armory show 2010 - initial thoughts

In looking at the works I selected to photograph at the Armory Show I was struck by how many of them were reminiscent (or overtly derivative) of works by other artists whose work I enjoy.

This Gavin Turk painting was a riff on Robert Indiana's "Love" (and certainly brings to mind the issue of whether Turk's appropriation constitutes fair use of Indiana's original)...

...this "Bad Beuys" painting is in some way critical of (or an homage to) the work of performance artist and sculptor Joseph Beuys...

...the milk-drop photograph by an artist whose name I did not record is simply an inverted version of Harold Edgerton's "Milkdrop Coronet" of 1957 (again, the fair use question)...

...this sculpture was a humorous take on Degas' "Little Dancer, Age Fourteen" (1881), and represented what might happen if the young girl were to stumble off her pedestal...

...Vik Muniz's drawing was derivative of one by 18th century Italian artist Giovanni Batista Piranesi.  Muniz is one of my favorite artists - I was fortunate enough to visit his Brooklyn studio last summer - and this work was unlike anything of his I had ever seen before in its demonstration of his extraordinary abilities as a draughtsman...

...In its barrenness, this small work reminded me of Ed Ruscha's lonely 1966 painting "Standard Station..."

...and even the Hirst skull painting from 2007, with its perspectival lines and rough surface, reminded me of a Francis Bacon I had recently seen in a retrospective at the Metropolitan.

Upon returning home and looking at the set of images with which I emerged from Pier 94, the following themes became evident:

- I apparently choose to engage with certain images more than others because they possess an aura of familiarity to me (the above comparisons make this quite clear!).  I admire the work of Francis Bacon as well as that of Piranesi, thus is stands to reason that I should enjoy works which are quite obviously derivative of theirs.  


Are the artists whose work I saw today consciously commenting on the work of their predecessors (or, in some cases, contemporaries)?  Or am I projecting my own preferences and misinterpreting them entirely?  I believe there is a continuum - in some cases, as in the Gavin Turk, there is a rather overt co-opting of the "original" artist's work.  Turk has appropriated works by Warhol as well for his own purposes, and refers to his own work as "highly clichéd."  In the case of the "Standard Station" analogy, however, I am not certain that the artist consciously sought to produce an image which evoked Ruscha's 1966 original.

- I appear to eschew abstraction in favor of realism.  I find it easier and more interesting to engage with works of art when they represent something which is comprehensible to me, which might explain my predilection for photography.  On the whole, there was quite a bit of realism to be seen at the Armory Show, a fact which I believe represents a shift from previous years, when abstraction appeared to be the norm.  

- I enjoy works which juxtapose the old with the new or the expected with the unexpected, imbuing them with an element of the surreal.  The below photographs were appealing to me for precisely this reason.  On the left, a church-like building contains plaster casts (or marble sculptures) of the human figure - while at the outset this does not seem surprising, it soon becomes clear that the primary visual elements are taken from two entirely different time periods.  On the right, the classical lion is covered in modern-day graffiti, resulting in the desecration (or adornment?) of this powerful figure.