Domenick Ammirati on Armory Week in New York

AUGUST WAS SLOW and dull and frustrating; I spent it trying to synthesize Craig Owens and Leo Strauss. The confluence of postmodernism and antimodernism would seem to explain our reactionary aesthetic substrate as well as anything at the moment. The transformation of the art object into a financial instrument: What does it look like? It remains terminally hard to say, since what it looks like doesn’t matter. We just feel like we’re being lied to all the time.

An art fair, of course, is not the place to look for coherence or aesthetics. The Armory Show moved to autumn a mere two years ago and has already implicitly made the first week of September “Armory Week,” lassoing the slew of exhibition openings that take place—not to mention Fashion Week, the finals of the US Open, and the VMAs—as its paraproperty: part of the brand. In July, the Armory was acquired by Frieze, which is itself owned by the entertainment giant Endeavor, which on Monday announced its purchase of WWE. Obviously I should follow the lead of Ari Emanuel and, rather than Owens and Strauss, try to synthesize art and professional wrestling to find the real key to our age. (Here my editor reminds me that, by some seventy years, Roland Barthes beat me to it.)

Now that the two shows are siblings, one wonders how much longer the more toned and tony Frieze New York will continue to operate at an inferior site. The Armory’s Javits Center, oversized and airy, is designed for trade shows, naturally making it a better space for the display of art than Frieze’s Shed, which was designed as a kunsthalle.

For this go-round, the Armory’s organizers made the most prominent feature of the show’s layout a long, strange runway of oversize sculptures on round-edged beige carpet half a football field long. The most impressive feature of this ad hoc sculpture park—not Art Omi but Art? Oh My—was in fact part of the architecture, a monumental gray ductwork structure stretching to but not quite breaching the Javits Center’s glass ceiling, just like Hilary Clinton. I spied filmmaker-artist Bradley Eros, an unlikely connection to the comparatively quaint world of Anthology Film Archives and Jonas Mekas, tipping an ear to it as if it were a cross between a Max Neuhaus and a Walter De Maria. The most impressive command of the contemporary artist’s concerns was displayed by the jewelry brand Sauer, with their Zodiac collection offering the dozen astrological signs as signets and their questionably titled Fungus collection taking up the vocabulary of the magic mushroom.

As for the rest of the week, there was far too much to do and see. From Wednesday through Saturday, there were some one hundred and fifty openings at credible galleries, loosely defined, with myriad collateral dinners, parties, screenings, and performances along with at least three other fairs. I had failed to do my laundry, which meant that throughout the ludicrously hot, frantic, theoretically glamorous XXL weekend I was wearing socks with holes in them and my most uncomfortable underwear, including a defective pair of Calvin Kleins and some American Apparel nude women’s bikini briefs that I purchased for a Halloween costume nearly a decade ago. As a result, I was continuously plagued by the sensation that my trousers were steadily, slowly being yanked toward my knees—getting pantsed in slow motion.

On Friday, afternoon rains had failed to dispel the humidity, leaving the night saunalike and a little mad. You would duck into a white cube for just long enough to cool off, say some peaked hellos, and return to your route as the street air settled back on you like a steamed duvet. My itinerary included stops at Derek Eller for some legitimately sick paintings by Austin Martin White—including a few illuminated in ghoulish ultraviolet for the opening’s hours only—as well as Artists Space for Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Theta for Kelsey Isaacs, and more. TriBeCa’s wild profusion of events turned Walker Street into Times Square. A brief and brutal fight erupted on the sidewalk in front of Chapter NY between a women in a silky hot-pink jumpsuit and a woman in tight jeans and a black corset, though I think most of the blows caught the thick part of the loser’s skull. I saw no blood.

Ultimately I settled into the luxuriant air conditioning at David Lewis for my old friend Lisa Jo’s opening, followed by a slow-rolling buffet at Bacaro. When it broke up, I chose to forgo the Theta after-party, which took place at a nautical-themed gastropub and featured music by the Dare, whose biggest song, “Girls,” combines 2 Live Crew with the Chemical Brothers, which is I guess how straight people make electroclash. Instead I went for a nightcap in a basement hotel bar that featured, with nearly as much nostalgia, jazz.

Oh yes, it was 9/11 this week too. Now do you see why I’ve been reading Leo Strauss?

I’m somewhat worried about developing a benzodiazepine addiction, as I’ve been relying on them more regularly, including on Saturday night, which I spent at Karma (Jane Dickson and Kathleen Ryan) and eventually Lomex, which had the weekend’s nerd blockbuster, an exhibition by legendary character designer Yoshitaka Amano of Final Fantasy fame. I missed the crush of backpack-wearing weebs who arrived promptly at six in alarming numbers to find the artist unflappable and fucking chic, wearing a newly purchased, boldly sized hat that Anna Wintour herself would not be allowed to wear on the front row at a runway show. The surprise of Amano’s exhibition were fanciful, pervy cartoons on Dean & Deluca bags made during his brief residence in New York in the ’90s, circa the last gasp of SoHo as an art neighborhood.

At the dinner for Amano, which took place at the new restaurant Ella Funt in the East Village, I talked about that era with artist and impresario Jimmy Raskin, who’s involved in a fashion collab with the artist. As a naïf, he worked for the legendary gallerist Pat Hearn; we discussed the improvisatory nature of the Armory Fair’s 1994 founding, in which she played a crucial part. We contrasted that giddy, scrambling affect favorably with the seemingly inescapable hyperconsciousness of the present, that poignant desire to be historic that grips a segment of the art and literary world, that insistent need on the part of a social scene to Möbius-strip all discourse into discussion of that scene itself. I took my seat just in time for oysters, and to overhear at the table next to me, delivered ironically (which is to say, sincerely): “Bohemia is a very complicated place at the moment. Tensions run high.”

After dinner, a full-on party opened up, along with the basement. The space turned out to be vast, unfinished, musty, and stocked with building supplies. We suspected it to be a former Ukrainian bath, given the deep, squared-off pit at its center. A literal (which is to say, literal) miasma hung in the air, perhaps from a fog machine to better set off the disco ball, perhaps from the humidity, perhaps from something sinister. The rest of the night, as it became chaotic, involved regular trips up and down the stairs in hopes that the belowdecks would feel more favorable for lingering. It did not. People preferred the hot mob in the dining rooms above, which produced a crowd thick enough to conjure the fire department, much to the horror of Lomex’s Alexander Shulan and the management.

The firefighters’ easy departure heralded the evening growing late. The community was peppy and hedonic. We discussed what drugs we were on, the petty details of artistico-business survival, and music we liked, and no doubt talked shit. I sat my male ass down and listened to three women artists converse about gender and the art biz—getting snubbed, shunted, or misunderstood. It seemed extra pointed taking place against the restaurant’s strange, dubious wall of paintings of nude and scarcely clad women. Real cool, guys. But was one of the paintings a Miriam Cahn?

Downstairs in the haze, I stared at the mirror ball’s fragmenting beams and thought of Sauer’s glittering opals, sapphires, and diamonds, their zodiac rings. The final fantasy in my evening’s mental PlayStation was an imaginary Elements collection: the NYFD symbolizing Fire; the catacomb we inhabited, Earth; the open pit a pool of Water run dry. As for Air, it was bad down there. Bohemia is a complicated place. I preferred to find its representative in the basement’s only design feature beside a rudimentary bar—a swing, on which an occasional partygoer ascended gleefully into the sky despite being so far underground.

Given the pervasive nostalgia afoot, that prop made me worry that the place would be turned into a site for some neo-burlesque revue, like a 2.0 of The Box. And in fact my dowsing wasn’t far off: The space had been no bath but rather was the former site of the 82 Club, famous in the 1950s and ’60s for running drag shows for a mostly straight, celebrity-dotted audience. Apparently the owners plan to revive the club in some fashion. The history is unwieldy, as usual. I will refrain from judgment. At the moment, I’m not trying to conclude; I’m just trying to present.

— Domenick Ammirati