Home/Invasion: NADA’s Uncanny Art Fair
As the U.S. art industry haltingly reopens, one fair has captured the experience of surviving the pandemic with a haunting, immersive meditation on decay, decline, and renewal.
I’m taking a bit of a swerve today to talk about art, so that I can highlight an important event you might want to see. The New Art Dealer’s Alliance has a spectacular art fair up through June on Governor’s Island in New York City. If you have the chance to see it, it may be a truly once in a lifetime opportunity: the show, radically reimagined in response to the pandemic, also captures something profound about this strangest of all catastrophes.
There is a financial angle here, though for once I’m more interested in the actual art. The fine art world is in serious trouble thanks to COVID. It might be counterintuitive, but selling paintings and sculptures depends just as much on in-person events as comedy or music, if not moreso; comedians and musicians have at least some socially-distanced ways to deliver their work, but most fine art is completely pointless if it’s not experienced firsthand. And of course, nobody’s going to spend $10,000 or more on a piece of art without seeing it firsthand – or, almost as important, thoroughly schmoozing the artist.
No surprise, then, that according to a recent Harper’s summary of the dire situation of the arts, fine art sales were down 36% during the pandemic. Gallery shutdowns were clearly a major part of the decline, but a huge portion of art sales actually happen, not through ritzy gallery openings, but through much more mercenary events known as art fairs.
Art fairs are – or were, pre-COVID – essentially trade shows, with each gallery paying fair organizers for a booth to showcase their artists. Major art fairs like Art Basel Miami last about four days, and also spawn satellite fairs, much the same way South By Southwest is surrounded by unaffiliated events. Because they’re so large, and clustered together on top of that, they’re an efficient (though exhausting) way for professionals to get a panoramic view of the art world. (The lower-end fairs are also where a lot of less-glamorous middlebrow art gets sold to rich people[‘s decorators[ looking for innoffensive but vaguely classy décor.)
March is prime time for New York art fairs, so nearly two years’ worth of fairs (with some exceptions) have been effectively lost to the pandemic. But they’re starting to come back. One of these early returners, the New Art Dealers’ Association’s 2021 fair, may be the last best chance to experience the pandemic’s strange upsides for viewers (if not artists or dealers). It’s situated in four three-story houses on Governors Island, which New York City has been redeveloping as a public facility for a few years now.
Governor’s Island is a perfect day trip for New Yorkers even without the show – the island can only be reached by ferry, so there’s a blissful lack of crowding or cars, and plenty of grass, trees, and space. As my wife and I joked, it’s a chance for citydwellers to “act normal for a day, except it’s more like four hours, we can’t get you a whole day.”
But as peaceful as that emptiness is, there is also something haunting about Governor’s Island. Formerly a succession of military bases, the island is dotted with dormitories and homes, now uninhabited as far as I know. The NADA fair is set in four of these houses. They have not been substantially restored, so they’re full of flaking paint and oddly stained floors. With the lower density of visitors, my wife and I often found ourselves the only people in a room, or even on an entire floor.
All of this creates the deeply unnerving sense that you are not actually supposed to be there – that you have stumbled on a strange and inexplicable thing, an abandoned art show in an abandoned house.
The fair includes a huge number of site-specific installations, and they uniformly lean into this sense of invasion and wrongness, playing with the physiognomy of the run-down houses. Pieces are half-hidden in closets or, on the other hand, emit strange sounds you can half-hear from four rooms away.
I’m not in the loop enough to know precisely how these things work, but it’s pretty obvious there was very tight coordination between the organizers and the artists, which is generally uncommon for fairs. The effect is that of the increasingly hoary Freudian ‘uncanny’ - the sense that something normal has been upended, invaded, made strange and even scary. This display of ceramics, by Marie Lorenz for the Jack Hanley Gallery, is perhaps the best example.
It’s as if a tribe of aliens discovered a midcentury kitchen and, not knowing its original purpose, turned it into some sort of shrine.
(One note: I’ve attached artist information to images where I have it, but I didn’t get every name, and most of the pieces don’t have posted titles. One of the perks of this newsletter being a hobby is that I reserve the right to be sloppy every once in a great while. On the off chance that you recognize one of the unidentified works, feel free to let me know and I’ll add the info.)
Other rooms take on the air of heterodox scientific displays, like this absolutely insane grouping by Estafania Puerta.
I’m particularly partial to this alien autopsy that dominates the Puerta installation. Notice that the body of … whatever this is, is made out of cheap waffle foam. The repurposing of trash was also a major theme of the fair, which again seamlessly meshed with the crumbling, lonely setting.
A set of ‘textile’ pieces by Kira Dominguez Hultren may be the apex of the approach, mixing yarn and thread with a mix of industrial castoffs – cables, piping, protective sheets – to create her work. The pieces are so unambiguously, sensuously gorgeous that the realization that they’re made partly out of trash is dizzying.
Easily the most unnerving piece in the show occupies not a room, but a closet. You hear it before you see it, making the space itself inextricable from the experience of the art. I think I’ll avoid spoiling it for you, except to say – listen for the water.
All of this would be impossible in anything like a standard New York gallery or fair setting. It’s not just a matter of space and crowding, though that’s a huge part of it. The New York art world is, just as the tropes would lead you to believe, a place of intense ladder-climbing and careerist strategy during normal times. From a creative perspective, the pandemic has disrupted all of that for the better, forcing galleries to hold more intimate and limited events, including NADA’s fair.
Sadly, my wife (herself a painter) pointed out that there is a downside to this creative triumph. Usually, each gallery in a fair has an attendant who can provide pricing information and answer other questions about the works in a room. That sort of hands-on approach is crucial to art sales. But given current conditions, there are no attendants at NADA. That’s a huge plus for the viewing experience, but probably not great for the galleries’ sales.
I seriously doubt the fine art world will stay down for very long, and if it does, it won’t be because of COVID - as we know, the kinds of people who buy high-end art mostly got richer during the pandemic. A lot of rich New Yorkers fled to houses outside of the city (*coughcowardscough*), and they’ll be shopping for art to fill those homes soon enough.
The bigger threat to the art world, it must be said, is Joe Biden’s policy agenda - but I don’t mean that would be a bad thing.
Biden is pushing for a number of measures, from daycare subsidies to capital gains tax hikes, that would have the effect of reducing income and wealth inequality in the U.S. The fine art industry, however uncomfortable this fact might make artists, depends on the disgusting excess of the very highest income brackets. A lot of art is sold as straight-up tax dodges, a hustle that Biden could easily disrupt, intentionally or not.
More broadly, putting pressure on top-end ‘collectors’ (ahem) will have a trickle-down effect of contracting the whole market, including for the sort of emerging artists NADA is focused on. Their current stripped-down, quiet, weird, uncommercial, wildly experimental fair may be a preview of that future, and if so, I’m more than ready for it.
A few more shots of the NADA fair (unfortunately mostly without credits) follow. See it on Governor’s Island by August 1 - but check it out as soon as possible for the best experience.
