Does -scopeHamptons want to be in the premier league?
James Westcott and Molly Kleiman
# We had been warned that the —scopes, which piggyback on other fairs at various times of the year in London, Paris, New York, and Miami (its original location) were a particularly commercial brand of art fair, and that it pushed young artists and smaller galleries to center stage not out of a sense of adventure or benevolence, but simply because they can’t get the biggest and best.
# A glitzy, but cheap looking catalogue with ugly design and a guilt-ridden opening address by one of the organizers, David Hunt, seems to accidentally confirm the awkward middle-ground the festival occupies–desperate to be premier league, but pretending to reject it because, in actuality, it’s not yet good enough to join. The dedication page–graced with the snapshots of two fallen miniature domestic companions–reminds you where you are: the nexus of lap dog toting high society.
# —
scopeHamptons, scheduled for the height of summer, when most Manhattan transplants are likely to be in town, is located in a building that’s refreshingly charming and airy for an art fair, no aircraft hangar: all white painted, high ceilinged, wood beams, a dusty wood floor. The place smells of summer, or of an imagined memory of summer.
# The grand-sounding "North Hall" and "South Hall" were cramped and surprisingly small–containing four narrow and overly-filled walkways filled with somewhat ramshackle booths. Clutter can be festive and fullness can mean depth.
# But the art just isn’t that good. There are promising small galleries: RARE, Praxis, Mixed Greens, Art in General (with a more seasoned and familiar, if familiarly good, selection), Brooklyn’s Black and White. And exciting imports–Miami’s Liquid Blue (which celebrated its first birthday), Boltax (from another New York escape spot, Shelter Island), and Lumas (a Berlin Gallery that focuses on new photography). But there were a few dubious local galleries and way too many "Fine Art" galleries. Peering at walls virtually wall-papered with art often led not to unexpected discoveries but to a face full of cheesy figurative paintings, roughly spattered, atmospheric beach scenes, or bad wire sculptures of boats coated in some kind of animal skin. The presence of these galleries seems cowardly and craven on the part of the organizers, who boast of their daring.
# On our second rotation through the "Halls," James stopped meaningfully at a large colorful abstract painting–families of boldly colored, plucky boxes hovered against a dreamy blue and green (psychedelic?) backdrop. "This might be one of my favorites." And then we realized, in a moment of Magic Eye meets MoMA, that the bouncing boxes arranged themselves in the outline of a lounging woman–arm draped above head, elbow cocked, hair thrown back. Bad.
# Some themes emerged, although we’re not sure what acted as the invisible curatorial force–the anticipation for the exclusive beach locale, the gods of the Hamptons, or our desire to find curious threads not just flimsy parts.
# -Blanched beach scenes: at Lumas, with Julia Christe’s gently melancholy White Sands series–in this case white desert dunes, not beach-scapes–in which distant figures wander around in a void, and with Thomas Wrende’s depressingly vacant crowded beaches–but a poor shadow of Massimo Vitali. Black and White Gallery had a welcome mat of sorts–a thin strip of [painted oilcloth?] that brought the Atlantic to the exhibition floor. To enter their booth, you had to walk on their water.
# -Clouds: but light, fluffy, summery ones, mostly, in Ken Fendell’s new agey sky photo-montages (is that a fairy flitting over the second sun?), at Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery, and in Jack Balas’s painting of a desert with clouds that have different dates of them, at Jack the Pelican.
# -Stuffed Things (often of the animal variety): at Praxis, Gabriela Maciel covered the walls with her scrunchy sculptures: clustery, gnarled and squishy, colorful organisms. Trembling sketches of her Criaturas, hung next to their knotted, twisted and twined, three dimensional kin–made of synthetic netting. At Solar, Lucia Pizzani’s photographs documented the attempts at sustainable development in an Amazon village–in one, a mournful child stares out; mounted as the contiguous photograph, a floppy, barbed wire-skewered stuffed animal. RARE gallery exhibited and enormous growling grizzly bare made of carpet. Not that terrifying. Pretty funny actually, but then depressing in its juvenility.
# To make things interesting, we imagined that we each had $5,000 to spend. Most of the works seemed pretty affordable–as well they should be, given the very patchy quality. The cheapness though strikes a discordant tone with the glamour the fair tries to exude (or at least attract) elsewhere–for example, with Jaguar’s sponsorship, an iPod mini encrusted in Swarovski crystals was Yours To Be Won. But for the most part, we both had difficulty spending even this fantasy cash.
# James: I wanted Johnston Foster’s funny, spongey lion head–it would make an excellent ironic trophy to mount on the wall–but at $5,500 it was a little bit beyond my means. So, after some reckless and rather desperate rooting around, I decided on a small square Cy Twombly-ish painting by Jimmie James, 47 nouns and a verb, at boltax for $600, Nina Levy’s photograph of herself wearing the mask she cast of her baby son–an image ripe for psychoanalysis, and very poignant–at Metaphor, for $2,850, and two works by Augustina Woodgate: delicate, sparse drawings of two naked figures conjoined by a clump of human hair stuck to the paper. These were $300 each at Liquid Blue, and they were small, and almost hidden in the corner–that’s maybe why they stood out.
# Molly: A sucker for things silly and beautifully strange, I was drawn to the Guerra de la Paz works at Liquid Blue–the soft sculptures of bonzai sewn from colorful whisps, loops and bundles of found clothing. The actual bonzai was out of my range (by several thou; it apparently takes a year to make one, so many hours sewing up those little grey t-shirted balls-turned-rocks). A photo of one would do (at $3,600). As much as I liked Gabriela Marciel’s creatures, I couldn’t see spending $1,600 on twisted netting. Getting over the disappointment of being priced out of some other interests at Black and White Gallery, my mind turned to gift-giving. For about $1,600 each, the Foley Gallery offered Thomas Allen’s pop-up pulp–clever, if too cute, photographs. Allen cut and folds illustrations from old pulp novels so that a cowboy shoots right atcha, a seductress’ leg slinks out of the pages. My mom would definitely enjoy hanging these on her walls. As one Long Island resident screeched as she stared at Allen’s Reflex, "I just love that leg!"
# Later, to make things even more interesting, we tried to identify the single worst work at —scopeHamptons. There were a lot more candidates than there were for works we would buy. But the most atrocious work was a gallery assistant/performance artist at Weisspollack gallery, dressed in a luxurious sateen orange dress, a lot of make up, and a belt with fake dynamite attached to it. Her finger never left the detonator, even as she smiled and chatted to people. The work was so depraved and brainless–suicide-bomber chic–that it was hardly worth getting angry about it.
# Another appalling work was a large soft charcoal drawing of a cow’s head. It was about the standard of a middle school art project. But at least it wasn’t pretentious! And there might be some contextual key that unlocks the work and explains everything, suddenly making it brilliant. We tried to speculate what could possibly make this into an interesting work of art: what if the artist had never seen a cow before, and was given the brief of drawing the most fantastical animal imaginable, and happened to come up with the common cow? What if the artist had a new kidney grown from DNA from this revered cow, a kidney that keeps him alive, such is the severity of his diabetes? What if it’s a self-portrait by the cow? What if the charcoal used to draw it is made from the cow itself?
# Art fairs tend to eradicate both contextual knowledge of production and intention (what we can glean of it) and they obliterate the necessary physical context that allows works to breathe. It’s very hard for any work, even good ones, to sing when they’re crowded on the wall of a booth, in the proximity of dozens of other booths. And it’s even harder when the works themselves aren’t that good. It’s close to impossible to resonate with the work like you can in a calm gallery or a museum. The impulse instead is a greedy, impatient one: find the hot shit quickly, and buy it (or pretend to buy it). And these fairs focus as much on their social cachet as on the art. Southampton provides an instant pool of celebrity buyers, and we overheard one of the tanned and dapper —scope workers proclaiming, "Tonight’s party is gonna have the sickest guest list man, the sickest."
