It happens so immediately, I think it is a work of performance art. I rise out of my car and a man appears next to me. He is middle-aged and freckle-faced with slicked-back thin red hair. We’re in the parking lot of a revamped modern hotel and he’s wearing jeans and a stonewashed jean jacket. Pointing to the hotel, he asks, “What’s going on here tonight?”
I tell him this is an art fair. “That’s pretty classy for the East End,” he says. He points to a silver car and calls out, “There’s a Porsche!” He leaves toward the hotel, I go for my stuff in the trunk, and by the time I’m headed inside, he’s returning to the parking lot. “I just had a fight with my wife and I just want to get a room, but I can’t even do that,” he starts in, introducing himself as Gene. “This place is nothing like what it used to be. I haven’t been here in probably two years. I’m a longshoreman. Our dispatch center is over there.”
The dispatch center is a prefab concrete building decorated with blue tiles, set in a low-lying zone of light industrial buildings, the next closest being Allright Ladder Co. The cheap old hotel, incongruously called the Waldorf, was renovated and reopened eight months ago as a “creative compound.” Gene tries to persuade me to skip the art and go for a drink. I sort of miss him when he goes, especially when I enter the hotel and behold a front desk selling $9 imported toothpaste and fashionably threadbare T-shirts probably made in some squawkingly innocent manner (by hemp-recycling homeowners living within bicycling distance?), before ascending the staircase into what is called the FAIR or The Fair or Vancouver Art Fair—I can’t remember—but which I am calling the Non-Fair.
I am calling it the Non-Fair because of a simple definition of terms: The quantity “art fair” and the quantity “Vancouver art” are non-overlapping. An art fair—say, Art Basel in Switzerland, or Art Basel Miami, or New York’s Armory Show—is a luxury mall, a commercial free-for-all not driven by ideas but by sales. Vancouver art, on the other hand, is a temple of conceptualism, a specialist’s archive. The idea of a “Vancouver Art Fair” implies a Venn diagram that is improbable and potentially comical. I must see it for myself.
Carved wood panels in the hotel rooms are not art—they’re part of the hotel’s tiki theme. Room 121, with a sign over the door that reads “The Lake & Stars Shop-In-Room,” is likewise not art—it’s a place to buy lingerie, and remains closed this particular weekend.
The art is to be found (among beds and dressers) in the rooms along an L-shaped corridor. There are 17 galleries (and one bookstore) represented, from Vancouver, Seattle, Mexico City, Toronto, Victoria, Munich, and Berlin. In one sense, this Non-Fair is a zoo. It presents various species of galleries while protecting them all from the predation of the real world. There are commercial enterprises selling stylish, bright, faux-naive drawings; semi-ironic-but-attractive sculptures; and paintings ranging from cartoonish to neo-formal. There are also galleries selling nothing but good intentions (i.e., shopworn rhetoric), or history (video of a 1980 performance piece by a hilarious man who set a new record for the greatest number of illegal border crossings in 84 seconds at Point Roberts, Washington), or good immediate experiences (rather than objects for sale).
But this is still Vancouver, and even the “predators”—the actual-objects-for-sale art—are tame. If British artist Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull can be considered a great white shark in art’s money-hungry ecosystem, the closest thing here is a crystal squirrel delicately laid on a bed with a spray of fake flowers—a recent work by Stranger Genius Award winner Susan Robb, represented in the room of Seattle gallery Lawrimore Project. The squirrel is a lovable moment in a beautifully curated display of videos, installations, and sculptures by multiple artists that changes every day in this little room, inspired (as a finely printed handout explains) by William S. Burroughs’s cut-up methods.
Vancouver art is a land of clever foxes—likable and ingenious, not smug. In another hotel room (rented by Or Gallery, a government-funded, artist-run center in Vancouver), the art includes: funny-smart framed prints, a clump of American one-dollar bills sitting on a nightstand next to a handsome first edition of Das Kapital (with a brown marbleized cover), and a video playing continuously on the flat-screen TV, in which the flashy commodities at Amsterdam’s annual Millionaire Fair talk to each other in accented voice-overs.
Vancouver artist Dan Starling made the amusing video, Commodities Start Talking at the Millionaire Fair (a baroque candlestick asks a glass sword, “Do I have to spell it out for you? M to the A to the R to the X”). At the Millionaire Fair, the commodities are, like, a Hummer limo, a shoe made entirely of gold, or a sparkling beanbag. Here at the Non-Fair, Starling stands in a hallway, crowded against the wall; I wonder what he’d make the objects say to each other in this very different expo.
“This is not a real fair,” Starling tells me, reminding me that, in fact, most of the art world isn’t here, since this is opening weekend for the Venice Biennale, where all the collectors and curators go. “It’s like a conceptual art fair.”
Here in this ethereal wilderness, there’s both real appeal and plain old goofiness. In one room, members of the collective Instant Coffee are asking visitors to explore the question “Has money devalued art?” (I find this goofy.) They’ve hung posters: “Feeling So Much Yet Doing So Little,” “Together We Can Stop the Rain,” “There Is No Romance in Taking a Risk.”
In a room shared by the journal Fillip and European publisher Motto Books, the posters read “Hot Dogs Are Not Bookmarks” and “Deprofessionalize.” Books range from starchy to sexy, and persons are overheard discussing whether a certain restaurant “understood the concept of veggie.”
When the contingent from Seattle University’s Hedreen Gallery crossed the border on its way to the fair, the border guard asked to see the art in the car. Artist Jason Hirata pointed to a pair of audio speakers composing the basis of his (ultimately visceral) installation, and the guard said, “So what you’re telling me is you don’t have anything that looks like art?” Luckily, the guard waved them through, unlike the customs officials a century ago who declared Brancusi’s abstract classic Bird in Space neither bird nor art. Are these new officials a new breed? Is it something about sharing the border with the new sculpture Non-Sign by Seattle’s Lead Pencil Studio, a billboard structure made of welded steel rods that’s empty where the sign would be?
The logo of the Non-Fair also involves empty space—a whole bunch of it, beneath the words “THE FAIR.” This shouldn’t be taken too far. The fair is not empty. It’s open—to commercial galleries, nonprofits, institutions like Seattle U’s gallery, and independents like Seattle’s Season, run by artist Robert Yoder (who made a sale right off the bat). Which makes it sort of great. There’s simply a higher quotient of interesting art here than at a regular fair.
All of these factors lead me to believe that the fair’s organizer, Lucas Soi, will be a predictable type: progressive, liberal, etcetera. He is young. He is an artist. But this being the Non-Fair, it is already Backwards Day, so I should not be surprised when, in a conversation on the curb facing Allright Ladder Co., Soi professes sympathies with the Republican Party of the United States and calls himself a hustler and a capitalist. (From the sound of it, a Canadian conservative is like an American centrist, but still.)
Soi is an inveterate litterer. “When in Rome,” he says of dodgy East Vancouver, throwing down his beer bottle. (He grew up in West Vancouver, the wealthiest neighborhood in Canada; he now, as a full-time artist, lives in East Vancouver, the poorest neighborhood in Canada.) “East Van” are the proud and defiant words that appear in a giant cross-shaped text sculpture nearby, by the artist Ken Lum, who grew up here, but who is a classic conceptualist.
“I’m not a fan of Ken Lum,” Soi says. Has he seen the Lum retrospective currently at Vancouver Art Gallery? “I’m not a fan of the VAG.”
And yet, Soi is something every community needs: a detractor who doesn’t just complain, but organizes.
Of the 18 galleries at this fair—the first in what he hopes will be a continuing tradition, despite the fact that he intends to move away—several turned his work down when he tried to show there. But now, says Soi, “I’m working with all the galleries in town that would never work with me, and working with them all at the same time.”
“I’m, like, übercapitalist,” he says. “This is why I love the USA. What I’m doing is I’m bringing the American philosophy to Canada.”
Soi came up with the idea of a weekend-long fair after he heard that the renovators of the Waldorf were looking for programs to fill up the rooms. He was driving to Seattle for an opening at Season, where a conversation with Robert Yoder put the idea firmly in his mind for a fair in Vancouver. Yoder’s self-run gallery (based in his house) was the first to sign on.
Soi’s pen-and-ink drawings are not at the fair, but the fair is intended to provide room for art that doesn’t fit the Vancouver model the same way his doesn’t. The fair’s website is ArtAfterMoney.com, and by this point in the conversation I’m thinking the URL refers less to timing (the recent British Columbia government funding cuts to art) and more to the notion of going after money—trying to make some dough.
“The dialogue [in Vancouver] has been, ‘We’re above money, money is beneath us, we can make work that’s so rigorously conceptually based that we don’t have to explain it to anybody.’ Fine,” Soi says. “But that’s the only game! How about the other game? Sales. How about we give artists a living wage?”
Back inside the hotel, in a room with walls and windows covered by large blueprints for dream homes designed by amateurs using online software, the respected France-and-Canada-based artist Nicolas Sassoon considers this dream for Vancouver. “I think,” he says gently, in his French accent, “that Vancouver could use a little more of the idea that there’s a market.”
Come Monday morning, in fine Vancouver fashion, actual sales figures remain elusive. Soi won’t release numbers but says there were “lots of sales.” His clickers counted 1,000 fairgoers. And Seattle dealers like Lawrimore and Yoder say the low stakes—each room cost only $600 for the weekend—made the experience well worth it. “One or two people is all it takes, and I know there are one or two people in Vancouver who are going to be important in advancing my artists’ careers,” Lawrimore says. “And the company is good.” That last bit is especially true. 
“My Business is Circumference.” – Emily Dickinson
It is odd and frustrating that you insist on aligning these local artists rehashed statements of the big gamers work with your silly comparisons. Brancusi and Hirata? strange bedfellows. Hirst and Robb? Again, odd. It sounds as if the border crossing for Hirata was more compelling than his featured art. It is cute that you’re weaving the rustic northwest into you big city art associations, “ethereal wilderness”,(chuckle, I think), but it seems you are more interested in celebrating the “genius” of the local gallerists and their “stellar” curating than the art itself. One could argue any venue is better than none, but posturing a rented room in a groovy hotel with art on the bedside tables is neither alternative, superior,nor new and should not be hyped as such. The northwest’s after the fact trend of apartments and living rooms as galleries is nothing more than a venue in economically down trodden times, and I blame the validation placed on this with the gallerists,and you.You are all old enough to know different.It is not shifting the context nor bringing new game to the table and should not be seen as such. There is no distinction of excellence nor superiority because of these circumstances. This weekend was fun and I’m sure you were caught up in the moment, but the ability to step away and see it clearly is essential. You did nothing but make ridiculous associations and spoke nothing about the art itself. What happens when these young artists Utopian grandeur crumbles and they all fall back into the institutions as graduate students elsewhere? What are we left with? Young artists attempts at making their marks, but not great art. The fair was not a hub simply because Vancouver is. This was as it appeared, a small upstart fair with potential in the future undoubtedly, but not as you say or I saw it. My experience there obviously was not the same as yours, but we did see the same fair and art. Conceptual art has gotten way too easy to connive, manipulate, and pull off without substance or validity and we suffer from a lot of that here these days. The celebration of the dictatorship of the annointed few locally is a house of cards. Getting to what is authentic and sincere is the point, and it is ironic that you slam the important fairs as mercenary and commercial and pass off the Vancouver venue as think tank because of it’s vicinity to the “temple of conceptualism”, Vancouver. What? Isn’t that a bit too much tearing down the ominous opponent to elevate yourself because merit alone is not enough? A stretch and unworthy. ART is just not that easy. Really, it’s just not that easy. Thankfully, people are beginning to see this and the the talk is starting. Don’t get me wrong, great conceptual art is an amazing thing. Here’s hoping for a fresh new outlook and a new crop of work that is deserving of all the hype and chatter this time around.
@northwest mystic: Maybe you could bring attention to the things you feel I’m ignoring by writing about them, here or elsewhere.
I like you northwest mystic (DP). Good stuff.
I think there was a healthy dose of irony with the Robb/hirst comparison. Surprised you missed the point there.
As for “authentic and sincere” we have a number of artists that would love to have that conversation with you. (bruch, Berk, browing, layman, jones, robb, Hansen, et al). You are very wrong here and history (read as career path) is already proving this. I blame this on myopia and ignorance which can easily be overcome if you simply chatted with any of us about what we’re up to and why we do it with all our hearts. Just because there seems to be a little more head than hand should not blind you to our hearts. (And I think Bruch, Berk, Browning, Hansen et al would have something strong to say about the hand quotient too)
I’ll admit that I’m equally ignorant about the things you seem to support (which are quite vague at this point, ie “you know, good honest art, not that insincere, beentheredonethat art at LP”). So again, perhaps a dialog could be mutually beneficial.
As for the “dictatorship” and “hype” comments, that’s just silly. We do what we do. Others, other things. Jen tends to gravitate to the same things we do. Get over it. One voice. Don’t listen. To propagate more Gravesisms you hate, it’s like calling Greenberg out for not spilling ink on the great Social Realists or, more recently, Saltz for ‘defending’ Allora and Calzadilla. Futile.
There’s room for everyone and every voice in Seattle which is why I love it here. I’m glad yours is starting to emerge and we wish you well. When you prove us and our artists wrong in our earnest endeavors, it will surely be to a different though similarly cliquish group. (which is good and healthy for our community)
Sincerely,
Lawrimore Project
I’m liking how my coffee and my recent nerve disorder are enabling me to take all this in with a bit of wheatpaste in a Brion Gysin collage-sort-of-format, turning left at Schwitters’ Merzhaus, and walking past the tableau of hookers in the Tiki-themed ghosts of Christmases past. With Pacific Island themed tattoos…a tryptic of communication thru a fourth eye. Dialogue is a good thing…it’s circumference indicates growth thru poetic annular rings…art on…
And I like you too Lawrimore Project. You make a difference. and as for you Jen, I would like to reiterate the importance of open forum comment and right to opinion. Working for a paper that has an all out “no apologies” policy, you should try to be brave and toughen up. Commentary is as seen, and a convenient go elsewhere dismissal is not your right nor fair. Although I am certain your artists are genuine in their heads, LP, it is you and your like that are in question here, respectfully. Collectors and art lovers look to dealers and critics for their informed, intelligent, and insightful direction towards artists and authenticity, qualities of transcendence and greatness. All that a dealer or critic has is his or her mind, their word, if you will, thus when Jen Graves makes what appears to be a silly, lighthearted, or uninformed venue of a struggling to get noticed art scene, it does not help the cause. It also, as I’m sure you know, an easy thing to manipulate in the wrong ways, if you know how. As much as I do appreciate your sly attempt at a commentary on “the fight” your avant garde group is waging against the domination of kitsch forces locally I think taking the Greenberg alignment past that to reference the Graveisms comment is as silly as her associations, and beneath you. The real issue here is proper perspective and place. Acknowledgement of talent and art on a level that is honest, frank, and devoid of contrivance and condescension. A forum that Vancouver has built beautifully and Seattle should strive to create. This is why Jen Graves should be more diverse, less “myopic”, appear less “ignorant” and fair to the community(convenient easy to use words, eh?). I admire your defense of your artists. It is what a good dealer should do, but I could go for a stronger dose hard work and less defensive, prickly excuses doused with ironic, smug, lofty, and sometimes snide attitude. Thanks.
Mystic (A.F.)-
Perhaps it’s best if we take this discussion offline and hug this out.
Drop by the gallery anytime.
-sml
i’m with strubbe here, there’s something in the water… art is on, although it might just be blood in the water.
JG supremo makes a lot of things sound bigger than they are… she likes zooming in and out, playing with scale.
being there, i had to say it wasn’t no big thang and it was fun b/c of that.
THX FOR LETTING MUSS KNAW THAT WE DUZN’T THINK OF IT 1ST… WAIT WHAT’S THAT MYSTICAL? YOU SAY YOU HAVE NEU GAMES 4 ME TO PLAI? SCUSE ME CAN I HAVE A NUTTA.
oh of course also –
I INTERVIEW JEFF WALL IN THIS ISSUE OF HUNTER & COOK, MAKE SURE YOU SEE MY TATTOOS.
What a creepy introduction to your colorful send-up of a questionable affair! Remember when Seattle had an art fair (also creepy, but not in a refurbished-Waldorf sort of way)?
Until recently Vancouver has been so refreshingly art-socialist (glad you mention “Commodities Start Talking at the Millionaire Fair”), but I have friends dwelling there who left behind their radical left-wing upbringing in the US to joyfully embrace the new consumerist capitalist paradigm. McMansion and all. It is too bad. However, if they would buy some of my art and hang it in their awful house, I would probably avert my critique.
Dirk was in Vancouver for The Fair and we talked a lot about it afterwards – how it reminded him of the early days of the Jupiter fair in Portland, and when we first launched our Aqua fair in Miami. I’m not quite sure, Jen, why you’re presenting it as a new idea – but I’m glad you’re covering it anyway.
The position of “non-fair” is troubling though. Yes, this is another dyi moment and a lot of cool stuff is generated during times like this, but are you really so opposed to seeing things make it to the next level? Don’t forget that the Armory Show started as a dyi thing at the Gramercy Hotel. And while it certainly is more commercial now, all of those sales mean that at least some artists are still earning a living and at least some dealers are staying in business at a time when many have been forced to close. If you think art fairs are warping the artwork, try not having any money to make art, or not having a dealer. I’ll take the “problem” of art fairs over those problems any day.
Saying, “An art fair…is a luxury mall, a commercial free-for-all not driven by ideas but by sales,” is just to easy and simplistic. You’re also revealing your ambivalence towards financial success in the art world, and that’s nothing new either – plus a bit sophomoric after a certain age. If you really think the galleries set up in Vancouver just for fun, you really don’t have a clue about business. Everyone was hoping it would help further their programs and their artists in some way that will eventually pay off. That’s what an art fair is for, and if it doesn’t do that it won’t survive.
And if it does eventually pay off, I hope you won’t stop covering it.
-Jaq Chartier
jaq: thanks for your comments, and you, too, northwest mystic. there is no “no apologies” policy at the stranger, and my coverage is always shifting and changing, and i read what y’all write.
i like when people buy art. i like when artists earn a living wage. i do not believe that not having a dealer warps an artist — but i hear that you do.
thanks again for writing, and i’ll refrain from declaring anyone a freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior.
xoj
What part of “room for everyone” and “GREAT Social Realists” do you not get Mystic?
But maybe you’re right.
Maybe we have pulled the wool over the eyes of the entire art world.
For example:
Just another ‘soft-work’ May for a Seattle ‘house of cards’ built on ‘hype,’ easy conceptualism, and its ‘word’ with their ‘undeserving’ roster preparing for their ‘utopias to crumble’…
http://www.lawrimoreproject.com/lp/News.…
“My smugness is my business.” -sml [for Alpha Unicorn]
“Everything made sense… until Box.” – Logan’s Run (for sml)
You’re a big one for others thoughts and quotes in your defense, to a fault. But since “smugness” is your business, comes with the territory, huh?, I guess that makes you a smug dealer? A word of advice, less quoting (we all know you can read) and a lot more original thought. If there’s one thing people agree on about you, you could run a great political campaign, you spin well! Luckily, I’m not the only one allergic to wool. Peace and stay cool Cheshire, meeeooow! Namaste.
CHESHIRE MEAOOOW? HOLLA WHUT UP KITS BIG KING KAT HERE LISTENING!
HAHAHAH ALLERGIC TO WOOL.
ONLY UNICORN I KNO IS UNICRON.
I AM A SMUT DEALER, NOT A SMUG DEALER.
“Proceed – on your way to oblivion.” – Unicron
You might be interested in this young up and coming artist, LP or JG, she’s getting a lot of attention and hype (ny times, ny gallery, ny collectors), so she must be good, right?
http://www.aelitaandreart.com/aelitaandr…
Well, stirring the pot is as legitimate as having your own thoughts. Jen, once again you seem to do no more than report and comment. You speak freely and spontaneously from your thoughts and own center. People jump on your ideas. So what. I think it helps and is mightily useful for you to just say what comes to you. I guess those who counter are just positioning. Unlike the last article this one gathered some response.
@6 (mystic): I guess we have to think about your counter-arguments. But I sense you are making a fundamental error in your analysis. I take Jen’s raising local artists as possibly deserving equal attention to those that have become well-noted and well-to-do offers insight to the vagaries of the art world like the vagaries of the Top Ten List of the New York Times. In what she’s doing she’s giving an important measured support to selected Northwest artists. The vagaries thing is like the urban myth of A Star Is Born. There is an awful lot of chance and historical arbitrariness as to which artist wins the brass ring. In real strong sense there is not reason to think that a given beginning artist does not merit a similar attention by the art community as a well established International one. It’s a carousel of life after all and, sometimes, as in politics, the realities are creepy. Those at the top are not there necessarily because they excel in their concepts and execution, they are there because of a great deal of happenstance. The world has been upside-down for some time including its art world. It’s the nature of the beast. And giving support to locals is an act of giving, belief and as old as apple pie. If done well it can be a prescient call. So maybe you should back off a little? Your attack is harsh and a little too easy.
@19. You raise some good points, but the proverbial “pot” you mention stirring is a necessity. I disagree with harsh-you say potato, I say potato-Jen is very harsh, condescending, unfair, and unjust quite frequently, IMO. Due diligence. It raises the issue of qualifications and ability, although her credentials are suited to a social art gadfly presence as an art critic, true experience and intellectualism is obviously still in its youth. Myopic alignments with a few elitist feeders that give the appearance of seriousness and exception, ferociously fighting a hard fought battle against a compromised local art scene needs to be battled against. As the only game left, a bigger picture is so necessary. I’m all for celebrating the good created here and the deserving artists, but not because a few “informed” characters say so, because they know, and we do not, but because its worthy. Sorry but no dice.