Crashing the Artropolis party
ARTROPOLIS | A cutting-edge fair, NEXT, shakes up Chicago's annual art expo
BY KEVIN NANCE Sunday Show Editor
The primary storyline of last year's Artropolis -- the annual collection of art fairs at the Merchandise Mart -- was the resuscitation of the event's showcase fair, Art Chicago, which had been on life support after years of decline under a previous owner.
By most accounts, that story had a happy ending. Despite a few offstage glitches -- such as protracted delays in the load-in process that left some art dealers fuming -- Artropolis was a huge success, drawing more than 40,000 visitors, including a substantial number of big-spending collectors. Any bad taste left in gallerists' mouths from the load-in mess was washed away by the palate-cleansing flavor of money from sales, especially at the flagship Art Chicago.
But as the 2008 edition of Artropolis prepares to open on Friday, the question is: What's next?
NEXT, that's what. As Artropolis' newest addition -- complementing Art Chicago, the Intuit Show of Folk and Outsider Art, the International Antiques Fair and the now much-expanded Artist Project -- NEXT will focus on "emerging" galleries and artists, many of them working not in the traditional media of painting and sculpture but in cutting-edge installation, video, conceptual, performance and assemblage pieces.
"It's going to be a drastic shift, maybe a drastic shift from any other art fair you've ever seen," says Chicago gallerist Kavi Gupta, who's co-organizing NEXT with critic/curator Christian Viveros-Faune. "You're going to see installations that are going to be spilling out into open areas. You're going to see large sculptural pieces. You're going to see separated, custom-made video booths -- not just artists showing a video in their booths. You're going to see really, really ambitious work -- in terms of scale, but also in terms of complex ideas. It's going to be very content-driven."
It's also not necessarily going to be aesthetically pleasing, at least in the ways that, say, Art Institute of Chicago regulars might expect. Many of NEXT's offerings could be classified as expressing what Viveros-Faune calls an "anti-aesthetic," which Gupta defines as "irreverent object-making, putting disparate things together that, when they come together, make something."
"There's a level at which, if we do our job right, we're essentially reflecting existing trends," Viveros-Faune says. "You're certainly going to see more installation work, and you're going to see performance, which you're obviously not going to see up on the 12th floor" (where the blue-chip Art Chicago will be housed).
Within its 150,000-square-foot exhibition space on the Mart's seventh floor, NEXT will have about 180 exhibitors, including galleries from throughout the world, most of which will show a single artist's work. Among the works to be showcased are pieces by participants in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, including Matthew Brannon, Omar Fast, MK Guth, Ruben Ochoa, Amanda Ross-Ho, Eduardo Sarabia, Javier Tellez and Chicago's Melanie Schiff.
Also featured will be participants in recent biennials in Venice, Berlin, Beijing and Istanbul, including Guy Ben-Ner (who'll present a film called "I'd Give It to You If I Could But I Borrowed It"), Suzanne Winterling, Eri Itol and Taiyo Kimura.
In addition, NEXT will feature solo shows and large-scale works by established and emerging artists such as Graham Hudson, Fabian Marcaccio, Peter Sarkisian, Ricky Swallow, Monique van Genderen, Leo Villarreal and Mark Bradford.
Perhaps NEXT's most buzzed-about piece, courtesy of Brooklyn's Pierogi Gallery, is Jonathan Schipper's provocative installation "The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle," described by Mart president Chris Kennedy as "two American muscle cars slowly colliding together over the four days of the show, with the collision powered by no more than a small wind turbine."
This vaguely democratic yet often cerebral strain of art -- which dominated the Whitney Biennial and the controversial "Unmonumental" show at Manhattan's New Museum earlier this year -- is the wave of the present and future in the New York art world, but how will it go over in Chicago? And just as important for an art fair, will it sell?
"There are a lot of collectors here, in Chicago who are buying that work," Gupta says. "They've escalated their knowledge and their ability, and they're going past painting."
Viveros-Faune agrees. "The thing that the New Museum exhibition and the Whitney proved to me is that the anti-aesthetic can sell as well, because I know all those pieces are sold. It's just as marketable as the aesthetic."
But in the solid, sensible, corn-fed Midwest? "We think it's possible," Viveros-Faune says. "We think it's specifically possible in a city like Chicago, largely because it's a tabula rasa [blank slate] here."
'World domination'?
NEXT is owned by the Merchandise Mart, which also acquired Gupta's Volta emerging art fair in Basel, Switzerland, last year, and created a second Volta in connection with this year's New York's Armory Show, which the Mart also now owns. (Chicago art-world wags at Kennedy's City Club speech about Artropolis last week were heard to joke about his bid for "world domination.")
Kennedy deflected this line of thinking, although not quite with modesty. "The news here should not be so much about the creation of a larger firm for bigger shows," he said, "but it should instead be about the assemblage of the best team in the world for contemporary and modern art fairs, and one that is now headquartered in Chicago."
He went on to say that NEXT "represents what might be the most exciting show produced anywhere in the world in 2008."
Most of its galleries are relatively young and have been in business for less than a decade, he noted. "These are the young Turks of the art market. These are the dealers on the cutting edge of culture whose artists and exhibitions will define the art world for the next 20 years. Each hopes to lead and influence the established market with their unique vision of contemporary work. Their selections are often made in contrast to what the art world is currently celebrating."
The term "emerging," by the way, covers a fairly broad range of NEXT's gallerists and artists, some of whom are far more established than others, Viveros-Faune admits. "Clearly it's an elastic notion, but what we're talking about for the most part is are young or youngish artists, folks who are just now hitting at the museum level at the topmost, maybe some inclusions in some significant biennials like the Whitney and Venice, etc., but not major, major careers. We're not talking about people who are at the auction houses."
Yet.
'Art fair exhaustion'
What Kennedy didn't mention is that the phenomenon of international art fairs is increasingly the subject of a backlash from people who view it as too big, too unconcerned with innovation, and above all too crassly commercial.
"Without a doubt," Gupta says, nodding. "We're the ones who realize that. We're the ones saying that." Viveros-Faune agrees: "We feel the art fair exhaustion, the mall-ization of the fair experience -- the fact that the art component has largely been sort of sucked out."
In Gupta's view, however, the art fair phenomenon is here to stay.
"The art world has shifted to where the art fair is such a vital component to art-viewing," he says. "People travel from all over the world. This is where they come to see art. It's where they come to buy art, and we can't get away from that. It might shrink, but it's not going to go away. So our challenge, as art people, is how do we use this? How do we make it better? If more people are going to come to an art fair than to a museum opening or a biennial, we have to use this model now and make something smart of it."
How successful does NEXT have to be this year to return in 2009, even with booth rental rates (about $18 per square feet) significantly lower than most other fairs?
"At these rates, galleries should be able to take chances," Gupta says. "Success shouldn't be based so much on a commercial model, hopefully. Maybe it's based on doing something significant, having curators see the work, having a presence among your peers, having a discourse develop. Hopefully that's not a model that's based on financial success but on art success."
On the other hand, Viveros-Faune says, "Sales need to make sense for the exhibitors to come back. As inexpensive as we've made this fair, it still has to be worth their while."