Scope New York has been host to some shenanigans in years past. A large part of ARTINFO’s coverage of 2011’s fair focussed on "Come on Guy,” an installation by Richie Budd and Will Robison for which a small group of fraternity brothers were encased in a glass box and made to drink several cases of beer. On a week that saw about a dozen art fairs in New York compete with one another for the public’s attention, the crazy stunt was almost forgivable. After all, you can’t expect to make news if you’re too reverent.
It’s interesting, then, that reverence should be the defining feature of this year’s fair. Current Scope director Mollie White professes to dislike the word “edgy.” At C. Grimaldis Gallery's booth, artist Chul Hyun Ahn discussed his sculptures made from fluorescent light fixtures (including “Void,” 2011), describing Dan Flavin as a “mentor.” Gregory Scott, represented by Waterhouse & Dodd, paid homage to 1960s Pop art by installing a two-channel video in a Lichtenstein-style Benday dot painting. References to modernism are a recurring theme at Scope this year.
For the installation "Burn Before Reading," it was reverence for the art book that motivated Lilah Freedland to exhibit small zines and hand-painted works made by her artist friends. Freedland may have been nodding to Rikrit Tiravanija when she invited friends from the ProFailure Press, who provided a small picnic table, coffee, and donuts to the fair’s visitors — an effective strategy, by all accounts.
The line between collegial homage and mere name dropping is a fine one, and of course there were some at Scope who missed the mark. At the Global Art Group booth, Alex Guofeng Cao has created bust-length images made up of grids of tiny, squared-off images from mid-century pop culture. Some might read these as tributes to Andy Warhol, but many more may see them as unimaginative dorm room art. Meanwhile, Galerie E.G.P. is exhibiting scribbled sharpie pen drawings accompanied by gothy concrete poetry made by Oliver Bragg, an artist who, one guesses, wants to be just like David Shrigley when he grows up. Maybe he will be.
By far the fair’s strongest suit is photography. Among Scope's highlights on this front is the work of Raif Kaspers, represented by Turin’s Gagliardi Art System, who shows unique bravado in his heavily manipulated wall-sized pictures of families at an enormous Japanese wave pool. Also of note is the gallery Emanuel Fremin, which is exhibiting images of abandoned churches and concert halls in Detroit taken by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. The abandoned grandeur of Detroit is not a fresh subject, but the fact that this kind of urban landscape photography has already been done doesn’t seem to matter. Most viewers didn’t even ask where the photographs were taken. They just stood there, mesmerized.