NADA NYC
Pier 36 at Basketball City
299 South St. on the East River
May 10-12, free
www.newartdealers.org
Back in March, Armory Arts Week featured the Armory Show, Volta NY, Scope, the Independent, Moving Image New York, ADAA the Art Show, New City, Fountain, and Spring/Break art fairs. Now that we’ve all gotten the chance to catch our breath, the second part of the season is up and running this weekend with another slew of art shows around the city. While the main event might be the second edition of Frieze, held on Randall’s Island and charging a whopping $42 admission fee, there are numerous lower-cost options. At NADA, it does indeed cost nada to see more than seventy exhibitors at Basketball City, including Eleven Rivington, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Marlborough Chelsea, Churner and Churner, Feature Inc., and SculptureCenter. Among the special events and projects are Merkx & Gwynne’s “King Arthur Green Room,” a LittleCollector tour, a Lower East Side gallery tour, and an Eat up NY in the LES food tour at this show sponsored by New Art Dealers Alliance, which “believes that the adversarial approach to exhibiting and selling art has run its course . . . that change can be achieved through fostering constructive thought and dialogue between various points in the art industry from large galleries to small spaces, nonprofit and commercial alike.”
PARALLAX “ART” FAIR
Prince George Ballroom
15 East 27th St.
May 11-12, free with advance registration, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
www.parallaxaf.com
Parallax is a self-described “non-art fair that makes a uniquely refreshing conceptual statement about subjectivity and the commoditization of taste, offering an intellectual framework where visitors can dare to be themselves for a change.” Created by Dr. Chris Barlow, Parallax features works from more than two hundred international emerging and established artists celebrating “the luxury of objects” and examining new forms of acquisition.
Jani Ruscica’s “Screen Test (for a Living Sculpture)” is among the special projects at Pulse (courtesy of Otto Zoo)
PULSE
The Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th St.
May 9-12, $20 (run of show $25)
www.pulse-art.com/new-york
The always enjoyable Pulse is back at the Metropolitan Pavilion, with nearly fifty international galleries part of its main exhibition and another thirteen in its Impulse cutting-edge section. This year’s Pulse Projects features Tristin Lowe’s “Comet Nature,” Lisa Lozano and Tora Lopez’s “We Couldn’t Remember What We Came to Forget,” Franco Mondini-Ruiz’s “Spring Flings & Pretty Things,” Russell Maltz’s “Painted/Stacked,” Jason Rogenes’s “CH1M3R4,” and Tim Youd’s “Typing Tropic.” The multimedia Pulse Play lounge will be showing Jani Ruscica’s Screen Test (for a Living Sculpture), Robbie Cornelissen’s The Labyrinth Runner, and Lars Arrhenius’s The Street, there will be a Pulse New York Chelsea Gallery Walk and after-party on Thursday night, and a free shuttle bus will take people between Pulse and the Frieze ferry stop.
The cutlog fair makes New York debut with indoor and outdoor events
CUTLOG NY
Clemente Soto Vélez Center
107 Suffolk St. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
May 9-13, $15 (run of show $25)
www.cutlogny.org
Making its New York debut, cutlog is a whirlwind event focusing on collaboration and innovation in multiple disciplines. Held at the Clemente on the Lower East Side, cutlog NY includes such exhibitors as Tel Aviv’s Art Connections, Paris’s Galerie Dix9 and Olivier Watman, Antwerp’s Marion de Cannière, London’s House of the Nobleman, Milano’s Edward Cutler, Lyon’s Céline Moine, Istanbul’s Gama, and Vancouver’s the Apartment, but it’s the special projects that highlight this highly anticipated fair. There will be projected images outdoors on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights; such live performances and installations as Movement Research re-creating Anna Halprin’s “Mirror Piece,” the Fantastic Nobodies’ “Free Car Wash,” Tyler Matthew Oyer’s cabaret “Gone for Gold,” Marni Kotak’s exercise-obsessed “Calorie Countdown,” a site-specific dance by Netta Yerushalmy, and Phoebe Rathmell’s “Visceral Transcendence,” among others; and talks with Harvey Stein and John Lurie.
Gaetano Pesce will be at Collective .1 Design with new installation and conversation
COLLECTIVE .1 DESIGN FAIR
Pier 57 at 15th St. and the West Side Highway
May 8-11, $25 (run of show $30)
www.collectivedesignfair.com
Another newbie is the Collective .1 Design Fair, founded by Steven Learner to present a curated examination of new and historical design. Approximately two dozen galleries will gather at Pier 57, including Demisch Danant, Jousse Entreprise, Lost City Arts, Maison Gerard, Mondo Cane, and Sebastian + Barquet, with installations by Gaetano Pesce, Sebastian Errazuriz, and Dana Barnes, tours, book signings with Christopher Bascom Rawlins and Jeffrey Head, and such Collective Conversations as “Inside the Design Market,” “Obsessed — Collecting in the 21st Century,” and “In Dialogue” with Gaetano Pesce and curator Daniella Ohad Smith.
Pema Tseden’s Old Dog is a beautifully told, slowly paced meditation on Buddhism’s four Noble Truths — “Life means suffering”; The origin of suffering is attachment”; “The cessation of suffering is attainable”; and “There is a path to the cessation of suffering” — that ends with a shocking, manipulative finale that nearly destroys everything that came before it. In order to get a little money and to save the family’s sheep-herding dog from being stolen, Gonpo (Drolma Kyab) sells their Tibetan nomad mastiff to Lao Wang (Yanbum Gyal), a dealer who resells the prized breed to stores in China, where they’re used for protection. When Gonpa’s father (Lochey) finds out what his son has done, he goes back to Lao Wang and demands the return of the dog he’s taken care of for thirteen years. “I’d sell myself before the dog,” he tells his son. And so begins a gentle tale of parents and children, set in a modern-day Tibet that is ruled by China’s heavy hand. Gonpa’s father doesn’t understand why his son, a lazy man who rides around on a motorized bike and never seems to do much of anything, doesn’t yet have any children of his own, so he pays for Gonpa and his wife Rikso, (Tamdrin Tso), to go to the doctor to see what’s wrong. Meanwhile, the old man keeps a close watch on his dog, wary that Lao Wang will to try to steal it again. Writer-director Pema Tseden (The Silent Holy Stones, The Search) explores such themes as materialism, family, and attachment in a lovely little film that sadly is nearly ruined by its extreme final scene. Old Dog is screening at MoMA May 15-20 as part of “Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions,” with Tseden taking part in a discussion with Asia Society film curator La Frances Hui after the 8:00 show on May 16 and with Hui and Chris Berry following the 7:00 show on May 18. The series continues through June 1 with such other films as Zhang Yuan’s Mama, Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju, Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, and Ai Weiwei’s Disturbing the Peace.
