Pool Art Fair makes a splash at Hotel Chelsea

By Debra Jenks

The fourth annual Pool Art Fair was a refreshingly populist addition to the staggering swell of international art fairs. A loft space hosted previous Pools in New York, but last weekend, “Art Attack: Pool New York” took place for the first time at the Chelsea Hotel and featured work by over 50 artists, including Taleen Berberian, Nicholas Bergery, Peggy Cyphers, Love Artist Kathe Izzo, Jonas Mekas, Barbara Rosenthal, Linda Troeller, Chris Twomey, Ultra Violet, Nick Zedd, and the collaborative teams of Peru Ana Ana Peru and LIZ N VAL.

The hotel art fair, for those not yet familiar with this current trend in art purveyance, used to be more grassroots. It was an alternative venue for artists and less-established galleries to showcase their work without the enormous overhead that comes with the operation of a gallery.

From its humble inception, the art fair has grown into a global enterprise, taking place practically everywhere from Budapest to Bangladesh. The number of fairs in New York alone is mind-boggling. In addition to the Armory Show at Chelsea Piers, where 154 galleries from around the world fill two piers and generate $45 million in sales, and its funkier version, Scope New York, there’s Pulse, Red Dot, The Gramercy, The Outsider Art Fair, and yes, even an Erotic Art Fair.

Unlike these shows, Pool champions independent artists, a k a artists without gallery representation, and brings the art fair down home. This is in part due to the hotel itself, a landmark of a bygone bohemia. The show’s curator, Giorgio Handman, said he “encouraged the artists in this year’s show to present site specific works . . . to take advantage of the transitory and clandestine character of the rooms,” which have housed a number of luminaries like Dylan Thomas, who died there, Arthur C. Clarke, Allen Ginsberg, the poetry patron Linda Twigg, Viva, Janis Joplin, Julian Schnabel, Cristo and Jean Claude.

Linda Troeller, a resident artist at the hotel, has been photographing the less celebrated, and more current tenants and guests for over 12 years. The photographs in her recently published book, “Atmosphere: An Artist’s Memoir of the Chelsea Hotel,” were a fitting inclusion and tribute to the fair’s local bent. (See story below.)

There was a long waiting list for appointments with The Love Artist (Kathe Izzo). Her “Musical Theatre of Love Seed Project” at Pool was an extension of “The True Love Project,” in which she “promises to love the world one person at a time.” She describes herself as ‘’a cross between a prostitute and the Dalai Lama.’’ I found her ensconced in the bathtub of a candlelit bathroom “studio” complete with roses, pond flora and troubadour, holding hands with a fair attendee. Previous “True Love Project” sessions have taken place in galleries, theater and hotel lobbies, department stores and nightclubs. She has even set up her “Love Shop” in a former upstate jail as part of the Kingston Sculpture Biennial.

Izzo’s work is a twist on the idea of art as therapy. For her it’s therapy as art and her mediums are “love and intimacy.”

Video art seemed to dominate this year’s fair. The enigmatic duo Peru Ana Ana Peru’s “8 Years of Persistence” portrays an armless man trying to masturbate. A cheering soundtrack buoys the exoticism turned eroticism, and we want this protagonist to succeed. Poignant and disturbing, it brings to mind Jillian Weise’s book of poems, “The Amputee’s Guide to Sex,” just out from Soft Skull Press.

Mixing animation and live action, B-horror flick icon Nick Zedd’s style of filmmaking could be compared to a pressure cooker building steam, its guts about to blow. The painfully hilarious “No Plague Like Home,” from his TV series Electra Elf, is a mind-control manifesto in which a flying Yoda character rants about the American manifestation of life-as-media-simulation, before shape shifting into an anus look-alike. The series airs on Mondays at 11 PM on BCAT Channels 34/67.

Also of note were the accomplished films of Pierre St-Jacques, the elegantly grotesque drawings of Jessie Gelaznik, and the kooky, psychedelic paintings of Joshua Abram Howard, particularly the one of Flipper. How appropriate for The Pool.