Armory Review

Armory 2010 Review

Jaeman Shin

 

                Walking through the crowded isles with absolute visual overload of colors, lights, and sound, my first reactionary thought was that this is not how art should be shown or viewed.  I am aware that the main purpose of the Armory show is the buying and selling of the art, yet the carpet flooring and the cubicle divided galleries take away a lot from the true experience of the artworks.  There were many great artworks at the show yet most of the times my eyes were so numb from the massive scale of the exhibition, I found my eyes spending the most time on “loud” attention grabbing artworks of big scale, bright lights, or illusionary aspects.  And these eye grabbing artworks just may be the current trend in the world wide art market since I saw plenty of them at the Armory show 2010. Trying to make a connection between the current artworks by meaning, method, or aesthetics is an extremely difficult if not impossible task with the artworks seeming to come from random points in modern to post-modern art. 

Hyper realistic artworks were popular among many galleries. Out of all the massive hyper-realistic paintings at the Armory, Deborah Poynton’s nude female and male paintings were very powerful and felt new and different from many other hyper-realistic figure paintings that I have seen before.  Among the many different subject matters excruciatingly rendered on gigantic canvases, There was also a creepy hyper-realistic sleepwalking life size sculpture by Tony Matelli. Similar to last year’s Armory show, series of mirrored neon light sculptures and neon text were everywhere. The one that stays on my mind is Bert Rodriguez’s play on Bruce Nauman’s Sculpture which reads “The true artist makes shit for rich people to buy.”

Some of the many other “genres” of art at the armory show were pop art reminiscent works like the yellow room installation I Am Curious Yellow by Adam McEwin, Interactive art like spray to forget , body painted lady performance,and political works like the tar covered scrooge and the live cam 360 degree view of an oil pump. 

My favorite artworks were the kinetic sculptures especially the incredibly simple yet beautiful sculpture serpentine by Zilvinas Kempinas. Zilvinas uses weighted magnetic tapes floating and twirling in the corner of the cubicle by a couple of fans. The magnetic tapes resemble sea snakes or eels diving deep under water and felt so alive I must have stared at this artwork for at least ten minutes, which is a very long time to spend on one artwork at the armory. Elias Crespin’s Tetralineados circular was a very well crafted and subtle yet powerful artwork made with multi-colored plexi-glass squares suspended in a ring shape formation slowly moving in waves. The suspended sculpture felt like a mixture of Donald Judd and Olafur Eliasson. Conrad Shawcross’s Pre-Retroscope VI, a boat like structure with paddles and a projector and screen running on a circular track on top was a very nice artwork, and a perfect example for the physical projection project in the new media course. 

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the Armory show was seeing big name artists from cubicle to cubicle, and many times the works were less known and slightly different from the works the artists were known for.  Olafur Eliasson showed his photographs and Rhomboid Kaleidoscope, and it was exciting to see a completely different type of work from an artist that I really like. Sarah Sze known for her huge installations but she had a small windex lamp and table sculpture which was positioned in an awkward spot easily passed by unnoticed for many viewers. The Armory show’s convention/mall type setup makes it almost impossible for installation artists like Olafur Eliasson and Sarah Sze to show their works, besides it would be pointless since installations are not really sellable artworks.

A noticeable amount of “magic eye” like illusionary sculptures and paintings/wall mounted works could be seen again and again throughout the piers. These illusionary effects were achieved using a wide variety of rather new technologies like the live interactive video work by Lozano-Hemmer Rafael. Rafael’s The company of colours is a flat panel screen which converts the viewers in front of it into color sample panels like what you see on a photoshop type software or at the paint store. Also, L.E.D.s, laser cut paper or plexi-glass, and even holographs were used to create the visual illusions. 

Much like the wide variety of different cultures interacting in the globalized world today, the world-wide trend in art is also a mix of all different types of art. This could be viewed as complete freedom to do anything or complete confusion with no direction. I am not sure which of the two describes the art of now, maybe both.

                Walking out of the Armory show exhausted, I felt a little bad for the many artworks that were just buried by too much artwork. I know many hours and hard work were put into a lot of the works that I didn’t even glance at for more than five seconds.