If you’re like me, you couldn’t care less about the sterile vault of corporate contemporary that is the Armory show. For a riverside art fair with more grit, the Fountain Art Fair truly delivers. Named after Duchamp’s famous urinal, this one had the piss and vinegar. All manner of odd buoys and ropes were tucked away in the corners, and you could actually feel the river’s swell beneath your feet.
This atmosphere was perfect for the main purpose of my visit: a fund-raiser for Swoon’s next summer voyage. This May, the artist and her 35-strong crew will set out on the Adriatic from Slovenia with a course charted for the Venice Biennale. It will be the fourth such undertaking, following previous excursions on the Mississippi and, last summer, the Hudson. Each of the three vessels is handmade from salvaged materials, looking less like a boat and more like a ramshackle hallucination of a floating city. It’s an expensive undertaking, and Christina Ray of the gallery Glowlab has generously given half her Fountain space to support the project. Items for sale include prints by Chris Uphues, Faile and Elbow-Toe, and Swoon herself.
Curious to learn more, I exchanged e-mails with Swoon, who is in Cairo preparing some of the paper details that will festoon the flotilla. She explained, “This project is not a commercial project in any way. It’s a group of people, and a voyage, and all of the people who we interact with on our voyage, and the myth of it, and all of those things—but there is no art to be sold, and no way that a commercial gallery could fund such a project, and hope to be recompensed.” Deitch Gallery, which represents Swoon, footed the bill for shipping two of the boats by cargo container.
There have been a couple of fund-raisers already. Helping out are like-minded organizations—Secret Project Robot, Paper Monster, Silent Barn, Glowlab and others—along with crew members like Tod Seelie, whose photo from last summer’s voyage was for sale at Fountain. Says Swoon, “This is the kind of fund-raising that is really meaningful for us. It’s the kind where one month they are going way out of their way to help you realize a crazy dream, and the next month you are donating work to their fund-raiser event. Everyone lends a hand when they can to try and keep everyone else afloat.”
It’s this scrappy energy the augurs well for the continued vitality of art in the age of the declining Dow. You could see it on display throughout Fountain: the dancer in a red, white and blue bikini as part of an installation at the McCraig Welles Gallery by Greg Haberny; New Zealand outsider-visionary art from gallerist Stuart Shepherd; and a giant pair of panties by artist Victor Cox in the fair’s downstairs Murder Lounge; and so on.—Tim Paul
Photographs courtesy Melissa Soltis
