When you enter the front doors of the Moving Image art fair, located at the Waterfront New York Tunnel, a cavernous space about as far west in Manhattan as you can go before falling in the Hudson River, there are no booths in sight, and very little of the stuffy nonsense that pervades other fairs. As far as the eye can see there are only screens and images, color and light.
Created in 2011, the fair’s existence is simple, even necessary. “If you walk around a major fair you’ll see there’s very little video,” Moving Image co-founder Edward Winkleman told ARTINFO in a conversation shortly after they opened their doors on the morning of March 6. “We thought video was too difficult to show in most of the major fairs, so we developed Moving Image to experiment with the model.”
“It costs next to nothing to do this fair compared to the average fair,” Winkleman added. “Most [gallerists] say it’s the easiest fair they’ve ever done, and it’s all intentional.”
The space has cleaned up nicely since its days as the infamous Tunnel nightclub, which closed down in 2001 as a result of then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s quality-of-life campaign. The space is now a mini-mall catering to the rich, with luxury boutiques and a coffee shop, bearing no traces of its former life as a drug den for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd (unless you count Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s “Nymphomania” (1993), an important work of the Cinema of Transgression, which features a “sexualized satyr”).
“We’re always looking for what we consider a snapshot,” Winkleman said, hesitating to chart a theme running through the works in the fair. Chosen by a curatorial advisory committee, an annual rotating list of independent and museum-affiliated curators, the video work exhibited is geographically diverse, with a combination of new and historical pieces.
This amalgam of the past and the present is immediately apparent. Just a few steps away from a dog sculpture by Nam June Paik (widely considered one of the grandfathers of video art) is Leslie Thornton’s “Luna” (2013), a three-channel video that acts as a meditation on the cinematic image in the digital age. These works, and many more throughout the fair, engage in conversations through their visual language.
Two works that stand out share a similar stillness and painterly composition. Helsinki-based artistLiisa Lounila’s “7BPM (7 beats per minute)” (2014) contains a single shot of a clearing in the woods of Chinle, Arizona, during a thunderstorm. The chirping of crickets and sudden flashes of lightening in the sky give the piece a hypnotic rhythm, the stillness creating an ominous and open-ended narrative — is this storm the prelude or the aftermath? On the other end of the fair, Patty Chang’s “Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part 1” is a single shot of the oceanfront, where the artist cleans a dead sperm whale that has washed up ashore. Chang’s video is a big work (literally, projected on one of the biggest screens in the fair) that’s interested in big themes — the bloated whale representing, well, take your pick, and the cleansing signaling something new on the horizon. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the art world?
