The Armory Show: Theme 1

This past week was ridiculously crazy with all the art fairs, but if you get into a rhythm you can really enjoy yourself and see a lot of good (or forgettable) art. I was only able to see part of the Armory this year due to the fact that I had multiple other plans and was then derailed by the necessities of living: the ever pesky activities of doing laundry and grocery shopping.

The Armory this year was all about volume. In order to turn a profit in a post–stock market crash economy, galleries displayed many smaller, less expensive works, that if I had a job that paid a bit more, I might theoretically be able to afford. (Recently my coworkers and I have suggested, jokingly, that we pool our resources, buy art and rotate it around our offices. We would also be willing to give tours, do loans, and create didactic material. Basically we want to crowd-finance art purchases.) If I were an art consultant I would really have helped collectors clean up with some choice work...but alas.

There is no absolutely no way to characterize the entire show, but it can be fruitful to pick out individual works or to identify subtrends observable in hundreds of art booths. Trends can be useful for multiple reasons: they can indicate the kinds of themes that

are of interest to galleries, and possibly buyers, or they can potentially reveal thematic psychological, societal undercurrents (if one believes in the art to signify beyond itself, which I do. Art as symptom, one co-constructed by multiple parties). One such trend seemed to be art that was related to the idea of shallowness. Work after work created the illusion of depth, but to a limited degree. Far reaching, illusionistic, penetrating vistas have long departed most of the contemporary art in (at least) New York art galleries. And in fact it is well known that this trend toward flatness began around the 1860s, if not before. It was then that depth began to be eschewed for a focus on the picture plane, most famously in the paintings of Manet [Check out this interesting take on one of Edouard Manet's paintings]. This trajectory came to culmination in the work of the Greenbergian modernist painters of the 1940s and 50s. Since then, painting has greatly lost its prominence, though it never has died, nor should it in my opinion. In the Armory, what was fascinating about many works was that they seemed to have returned to the idea of painting, and of the idea of slight depth, but in other mediums.

German artist Herbert Hamak's 2009 resin and pigment works S. T. H1137N and S. T. H1139N (notably on canvas) that seem like blocks of ice, their depths unfathomable when viewed head on, but obvious when viewed from the side. Their obvious lack of depth revealed from any oblique angle is somewhat countered by the sense of murky depths when approaching the work head-on. A slight commentary perhaps on the ways in which viewpoint can seriously alter perception. Comparisons to Roni Horn's blocks of glass are formally relevant, but Horn's works are more about the clarity of the material (glass), the singularity of the material as weighty sculpture, and their allusiveness to clear waters. Hamak's, meanwhile, seem to be rooted in the relationship of other material to painting. Even their small size roots them on the wall, though the orientation of one of the works on display at the Armory jutted so far out into the field of vision that it could neither easily be termed painting or relief, but rather wall-sculpture. Hamak's use of resin is a method of suspending pigment, to focus on the color itself, rather than of the interaction between the two. Still, the resin serves to blunt the pigment's vibrancy, creating a matte quality that blunts the metaphorical connotations of clear sightedness.

Peter Zimmermann's works (e.g., Bud, 2008), made of epoxy resin on canvas, look like colorful oil slicks, with one layer slightly overlying the next. Although joyful in their vibrancy, there is a slightly menacing quality to these works. Based on real-world images, Zimmermann lowers the melting point of abstraction. No Morris Louis or Helen Frankenthaler reinforcing the idea of paint on canvas, in these works the epoxy denies the canvas base on which it lies. Reminiscent of high gloss car paint, these works could be conceived as inadvertent cautionary statements to the nations that valorize oil. But that is perhaps going to far. What is certain is that there is a fetishistic quality to Zimmermann's work that sucks you in, just like the rainbow colors on a oil slick. The most apropos comparison would be to Lynda Benglis's poured colored latex, whose rejection of the canvas altogether took the idea of painting off the support. But whereas Benglis's works have unfortunately not physically withstood the effects of time (many of the works unfortunately now look dirty), Zimmermann's are all timeless perfection. He has transformed Benglis's floor spills into controlled pictures abstracted from reality. In this he has ties to Gerhard Richter and his effacing of underlying images, though without Richter's obsessive attention to all kinds of images and also without Richter's cutting critique or inquiry into representation. Although I admit that I very much like Zimmerman's work, it is enticing, I feel its twisting of the legacy of Benglis's floor pieces, which deliberately flouted location (made in whatever studio she could find), material (latex was a slightly unusual material at this time) and the idea of the vertical painting (floor pieces) is dubious.The colors slide too easily over one another, creating ever-so-slight shadows that wash away thought.

Meanwhile, Dias & Riedweg's work Each thing his place. Another place, another thing (2009), a grid of nine photographs, each showing a similar division of two shelves of suitcases gives just enough depth to give the slight illusion of being actual shelves set into the wall. The display clearly references Andy Warhol's critique (or celebration, depending on your viewpoint) of consumerism in his Campbell's soup can and Brillo box series and the use of photography plays on the idea of whether photography can really index reality (a common usage for photography). Here this effect is used to fool the eye to a heightened degree, almost negating itself as photography and presenting itself as reality. The breaks between the photographs are almost unnoticeable, as the eye at first reads them merely as spaces in the lines of objects. These breaks can perhaps be read as the devices that reveal the way in which a visual logic of capitalism has become so embedded in our mode of seeing, that we literally

don't see the cracks in the reality or the representation. Most significant for this work is the identity of the items: suitcases, things in which people put their possessions to take them along with them. Just as we store and take with us objects, we store and take with us our modes of seeing. The shallowness here serves as a mimic for the lack of depth in object display and our mechanisms of interpretation.

Finally, Joris van de Moorte. (A quick caveat. This work may not actually be by Van de Moorte. The name was written at the bottom of the wall on which this piece was hung, but it may have referred to another work on display. Unfortunately for the gallerist, such methods of fixing object with artist can easily be misunderstood. If someone knows who did this, please let me know. The work has affinities to the Hamak sculptures, and at first glance appears to be

either glass behind glass or some kind of illuminated resin. Upon closer inspection it appears to be tarp--a cheap disposable material used for anything from gardening to trash bags. By framing it and illuminating it from behind, the artist has elevated this detritus to icon--something that shows only itself. By mounting it behind glass, it is coded as precious or t least worthy of protection. The slight depth allowing it maintain its three-dimensionality. In all, the character of slight depth seemed to be something of interest to various artists throughout the show, allowing them to explore variations of this term's meaning, allowing them to work in-between or among mediums, and promoting an examination of modes of viewing.