Armory Show remains tough nut for galleries to crack

Volume One, Issue 24, March 2 - March 8, 2007

Ranard’s Picture Show for Chelsea Now
In an enterprising move by Chelsea gallery Foxy Productions, their Spanish artist Ester Partegas was able to use a precious bit of wall space for a large-scale rendering of her stunning work “Blancs, Blancs, Blancs.” Below: Ranard’s Picture Show for Chelsea Now
Janine Foeller, co-owner and co-director of Wallspace Gallery, beside “Plug II,” 2007, by Martha Friedman.

By David Halle and Elisabeth Tiso

Emmanuel Perrotin is not used to receiving hate mail. “They write us letters saying, ‘You are so stupid for rejecting us, everyone likes our works.’ Well, we know that, but 1,000 galleries applied, and there was space for only 150. It’s very hard.” Perrotin is one of Paris’s most famous contemporary art gallery owners — at 23, he put on Damien Hirst’s first solo show, “When Logic Dies,” featuring Hirst’s self portrait of himself decapitated. But for Chelsea gallery owners he is especially consequential as one of the six selection committee members for the Armory Show: The International Fair of New Art, which took place last week from February 22 to 26 at Pier 94.

Although a gamut of art shows ran concurrently last weekend, none came anywhere near the Armory Show in attendance or degree of difficulty in being selected to exhibit. The show is open to any gallery worldwide so long as it exhibits new works by living artists, a rule long on the books but which the organizers strictly enforced this year, since consolidating the fair from two piers, as was the case from 2001-2006, to just Pier 94. As Perrotin explained, “Last year the audience did not have a good feeling — the avenues were too crowded, so we reduced the number of galleries from 190 to 150.”

Other admission criteria include a gallery’s proposed use of their booth, its reputation and influence, and for those re-applying for admittance, its performance at a prior show.

Last week’s attendance figures are not yet in, but the three-hour waits for admission suggest it exceeded the record 47,000 who came last year — a long way from the show’s origins in 1994, when about twenty galleries met for a few days in the Gramercy Hotel. Then the art market was depressed, and Pat Hearn and Colin de Land came up with the brilliant idea of an art fair on the cheap, with each gallery renting a hotel room and displaying their wares, all for about $200 a night per room. (The Red Dot Fair, a newcomer this year, emulated this formula at the Park South Hotel.) Today, a modest 288-square-foot booth at the Armory costs $16,950, the equivalent of roughly half a year’s rent for a gallery located in a non-ground floor Chelsea space. The astronomical price reflects the Armory’s newfound status as the city’s most important international art fair, in the same league as Art Basel Switzerland, Frieze London, the FIAC Paris, and Art Basel Miami.

Most of Chelsea’s blue-chip galleries were at the Armory Show, but a few, such as Andrea Rosen, Luhring Augustine, and Galerie LeLong preferred to participate in the Art Show, which is a deliberately exclusive fair, restricted to Art Dealers Association of America members, none of whom may be from abroad. It remains the only New York fair offering any serious competition to the Armory Show — and it had only 110 galleries competing for 71 spaces. Eleven big-name galleries, like Matthew Marks, David Zwirner, and Cheim and Read, took part in both shows. And two of the most stellar spaces in Chelsea, Gagosian and Paula Cooper, were in neither fair. As Paula Cooper’s partner Steve Henry explained: “We never do New York fairs. What’s the point? We want people to come to our gallery.”

At any rate, the Armory organizers have good reason to try to keep the larger galleries happy and committed to this fair. This means above all giving them spacious, prominently-located booths, which at roughly $50,000 for four days, exceeds the annual rent that many street-level galleries would pay for the same square footage in pricey Chelsea.

But Perrotin knows that the Armory selection committee also needs to make room on Pier 94 for the new, young galleries that are the life-blood of the system, as they nurture raw artists and constitute the potential powerhouses of the future. As the Armory’s Communications Director Pamela Doan put it, “We would not just put in a young gallery for the sake of it being young. But because the fair’s mission is to present new work by living artists, that always means the selection committee is going to seek out new talent.”

For a young gallerist trying to break into the ranks of high-end galleries, getting into the Armory Show is a big opportunity. It offers exposure to a huge audience, and helps to attract talented artists and gain acceptance into the other blockbuster international fairs, all of which also have very tough admissions committees. (Art Basel, Switzerland is the toughest by far, “harder to get into than most Ivy League colleges,” as one gallerist said.)

Chelsea’s contingent of 38, mostly powerhouse galleries at the Armory Show included three that had never exhibited there before, Wallspace (619 W. 27th St.), Foxy Productions (617 W. 27th St.), and Bortolami Dayan (510 W. 25th St.). All were formed within the last four years. The youngest is Bartolami Dayan, started a year and a half ago by Stefania Bortlolami, who was Gagosian’s Director for six years, and Amalia Dayan, the granddaughter of Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan.

All three newcomers were delighted to be accepted to the Armory Show, though it was clear they had better sell well there. For the roughly $17,000 they paid in rent, all had booths towards the back and far ends of the Pier, though Foxy Productions, in an enterprising move, applied to use the adjoining end wall for a site-specific work at no extra charge, something the fair’s rules permitted. Their Spanish artist Ester Partegas used this precious real estate for a large-scale rendering of her stunning work “Blancs, Blancs, Blancs,” which depicts a contorted female outline, shackled by a series of pins, each with the name of a country where women’s rights are unduly curtailed.

None of the three new Chelsea galleries really knows why their application to the Armory Show succeeded. Michael Gillespie, co-Director with John Thomson of Foxy Productions, thinks it was because of their untypical strategy for the Armory Show of devoting their entire booth to one artist, David Noonan, an Australian with a solo exhibition forthcoming at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Showing just one artist at a fair is risky, especially for a young gallery, since that artist’s work might not sell, leaving the gallery to cover the rent. Noonan’s work consists of collages from old theater magazines and books, some with a sexual motif. The largest work on display was a 7’ by 10’ silkscreen selling for $28,000. It depicted a naked woman lying on the stage, with ropes looping from above. Supposedly sex sells, so perhaps this diminished the risk of relying on one artist, though several of the other works by Noonan at the booth were non-sexual.

By contrast, Wallspace and Bortolami Dayan, like most of the other exhibitors at the Armory Show, featured works by several artists. The five at Wallspace included Dave Miko, Walead Beshty, Martha Friedman, Sharon Ebner and Mark Wyse. By the show’s second day, Wallspace had sold works by all of these artists, priced from $1,800 to $14,000.

At Bortolami Dayan “Aunt Sally,”a flashing light, sculptural piece by the British artist Gary Webb, with holes to put one’s head through, was a great hit with the audience. By the fair’s last day, all but two of the twenty pieces in their booth, priced between $3,000 and $60,000, had sold.

In general at this show, the difference between the prices of younger and more prominent galleries was at the upper, not the lower end. For example, Matthew Marks had works for $1,500, and the Ronald Feldman gallery — whose mirrored New York garbage truck, “Social Mirror,” by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, was the star work in the show — was selling a copy of Ukeles’s 1983 “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” which proclaimed the importance of recycling New York’s garbage, for $500. But at the upper level, established galleries had an advantage. Andreas Gursky’s, “Düsselstrand” at Matthew Marks was selling for $300,000; David Salle’s “Melody Bubbles and the Critique of Pure Reason” at Cheim and Read was priced at $500,000; and Yayoi Kusama’s, “Repetition,” at Robert Miller, went for $275,000. The New York garbage truck featured in “Social Mirror” still belongs to the Department of Sanitation (its book value is $6,000), but if the city ever clears the paperwork to sell this piece it will surely go for a high-end price, too.

Janine Foeller, co-owner/director of Wallspace, thinks it was their recent, networked move to a ground-floor space that was important for gaining entry to the Armory Show. Although over half of the 300 or so galleries in Chelsea are on upper floors, this is true for only two of the Chelsea galleries represented at the Armory Show. In January of last year, Wallspace made a “Chelsea step-up,” descending from an upper floor at 547 W. 27th St. to a street-level space on the same block. John Connelly (of John Connelly Presents, 617 West 27th St.) spearheaded Foxy Productions’s move to 617 W. 27th St., which was co-ordinated by Sherri Pasquarella, founder of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) in 2002, which has its own fair in Miami. “It’s a little outpost on 27th St., a community,” said Janine Foeller. “We all support one another, from exchanging information to borrowing pedestals.”

All three newcomers have bitten the bullet of a street-level space. As Stefania Bortlolami, who opened from the outset on a ground floor, put it: “If you open a ground-floor gallery, you’d better commit your life to it, because you have to pay the rent. You can open on an upper floor and have a show every two months and be open from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and have a real job somewhere else. That is different from being open six days a week. Ground floor means commitment.”

All three new Chelsea galleries were happy with their experience at the Armory Show. They sold well, and met lots of collectors and other contacts. Still, acceptance at this year’s show is no guarantee of making it next year. About a third of the galleries that exhibited in 2006, for instance, were not accepted back this year, in part because the committee keeps tabs on each gallery’s “performance” during the show.

“If they have a bad hanging, a messy booth, or were selling secondary market works, all of those things are noted,” said Pamela Doan.

“To stay in isn’t easy,” Perrotin stressed. “We try to make sure each is selling new work, not work that has already been sold once. A young gallery can often make more money by bringing in work that already has a pedigree, but that is against the rules. Also, we look at the arrangement of the works at a booth, to make sure they compliment each other visually.”

The truth is that there is competition at every level. The Armory’s organizers are under pressure to make sure the fair remains New York’s premier art show — hence its strict rules and regulations. And big-name galleries, like Perrotin’s own Gallerie Emmanuel Perrotin, which had an extra-large booth at the show, have their own set of difficulties, chief among them their mega-star artists, who are often reluctant to have their works displayed at a fair since doing so carries the possibly insulting implication that they actually need to make an effort to sell their work. One of Perrotin’s own prominent artists, Maurizio Cattelan (famous for his portrait of the Pope, impaled) has not shown at a fair for many years now.

Perrotin himself, though a highly successful Paris gallerist, doubts he could even compete in the Chelsea market, though he’d love to: “I’m 38, maybe I’ll open in New York one day. But when my artists come to New York they want to be with a big gallery. I couldn’t afford to open a big gallery in Chelsea.” Instead, he opened one in Miami. How is it doing? “Well, it’s OK now, but I had the bad luck of opening in 2003 just after the French government opposed the American invasion of Iraq. A lot of American people wouldn’t buy from a French gallery.” Nothing, as they say, is easy.

David Halle is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Elisabeth Tiso teaches art history at Parsons.