell their artists); there were no paintings behind glass. There were no guards watching your every move. Even though there were the snotty aristocrats, there was still a casualness to the whole affair, which was really appealing to me. I'd much prefer this setting to the MoMA. I saw a lot of inventive, fresh work at the Armory, and I was really excited that I was fortunate enough to be in town for it.
Inside the Armory Show.
Alessandra Sanguineti's "On the Sixth Day," is a photographic series she shot while in Buenos Aires. They served to document the relationship she observed between man and animal while in Buenos Aires. These pieces were really powerful and disquieting.
Michael Romer's piece Time is a projection of tiny black forms pacing across a piece of ashen rock mounted on the wall. The buglike forms, which represent humans, projected on the ageless rock creates a mood of insigificance in the face of time -- in the face of deep geological time.
I was really struck by the German artist Erik Schmidt's painting:
This reproduction does it absolutely no justice (as reproductions usually don't). I snapped a quick picture of it while a man was measuring it for his living room...It's composed entirely with thick dollops of paint. There's no chiaroscuro; it's a pointilism affect. Although he employs the techniques of the Neo-Impressionists, the affect is nothing like a Seurat. There isn't the calm, cool, calculated nature that you see in a Seurat. The dollops are much messier and thicker, and thus disquieting. It's a painting in this series Schmidt did of fox hunters. Although when I saw it I assumed it was an image of a soldier on a battlefield.
Vanessa Beecroft's three black figures laid on a flat, metallic table as though they were in a morgue. I believe they were done in bronze and perhaps wax. The bodies themselves looked like they had been discovered from an ice age; their skin looked rough and earthen, like worn leather, yet cold. They laid in the middle of the gallery's exhibit, and they confronted you as a chilling surprise.
In Dirty Fucking Rats, Tim Noble and Sue Webster combined a pile of trash to miraculously cast the shadow of two rats on top of one another. Quite ingenious!
An exit!
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