Despite the unimpressed response from the blogosphere (see here and here), I think this year’s AIPAD marks a significant improvement over last year’s. AIPAD ‘07 sticks in my mind as a bunch of galleries trying to sell the same non-vintage Kertesz and Lartigue prints around every corner. While there’s still plenty of late prints of Chez Mondrian around if you’re interested (going for $12,000–thanks, but I’ll just frame the postcard), dealers are trying harder this year to stress more unique wares. Especially welcome was a dramatic increase in the visibility of 19th century ephemera.
So why the general pooh-poohing? Most big art bloggers are either gallery owners or major critics. They’re interested in new work and new ideas (if there is such a thing), not the peddling of old pictures to the masses. Fairs, unlike galleries, are buyer-oriented spaces. You may not get the kind of originality and aesthetic design in a booth that you get in a gallery space, but–to the relief of the public–you also don’t get the hostile chill of the gallerina. In general, I’d say AIPAD is a great place to go if you are (a.) a real photography devotee and/or (b.) in the market for some high-end wall decoration–and that’s less a jibe than a realistic assessment of where most of these pictures end up. Here are some things that caught my eye:
Ringmaster. Tintype circa 1870s. Courtesy Tartt Gallery.
(1.) Vintage Portraits and Erotica
As I said, early studio portraits and erotica seem much more prevalent this year. (Needless to say, they’re much more affordably priced than most of the high art works.) Call me a pervert, but I love seeing the erotica from the 1930s-’50s on display at Winter Works on Paper. Who would’ve thought that there was a time so innocent that an image of a pretty woman lying on the floor–bound, but fully clothed–would have been sexually titillating? It’s sweet. There are also more risqué pieces, like the shot of a woman’s naked torso aiming an axe at her own vagina (at Tartt). It provides a striking staging of the misogynistic narrative of women as mutilated men (with the vagina as the gash resulting from the violence)–all the more interesting because the photographer probably wasn’t aware that he was illustrating a pervasive cultural myth.
Image © Andreas Gefeller/Hasted Hunt.
(2.) Andreas Gefeller
Hasted Hunt devoted a good amount of space to relative newcomer Andreas Gefeller, whose work is both visually and conceptually interesting. Gefeller paces around an area with his camera at shoulder level, taking pictures of the ground beneath him. He then combines all these maps into a giant grid that looks visually plausible from a distance, but forces the viewer to puzzle out some strange discrepancies–like the fact that tree shadows are clearly visible, whereas trees appear only as small circles of trunk when viewed from the shoulder down. It’s a fun experiment in the limitations of any single perspective. I give it a grace period of two more years before it becomes an annoying and much-copied gimmick.
Image © Maria Antonietta Mameli/Silverstein Photography.
(3.) Maria Antonietta Mameli
Also in the “neat the first ten times you see it” vein, Silverstein Photography is showing three works by Maria Antonietta Mameli. Each picture in her “Human Observations” series consists of a single tiny figure and shadow taken from overhead, hovering in the white space of a deleted landscape. I don’t think it’s got the same conceptual merit as Gefeller’s work, but I do think it’s pretty–for now.
There were a few lowlights, of course. Julie Blackmon’s work continues to disgust me. It looks like someone gave Loretta Lux a wide angle lens and suggested shooting in the living room. Kathleen Ewing Gallery was the only booth I found unattractive from top to bottom, with most pictures looking like they’d been cranked through photoshop to meet the specifications of a popular opinion survey. This is surprising, given that the gallery’s website lists Ewing as the Executive Director of AIPAD. Maybe she was too busy planning the whole shebang to pay attention to what she was showing?
Overall, though, a nice fair with a little bit of something for everyone. It’s a much easier way to get a sense of what’s on the current market than haunting Chelsea and 57th street all year.
