Read the rest of the interview in this week’s AinA here. I want to thank martin and the gallery. It was great fun and he’s always a fascinating subject.

He also identifies a new movement going on right now called “Neo-Senilism,” and he may have something there. Excerpt, below.

Me: What’s your next project?
Alex: I am instituting a prize for artists 80 years old and over. Like the Turner Prize, but for older artists. I feel we are in a time of senility. The end of a glorious epoch. Modernism started with young vigorous men with their penises up; now we are in a stage of the limp, of senility, and those greatest artists are of course older: Richter, the late Picasso, de Kooning. We forget things. “Neo-Senilism,” that’s the future of art. What’s happened years ago keeps happening over and over. I am now trying to get money for this prize.

Squirrel hair brushes: did you know that they’re used for auto body painting — specifically, those stripes down the sides? Surprised that such meticulous lines can be got with such floppy-haired instruments. GM says you can buy them at auto supply stores,

and clearly, they can be made to do whatever you want including more emotionally charged lines, like these.

Talking w Gregory always yields instruction and inspiration I don’t expect!

That’s Ben Godward’s brite 3-d creation in the foreground, draping off (part of?) two folding chairs;

That’s a mess of photos with deep sight lines (nice!), along with a grid of laser night shots (shout out to Paulius Nosokas) tacked up on the way to the stairwell.

And under the stairwell, a mise-en-scene that just, well, worked:

bare red bulb, TV monitor, detritus, all piled (you can’t adequately see it here) on top of what appeared to be an actual baptismal font. The show, we should add, was housed in an old church; ‘found objects’ don’t get any more loaded than that. Maybe the red light says ‘redlight district/tawdry’ to you, or maybe it bespeaks photos developing — their ghostly outlines getting ‘fixed’ before your eyes. Either way, it’s evocative, and intuitive — and decidedly Not Trying to be Something More Than It Is — which, in this context, pretty much spells success. Remember when Rachel Harrison tacked her dinner up to the wall in clear plastic baggies in alt spaces? Remember The Williamsburg of Yore and its event-based allnighter Extravaganzas? Well, it may not be clean or even pretty, but it’s happening here in Bushwick.

I should add that it was Andrew Ohanesian’s fine realityisbetterthanfiction (”Mandies”) installation that brought be out. The moment I got inside it, one of the show’s co-curators (Louise?) asked me to confess ‘my sins’ (”Mandies” in this iteration resembles a bona-fide wooden church confessional) but I oh-so-rudely demurred, because I’d, well, seen it, and seen-it-all. Guess she got me, ’cause I did have one: Arrogance.

Last, but totally not least, let’s include the look-book of projects that Iris Jaffe shared with me inside the church.

Sweet.
Absolutely no pandemic here. Just exactly what you come to this sort of show to see: enthusiasm, PBR’s, Effort, fun.

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I transcribe what the students, themselves, say they liked in their writing, clarifying or adding only a word or two on my part.
P.S. I love blackboards.

That’s Margaret Dearden, who was once my barista, works at Storefront, and helps out with Fountain.

Of course there’s sprawl here (im sitting by the bar) but there are some gems like this Bufallo skull hand carved nickel by Adam Leach at one of the fair’s best booths, Mighty Tanaka.

Also of high quality is Front Room, work shown below

Speaking of high, aerialists are on deck tonight.

We’ll let the wall get the last word.

Photo courtesy of The Independent

Also in evidence at the Independent is that weird phenomenon that occurs in Art Fair Week: galleries taking booths at tens of thousands of dollars cost, that have spaces within walking distance. Take Andrew Kreps, for example: his gallery is literally down the block, yet he’s doing both The Independent and the Armory, plus he has a show up now. As for Feature, it’s bringing Andrew Masullo to The Independent, while, simultaneously, Masullo is showing at the Whitney Biennial — a fact about which I’m really happy, by the way.

Lisa Beck showing with Feature

So go to The Independent to see how Lisa Beck (whose installation was in Feature’s foyer gallery for the longest time, and delighted viewers there) looks in the context of the ‘market.’ I mean, why do you go to a fair, anyway, if not to get a bead on that? Seeing your own crew, in context, is a learning experience not to be missed.

On the note of new-artist support, I also want to take in Fountain, because a young artist I just wrote about is going to be exhibiting there. Her name is Ashli Sisk, and we just did a catalog together. The work: “Big Game.”

It’s about species on the brink of extinction (among many, many other things), and she’s having a one-woman show at Solo(s) Project House later this month. Not bad for an MFA student yet to graduate from Montclair U.

Sisk's rhino -- one of many

The works are near lifesize — as though you, yourself, were a big game hunter who purchased them as a trophy for your walls.

Now if that isn’t apropos an Art Fair…

(Here’s a plug for the fact that I’ve covered Fair Week many times in years’ past: TimeOut NY2011, NYPOST 2007, TimeOutNY Wburg preview 2006…the list goes on. Read them only if you are prepared to be slammed with how fast new things grow old.)

That said, here’s Loren Munk’s painting, from the first ever Fountain fair in 2006. Maybe some things don’t change.

: )