The New York Times
March 11, 2005

ART REVIEW | THE ARMORY SHOW
Dealers Gather at the River, Convenient to Lofts With Bare Walls

By HOLLAND COTTER
Once upon a time, when the Armory Show - then called the Gramercy Art Fair - fit into a bunch of bedroom suites in a midsize hotel, artists of extreme youth were a novelty. "He's barely out of art school, you know. And he's so unusual. He's into painting! Can you imagine?"

Well, now we can imagine. Today, in an Armory Show that is big enough to sink the Queen Mary 2, young artists are something of a glut on the market. A fair number are still in art school. Almost all of them paint, or paint and draw, or paint and draw and make collages, and do so well and quickly.

To get a sense of all this, dash over to Piers 90 and 92 on the Hudson River where the Armory Show opens today. Designwise, the fair has been slightly rejiggered. Its miles of aisles have grown. Booths pushed to the periphery are rewarded with river views. And almost everyone has a tad more elbow room.

It's an international fair, of course, and the dealers are from all over. Well, from all over Western Europe, New York and Los Angeles, maybe Japan, with a few exotic additions thrown in. Well, at least one exotic addition: a first-timer from India, Nature Morte, which is run by the ex-New York artist Peter Nagy, who had a gallery by the same name in the East Village in the 1980's.

The art he has brought, by Anita Dube and Atul Dodiya among others, looks generally different from the art around it. This doesn't mean all that much in the context, though, because the basic idea of new art at the moment - being handmade and personal - is that nobody should look quite like anyone else. Not that there isn't a "look;" there is. Winsome-scary. Elegant-jangly. Something like that.

For sure, the days of look-alike videos and everyone talking about "identity" and acting worried that there aren't enough artists of color around are over. Now people are making things you can buy and sell and put on the wall of your loft. Art you can live with, for heaven's sake. A whole new generation of bond-market collectors is being turned on by drawings the size of stock certificates.

Lending some ballast to all this youngness are solo exhibitions of an artist now in late career, and another who has died. A series of paintings from 1962-63 by the American artist Lee Lozano, who died in 1999, are at Hauser & Wirth. The pictures are intensely sexual and absolutely furious, as shocking as a public outburst. As a group they form one of the best gallery shows in the city this weekend.

Ronald Feldman has a generous sampling of recent work by the painter Ida Applebroog, who is in her 70's. She's best known for her story-board style narratives of mute alienation, but her new pictures are of doll-like figures in high-heel combat boots.

In addition, in the one-person category, there's a display of new sculptures by Charles Long, in Fabergé-ish mode, at Tanya Bonakdar; a wall-filling autobiography and recent political history collage by Lyle Ashton Harris at CRG; and an installation of hand-carved guns by Allison Smith at Bellwether.

Last fall, at the time of the presidential election, Ms. Smith organized a sort of militant be-in - she called it a muster to action - on a farm in rural Pennsylvania. She is planning another for this May on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Arm yourself with art, is the rallying cry, and Ms. Smith wants you. You can sign up at Bellwether now.

Such event-based performance activity is a significant component of art in New York, and you can find it regularly programmed at both the Kitchen and at Foxy Productions in Chelsea. And a few performances are being done specifically around the fair.

Chris Verene, in collaboration with the Frisbee Art Curatorial Collective, has opened his "Self-Esteem Salon" at the Old Chelsea Y.M.C.A., through Monday. Pierogi is presenting live electronic music by Brian Dewan and shadow-box plays by Gary Panter and Joshua White in the fair itself. And at Andrew Kreps, Jamie Isenstein will be performing continuously, or as her stamina permits.

What's particularly refreshing about live, time-based art is that it counters the object-fetishism that is otherwise dominant. In that line, as I've said, small is big. There is tons of small to chose from. And some of it is substantial. David Kordansky, a Los Angeles gallery, has three tiny paintings of smoking volcanoes by Violet Hopkins at his booth. Here scale is as much an idea as a style, a means of talking visually about energy and containment. Mark Flores's T-shirt paintings at the same booth have a similar conceptual grounding, as do Patrick Hill's sculptures.

Of the painting displays that fill other booths, a few are carefully shaped group shows. This is true of a selection of portraits at Gladstone Gallery, but also, in a more casual way, of a salon-style hanging of paintings and drawings at Black Dragon Society from Los Angeles, and another at Daniel Reich. In both cases, the confined space of the booth enhances the dense, hermetic spirit of art that looks as if it might have been done on a kitchen table in an apartment.

Finally, a few individual artists stand out from the fair's atmospheric busyness. At Leisure Club Mogadishni, Rasmus Bjorn's large drawing of a customized pinball machine, titled "Opera Operation," is a prime example of a species of stupifyingly virtuoisic draftsmanship that is showing up with increasing frequency.

Zoe Leonard, whose work hasn't been seen in New York for a while, has photographs at D'Amelio Terras and at Yvon Lambert. I have a vivid memory of her installation of an army of found, battered dolls that filled the Paula Cooper Gallery a few years ago, and I miss her presence.

And it was fun to encounter Teppei Kaneuji's collages of coffee-soaked paper and sculptures that look like underwater plants, or something, at Kodama, a gallery based in Tokyo and Osaka. The work is odd enough to make your first question, "What is it?," rather than, "Do I like it?" And its goofy delicacy is a welcome departure from the Superflat slickness churned out by the Murakami machine.

In fact, Kodama has quite a bit of variety on hand, as do its immediate neighbors at the rear of Pier 90. including the Tomio Koyama Gallery, which is showing artists as diverse as Naoki Koide and Tom Sachs. For some reason, all of the Japanese galleries have clustered together here, creating a tight, buzzing cultural enclave where everyone seems to know one another, people and objects are in motion, and everything feels improvised and changeable, or did when I was there. It's a sweet dynamic. It reminded me a little of the Armory Show's hotel-suite days of yore.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company