| The PULSE art fair made its New York City debut with no spectacle, no performance, no public parties, but still PULSE New York 2006 was red hot. Organized by an international group of gallerists and curators, the fair’s stability and consistent high quality is due to the curation and design by the handpicked gallerists. |  |
Splendor at the Market – Alison B. Levy
The PULSE art fair made its New York City debut with no spectacle, no performance, no public parties, but still PULSE New York 2006 was red hot. Organized by an international group of gallerists and curators, the fair’s stability and consistent high quality is due to the curation and design by the handpicked gallerists. Branding themselves with a size and purpose linking the poise of high commercial fairs and the emerging art innovation found in alternative fairs, the group of 60 galleries (all but 12 by invitation) was a proper mix of prominent and seedling galleries. By setting the bar for high quality, PULSE is now the art fair utopia.
Like visiting Ikea, viewing PULSE was quality shopping at a zigzagging pace with good deals and a decent priced lunch (Swedish meatballs excluded). One could distinguish the individual dealer’s styles and a common art drive among them, unusual art materials that were thought provoking, beautiful and labor intensive. PULSE did not shy away from beauty. Splendor could be found in the cardboard parts of Ford 2006 by Chris Gilmour at Perugi Artecontemporanea, the four simple LED light tubes by Leo Villareal by Conner Contemporary Art in Washington DC and in Ginny Reed’s gorgeous combination of water bucket and glitter, Sparklebucket, at the emerging gallery Workplace Gallery in Gateshead, England.
PULSE art was habitable: Robert Moran’s booth-sized soft white boots were overwhelmingly fantastic at Mackey Gallery as were Julie Heffernan’s luscious-though-condensed mini paintings at the San Franciscan Catherine Clark Gallery. Virgil de Voldere presented Shih Chieh Huang’s Din Din, a colorful and complicated techi-creature with plastic undulating tentacles. These works demonstrated beauty and fascination as not boring, uptight nor anything else the over-puffed mainstream art establishment would lead people to believe.
Furthering this dreamlike beauty regimen was video at the fair. While no true presence of overtly political or new media art, there was a sprinkling of friendly video and technological art at PULSE. A motion sensitive video screen of a single tree with clouds for leaves, which when swerved left and right on its pedestal, dissipated the clouds in the video, was at Viennese Gallery Ernst Hilger, which sold out of all six video copies. Tricia Mclaughlin showed two very unique videos at Sixtyseven Gallery with a corresponding sculpture. Her videos are Mario World meets SimCity–with goofy stocky characters rushing to complete inane repetitive work tasks, indicating a bizarre economic system. Also of note was the video of a group of people eating ice cream but simultaneously freezing their poses while the tape rolled, at P.P.O.W. Gallery. Considering attention spans at art fairs, videos showing slow motion or repetitive motion seem to succeed well. However, most work at PULSE reflected a refreshing amalgamation of sculpture, painting and photography.
PULSE enabled a feeling of discovery. In particular, there are four stand out works that resonate with artistic prowess and conceptual meaning. An army tank series, part of an investigation into the Cardinal Virtues by Abigail O’Brien shown at Rubicon Gallery in Dublin, led to learning about her full project on Fortitude, in the form of a thoughtful documentary concerning dominant social roles. O’Brien’s tank photographs incorporate toy tanks as well as a father and son bonding experience over a collection of cast-off tanks and a fabulous series of embroidered images of tanks. Michael Simpson, a British artist in his 60s, showed paintings of benches similar to the presently popular German painter style at London Gallery David Risley. His work is based on the heresy of Giordano Bruno against the Italian church in the year 1600 and his paintings have mysteriously basic and ambiguous results.
Another strong work, which resonated on many visual levels due to its simplicity, was a fabric tree by Carolyn Salas at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art. Representing earthy sediment through fabric, her work is pretty in form and fragile in its materiality. A fourth extraordinary catch was the tattoo artist Duke Riley, who displayed an installation of a fictitious history with found objects from an Island near Manhattan and the Bronx. His nimble drawings of a huge ship with fornicating pirates were exceptional.
Art fairs bring the promise of a global art world, where artists of any location can be seen and bought by an expanding art public and hopefully PULSE will serve their galleries and artists well. One such gallery, which could benefit from the fair, is the Workplace Gallery from Gateshead, England that accesses many great artists who live nearby in a cheap area devoid of dealers. The Houston and San Francisco Galleries represented strongly at the fair, along with the Nathan Larramendy Gallery from Ojai, CA, which showed patterned wallpaper that popped with intricate images of cheerleaders upon up-close viewing by the artist Cassandra C. Jones. Jones also showed a video, which authentically (not ironically) made art out of superfluous snapshots. These and many of the works at PULSE are based in real life, making the fair cheerleaders of good art optimistic, honest, open, smart and curated! Ra Ra!
