The Armory Show, New York
The Armory Show is accompanied by nine younger, smaller, less prestigious fairs.
Given a downhill screwing economy there is no doubt that all aspects of the art world, fairs included, this situation may be temporary. But even without the anxious funders, there is a point at which critical mass fosters inertia. There is nothing wrong with art fairs that fewer of them wouldn’t cure.
But the Armory Show goes smoothly. There are no shrink-inducing moments and there is almost nothing that makes you stop in your tracks. Yes, there is the annual tape-’n’-things sculpture by Thomas Hirschhorn. This one, “Tool Table,” is, for a change, bloodless and cerebral: a sea of mannequin hands clutching de rigueur books (Nietzsche, Sartre, Thomas More) or tools (hammer, saw, trowel). It proves how much Mr. Hirschhorn’s work needs some form of sex or violence.
At Blum & Poe, Chiho Aoshima abandons her usual high-gloss surfaces to create a soft, cartoony, urban wrap-around mural on paper, melding photography and digital manipulation with clouds as old as Japanese screens.
And at the Murray Guy, large images by the German photographer Barbara Probst display the same woman photographed at the same instant from all angles, stretching one second into three-dimensional space, like Cubism.
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