New York may still be stuck in the frigid throes of winter, but the vibe inside the third edition of SPRING/BREAK Art Show on Tuesday night was a balmy world away. Once again located inside the historic halls — some that haven’t seen visitors in decades — of NoLita’s Old School on Mott Street, SPRING/BREAK includes projects from more than 30 curators and 135 artists (five artists were added the morning of the opening), nearly double the count from the previous year as the fair climbs further up the packed list of Armory Arts Week events, to position itself as a key player.
Founded in 2012 and organized by intrepid art world producer-artist-curator collaborators Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly under the guise The They Co., SPRING/BREAK (through March 9) is set up as an “Old New York-style inhabitation.” Considering that the participation, attendance, and wow-factor seems to grow exponentially each year (this year’s edition kicked off with a line around the block and saw dealer Jeffrey Deitch squeezing his way through the hallways), the event is proving to be not just another passing satellite fair, but a place for some of the most exciting projects of the week to be seen and purchased.
This year’s theme, PUBLICPRIVATE, was a broad framework given to artists and curators to formulate ideas and build environments that explore the ever-blurring boundaries between the two spheres humans operate on today. Social media platforms and various other ubiquitous technologies allow us to conflate our private and public selves, potentially giving rise to a whole new breed of social and personal conflict, and creating a very visible virtual field for the artistic process to play out on.
Filled with endless nooks and crannies and narrow halls, the academic building — a New York City landmark since 1996 and still overseen partially by the building’s former owners — lends itself to site-specific art works and presents an unconventional surface for curators to work with. The They Co. gave full freedom to participants, allowing one group to paint the walls and ceiling of a classroom metallic silver, and another to stage a live performance in a boys’ bathroom. The latter meant building a lofted platform over the toilet stalls and a stage atop the sink for Eve Sussman and Simon Lee’s performance work, curated by Maureen Sullivan.
Not to be missed on the first floor is writer/curator Benjamin Sutton’s “The Monstrous Self.” The exhibition combined crude humor with serious gross-out factor, taking things to such a point that artist Sigrid Sarda had to alter the bottom half of her work “Rule 34: Charm” the day of the opening because of constraints set by the space’s institutional guidelines. The piece was undoubtedly the most talked about of the night, a tableaux featuring a self-pleasuring female made of wax and real human bones, flipping through porn and taking selfies while covered in golden maggots. It topped the price list at $17,000.
Curator Yulia Topchiy, founder of CoWorker Projects, stole the show on the second floor with Bruno Pogacnik Wukodrakula’s “Powercave4,” wherein the artist encased an entire classroom in metallic foil, covered the ground in AstroTurf and geometric patterns of spray foam insulation, and filled the remaining space with projections, CCTV cameras that played visitors’ movements on television monitors, plant life, painted skulls, dolls, neon lighting, and skeletal sculptures. The horrifying effect was that of walking into a ritual chamber, where it’s unclear whether you’re a participant or potential sacrifice.
Gori admitted that as members of a community that is often subject to the ebb and flow of both the art market and New York’s real estate costs, temporality had been on his and Kelly’s minds when putting this year’s show together. “Even our situation here, in this building, is temporary, and we’re aware of that,” he said. That notion of nothing-is-forever is something that many in the art world are now more painfully aware of after Hurricane Sandydamaged spaces in Chelsea and along the Brooklyn waterfront, shuttering galleries and displacing artists who had studio spaces there. But Gori and Kelly saw this as an opportunity to give their peers a place to do their thing, and invited several gallerists and curators who no longer operate permanent spaces to participate in this year’s fair.
Kathleen Cullen, one such gallerist, curated a knockout group show on the third floor, including works by Michael St. John and Andy Mister, whose charcoal and ink drawing appropriations of historical images of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and frames from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” were prime examples of the fair’s theme.
Gori and Kelly’s decision to put SPRING/BREAK’s marketplace online is an addition to this year’s fair that could be a game changer. The artworks are available to purchase through the fair’s website and through a specially curated auction with Paddle 8, where curators have chosen one artwork from their section for a small sale, portions of which will be donated to ProjectArt, a non-profit arts education program. For any collector, dealer, artist, and even reporter who has trudged through the art fairs each year trying to keep up with sales, the digital marketplace makes the process painless and easily accessible, giving collectors the time to peruse or even buy a work on their iPads.
One thing hasn’t changed, and that’s the whirlwind experience the fair creates for visitors. Gori and Kelly are efficient ringmasters who have cornered a section of the market for rising art stars with wholly original ideas, and honed in on an community-driven art experience that was all but lost in New York until now.
