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Profile of an Art Fair
A Conversation with Michael Workman
By M. Brendon MacInnis
With the proliferation of art fairs today, we take a behind-the-scenes
look at the process of starting and developing an art fair,
choosing the Bridge Art Fair, for the purpose of
our discussion. The Chicago based company that produces the
Bridge Art Fair was started by Michael Workman, who
still owns the company today. The fair is probably best known
for its presence in Miami, as one of the satellite fairs taking
place during ABMB. This conversation took place at the M office
in New York, as Bridge Art Fair was preparing to
launch a New York edition of the fair to take place during
The Armory Show. The images accompanying this article
present an overview of all of the fairs and related VIP events
that took place in New York during the week starting March
24, 2008.
Were you from?
Well, the company [Bridge Art Fair] was started in Chicago.
But I’m originally from Indiana, and I moved to Chicago
for University.
What did you study?
English literature, actually. But I always had this divergent
interest in visual art; and literature, being another kind
of medium, like painting or film. So I wanted to do something
in that direction. After I graduated, I worked for a magazine
in Chicago called New Art Examiner, which is no longer around.
When was that?
In 2001, I think. They went out of business; they were a nonprofit
organization, and their funding had just kind of dried up.
What did you do at the magazine?
I was an intern, and then I hired on as administrative support.
I was also freelancing for the magazine, writing reviews and
things like that. When it went under, at the same time, I
was running a small used bookstore that was stocked with books
mostly from my own collection and from friends. We would have
people out to read poetry and do performances, and that sort
of thing.
So you had a small used bookstore?
Yeah.
Nice. Was it a cafe bookstore or something like that?
I wish I could say we were sophisticated enough to serve something
like lattes and pastries; it was really just a place where
friends and whoever happened to walk in could get together.
That was in Chicago?
It was in Chicago, it used to be on Ashland Avenue, a cruddy
little strip on Ashland Avenue. We had our apartment upstairs,
in the back of this bookstore. That was very early on.
Was it a walk-in bookstore, on the ground floor?
That’s right, yeah. But we would have these events,
poetry readings, music events; our little artists missions,
just some friends. Then we thought, wouldn’t it be great
if we could take our friends’ work and bring it out
to more people? So that lead us to become this local art publication.
What publication was that?
Bridge Magazine.
Okay.
That’s what led us to doing the fares, ultimately.
You know, this is actually how I first heard about Bridge,
as a magazine, through talk about the fair. A good friend
of mine, Yuko Wyle, she had a gallery in Williamsburg called
“Lunar Base”…
Oh, Lunar Base!
Yeah, and she was telling me that the people who did
this magazine called “Bridge” were launching a
fair in Chicago. I think it was called “Nova”
then. She was pretty enthusiastic about it, in fact I think
she was the first gallery from New York to sign up. Maybe
even the only one.
She came out when we did our first show, really. Well, it
was our first, kind of, art fair show. Before that we were
doing exhibitions for the people we were writing about in
the magazine, doing shows for them.
Who were the people you were writing about?
The people we wrote about were kind of friends of ours, on
that scale. Then we began organizing exhibitions.
You mean curating shows at different spaces each time,
or did you establish an exhibition space in Chicago?
We would find spaces around Chicago, and tie it in with
an event, such as a release party, and that sort of thing.
A release party?
Yeah, for each new edition of the magazine.
How often did the magazine come out?
I think we were doing it three times a year when we first
started doing it, then we tried to do it more frequently.
But it was very difficult in Chicago; there’s no publishing
industry there.
Was it a nonprofit?
Oh yeah! Absolutely. First, it was “not profit”.
But then we became F501C3.
Got it all official… Yeah, that’s right.
How was it distributed?
We had some distributors, but then a lot of these distributors
have gone out of business now. They were little magazine distributors
that we would go through…
You mean it was sold in bookstores?
Yeah, that’s right.
How was it funded?
Advertising.
Who would advertise in it?
Local galleries, coffee shops, bookstores, record labels…
Record labels?
We did music stuff too.
What was the editorial content? Did you have music reviews?
Sometimes there would be CDs put in with the magazine. But
there weren’t really reviews; it was original writing,
academic essays and such. Then, in later issues, there were
reviews.
So how long did the magazine last?
Oh, three years or so, before we started trending towards
doing larger exhibitions. You know, we would do these curated
things…
Can you give me some dates, a time-line?
Let’s see, in 2000 we came out with our first issue,
in November of 2000, and then it lasted through, I think our
last issue was 2002 or 2003. I think that’s about right.
When did the art fair business start? I had the impression
that Bridge Magazine segued into the Bridge Art Fair. When
did the Bridge Art Fair start?
Well, originally it was called Nova. Actually, we did another
project before that called “Art Boat”. That happened
while the magazine was still going. Art Chicago — just
a little background on that — was staged at Navy Pier
in Chicago, and we were looking for a way to get our friends’
work and artists we liked near the show for more people to
see.
Sure.
So, we rented a yacht and set up an installation on this yacht
that docked at Navy Pier; and all the Art Chicago people came
out…
What year was that?
That was 2002. We did it for two years, 2002 and 2003. And
then Nova was the year after that. So I think that was, what,
2004 the first one? We did one in a parking garage next to
an old abandoned office building.
Was that the first one?
That’s the one that Lunar Base was in.
I see.
And then we did another one, the following year, in a dingy
little hotel in the Belmont area [of Chicago]. But then, that
was the year that Art Chicago almost didn’t
happen, if you’ll recall that controversy…
You mean the year when there were two competing “Art
Chicago” fairs?
No, that was the year before, when Ilana Vardy [former director
of Art Miami] did the fair on the Pier and…
And Thomas Blackman held Art Chicago in a tent, in a
nearby park.
Yeah, that was really strange! I believe that was 2004.
So that’s when you launched the fair in the parking
garage, the one called Nova?
Yeah, and the next year, that’s when Art Chicago
pretty much fell apart; when the Merchandise Mart came in
[to their rescue] and bought them.
So let’s see now, getting back to our narrative;
first you started with the magazine Bridge. That finished
in 2003, and there was a year or so between that and when
you got into the art fair business?
Well, we were doing the Art Boat while the magazine was still
around, and from there we shifted over to doing more of the
mass exhibition fairs.
You still to live in Chicago, right?
That’s right.
Okay, now we went from Nova to…
We changed the name, because when we were doing our first
show in Miami, we found out that Art Basel Miami Beach
had a section called “Nova”. We didn’t know
that at the time. The Florida office [for Art Basel Miami
Beach] wrote to us and told us that they couldn’t
include us in their programs, unless we changed our name.
And at the time, the magazine name and name for the nonprofit
was Bridge; so I thought, well then, we’ll
just call everything Bridge.
The first Bridge Art Fair that you did, was that the
one held in the Catalina hotel?
That’s right, yeah. The Catalina is so close
to Art Basel Miami Beach [South Beach] that it’s,
you know, great.
After doing this one in Miami, did you start looking
at other models for how to do these art fairs? I mean, how
to grow in that business. It looks a like a franchise now,
with Bridge-New York, and Bridge-London, and so on.
I’m not sure that I would call it a franchise; there
is now a focus element to each show in which we pick out a
specific art culture, or geographic location, and use that
as the focus of the show. The idea is to have something like
a Biennial model, where for instance you go to Venice and
you have all of these pavilions. One nation puts their best
artist forward, and they compete, you know. We think, well
let’s take that idea, and take it somewhere else, in
another culture. So it’s more cooperative.
What was the cultural focus of Bridge-Miami?
It didn’t have one at the time. This element of the
show has only been added since New York, so it’s a new
thing. Before, it was really that we were doing this thing
in the emerging contemporary art idea. Then we wanted to be
international, with different countries in different parts
of the world, and to try and make this a showcase for that.
So tell me, how did the business evolve exactly?
You started with Nova in Chicago, the very first one, and
the next year; did you do something in Chicago again or did
you go straight to Miami? We were in Chicago for two years.
So, it was two times as “Nova” in Chicago,
and then in Miami it became Bridge. What year was that?
I think it was 2005.
So where are things at today with Bridge Art Fair?
We’re doing a lot of sponsorship work, those kinds of
things. We’re talking with people about getting involved
with the show in a different way, not just as exhibitors,
but also by dealing with institutions, program ideas —
really reaching out and trying to be creative about those
kinds of elements.
Also, I have to be very active now, getting out and seeing
galleries. So that’s become another aspect of it. In
a way, it’s not the same kind of thing as when we started;
when you say, hey let’s get together and put on a show.
It becomes this whole system.
I notice that the roster of participating galleries with
your shows is pretty impressive. There are so many art fairs
now, and you’ve managed to get a decent slice of what’s
out there.
Thanks; we work very hard. I mean there are two elements to
doing this. One: We’ve tried to build a good team.
How many people have you got working at Bridge?
Ten.
That’s a lot. Are they all full-time?
Yeah; well, there are two that are freelancers, not freelancers,
they’re full-time, but they don’t live in Chicago.
They work for us independently. And then we also provide full
health care.
Full health care? Wow.
The concept for us is we take care of our employees, and we
expect them to work really hard for the gallerists and the
public who come to our shows. So we’re trying to build
the core idea around doing a good job for everyone.
I’ve heard good things about your organization
in that regard, actually. Thierry Alet, who does the DiVA
and Pool Art fairs, was telling me that you offered free flights
and accommodations too, I think he said, to artists in the
show.
That’s something that was done in the past, we can’t
really do too much of that now. But yeah, it’s an important
element. In Chicago we did that; I think it was five people,
for speaking engagements and that sort of thing. Since then
we have moved things around some; we’re trying to grow
in other ways. For about the past year, I think, it’s
been about getting the right staff in place. We need people
who can do marketing correctly. We need people who can do
floor plans, design an Ad campaign…
I’ve trained people to do marketing; that’s
a tough one, to get it right.
Yeah, you have to be careful. I mean you learn these staffing
lessons early on. So then, you know, it’s trying to
find people to do a good job for the gallerists, to take care
of everything that they may possibly need.
And then the other face to this now is to try to build up
marketing relationships; to begin to build the institutional
relationships and to try and conceive of the show using this
focused model where we’re exchanging work in a more
collaborative way — between different cultures. So that’s
kind of where the state of the organization is now.
At this point we’re trying to solidify global ties that,
before, we would just be seeding and developing by traveling
and meeting people. It’s at a state of growth where
we’ve got these locations, you know, they’re prominent
locations because of the market, all except for Berlin which
has a different…
What are you doing in Berlin?
We’re doing something really different in Berlin, actually.
We’ve hired out this entire apartment building. All
of the apartments in this one building are being used for
galleries. A gallery can come in and do their own exhibition,
and they’re big [the apartments]. It’s a whole
complex, the courtyard and everything.
How did you do that? Is this one of those development
projects, where the apartments are still empty or something
like that?
No, these are vacation rentals; they were already set up where
people could come and visit. They had all of these apartments,
and so we just blocked them out for this year. It’s
unique and interesting. And it’s spacious, I mean some
of these apartments are like 1,100 feet — that makes
for a huge booth, in terms of equivalent square footage. But
it’s also very Berlin in that way; which is young, intimate,
kind of fun. You know, very free and open.
I can see how that could work. I used to live in Germany,
in the southwest, and I would go to Berlin a lot, staying
with friends in these huge “pre-war” apartments.
What part of the city are you in?
This is in “Mitte”.
“Stadtmitte.” Yeah, that area used to be
part of East Germany when the city was divided. The middle,
or center, of Berlin actually fell on the East German side.
Lots of artists live there now, it’s nice. When is your
show taking place?
During Art Forum [October 30 – November 2]. The idea
is that there is a whole curatorial crowd, I mean that’s
what they do really well, they bring out museum people, curators
and people like that. It’s not necessarily a top selling
market in that respect; but the artists’ work ends up
in collections of regard, or it gets in museum shows. It helps
develop careers.
What’s the price for galleries to participate?
I think the price for the smaller spaces is $5000. I mean
it’s not small; you’re getting a lot for the price.
And it’s interesting.
Interesting. And what about the Bridge-London fair this
year. How did that go?
Well, it’s a tougher market, a different market. But
I think we did comparatively well. My thinking on this is
that I think we came out to third, after Zoo. [Zoo
art fair]. Which is, you know…
I guess it must be tough; the Scope fair, which has a
good track record, passed on London this year.
Yeah, but Pulse was there.
Did Pulse take their space?
No, they took the space that Euro 6 had the year
before; that’s a local fair.
Is Euro 6 still happening?
Yeah, but it moved somewhere else, it was south of us. Scope
was in the brewery the year before; they’re coming back
though. I’ve heard that they’re coming back next
year.
When I was talking with them about that, they said they
just needed to take a break this year because they were spreading
themselves too thin with doing so many shows. They didn’t
want to go into it half way.
That’s right, that’s important. I mean that’s
the thing; even though we’re adding Berlin, it’s
only 30 galleries. That’s relatively small.
So altogether, you’ve got Bridge-Miami, and the
one in London; is London still at the same location next year?
Yeah, we have the same location.
And then you’ve added Berlin…
Added Berlin, and then we’ve added New York, which is
new for us.
That’s a great venue, the Terminal Building [where
Bridge New York takes place and also the former site of the
Tunnel nightclub]. All of the galleries in Chelsea are within
walking distance, and there are even galleries located in
the building itself. A lot of the Williamsburg galleries moved
into that building, as rents out there kept going up.
It’s also a very interesting building; the history is
rich. Everybody in New York has been to the Tunnel nightclub,
when they were like fourteen, you know, and I mean it’s
fun just to have that background.
Yeah, it’s really quite a coup, getting that venue
for an art fair. I think you’ll do fine there.
Thanks.
Ed. Note:
The inaugural of Bridge New York took place March
27–30, 2008 in Chelsea, at the Terminal Building, at
222 12th Ave & 269 11th Ave, New York. During that same
period, an unprecedented number of art fairs took place throughout
the City, attaching to the coattails of The Armory Show.
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Guglielmo Achille Cavellini
Florence Lynch Gallery
By Denise Carvalho
This retrospective of Italian artist Guglielmo Achille Cavellini,
or GAC, as he was known, consists of a selection of important
works from a career that spans some fifty years. His diverse
oeuvre ranges from painting and photography to performance,
handwritten works, and collectibles. Many of the works provide
foundations for his own dialogue or reinterpretation of them,
redefining authorship as a fluid interchange of identities.
Born in Brescia, Italy, in 1914, Cavellini’s artistic
career flourished under the influence of post-war Italian
abstract painting, around artists such as Emilio Vedova, the
Group of Eight, Alberto Burri, Renato Birolli, Lucio Fontana,
and Piero Manzoni. One can see specific references in his
work to the synergetic movement of Futurism, without its unpopular
misogyny, or the anarchic automatism of Surrealism. There
are also apparent gestures of Abstract Expressionism, especially
in his performance work. The work in this show reveals Cavellini’s
astounding ability to recreate himself; his constant self-referencing
subverts obvious narcissistic, self-promoting interpretations
to reveal his artist-self as an absurd personage. Cavellini
is the only real and unchangeable material of his work; everything
else turns into mere appropriation, fragmented and reinserted
into different formats, constantly becoming something else.
The first room of the gallery leads with Cavellini’s
goofy self-impersonations stamps on cardboard, collages, photos,
assemblage, and carbon works. His carbon works, however, indirectly
reference the artist via his depiction of other artists and
situations. This carbon series results from an almost ritualistic
process of burning for purification, destroying the previous
work and creating a new texture that serves as a background
for the new work. Colorful shapes of inlaid wood or paper
are added to the ground of carbon as a playful jigsaw puzzle,
suggesting the that art object is a ground for shifting decisions
and a constant articulation of a state of impermanence. Pop
Art personages also feature in Cavellini ’s vocabulary,
and the carbon piece, Jakie-Liz-Andy-Marilyn (1970) suggests
his interest in US celebrity culture.
New York tourism and its connection to consumerism and trade
are also evoked in his carbon assemblage, Empire State Building
(1968), in which the carbonated landmark skyscraper is added
over the wooden background, stamped with the phrases “Made
in Genoa” and “Made in Japan”. Here the
process is reversed: The carbonated piece is mounted over
the wood from crates that traded goods between Japan and the
Italian port city of Genoa. The reference to New York, centered
on the piece, is also the central part of the economic pun
referenced here. Cultural dichotomies are exposed in Sara
White Wilson’s C-print, La Declaration des Droits des
The Gap (2007), with its images from Paris and lingering memories
of the secret selves left behind.
Cavellini’s Postage Stamps (1980s) follows a similar
process of appropriation and reinsertion into the mechanisms
of art objectification, in which collected stamps lose their
public currency in becoming personal, self-celebratory statements.
His Postage Stamp series on board, Italy with Ropes and Strings
(1989) depicts a map of Italy filled with ropes and strings;
a self-explanatory work that combines a kind of hybrid of
Duchampian humor with concrete poetry. In Italy with Colored
Bias Bindings and Braids (1989) and Broken Italy with Leaf
(1988), the mirroring of materials in the titles plays a part
in the reinventing of Italy. Here also, the Constructivist
process of disarranging and rearranging is followed by a continuous
re-appropriation of the same image — an advertising
strategy—referring to both the industrial process of
reproduction, in which his work becomes Pop, and to game-making
as indicative of his Fluxus’ inclinations, assumed through
his participation in Interdada in California in 1980. The
Postage Stamp series also appropriates dates (1914-2014) as
a fictional reference to the centenary anniversary of the
artist himself. Cavellini ’s Postage Stamp motif continues
to appear in his later works, such as in his plywood panels,
posters, paintings, and even collages.
His creative process of appropriating, reinventing, and reinserting
art objects into his own field of cultural production anticipated
contemporary tendencies that fused art and life, crossing
the boundaries between the artist, the critic, and the collector.
Cavellini was a facilitator, with the ability to link artists
with collectors and critics, himself becoming all of these
personas.
This ability to interlink art events with his own art making
and critiquing led him to claim his own movement, the so-called
Elenco Dei Movimenti dei Protagonisti (List of the Movements
and Protagonists). With this title he also claimed his own
historicization of art, embracing the artists whom he knew,
showed with, collected, or appropriated into his appropriation
of history. He documented the names of these artists and other
celebrities in his text works, From the Page of the Encyclopedia
(1970s) as his self-history. He also created self-historicized
documents that blurred his fictional and real encounters with
artists and celebrities, such as his meeting with Mao Tse
Tung, participation in the mission to the moon, or his winning
the Nobel Prize in art.
Cavellini’s Page of the Encyclopedia series led to
numerous fictional letters and book covers in which he documented
his relationship with dead artists and thinkers, including
Van Gogh, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. His diaries
are the materialization of his invented concept of self-historicism,
displayed on various objects such as canvas, wood panels,
or clothing, including underwear worn by mannequins, his own
suit, a model’s skirt, ties, and the bodies of male
and female performance models. He made these text works into
relics, containing the artist’s continuous and nonlinear
writing in the layout page typical of an encyclopedia.
Some of these pieces contain a centerpiece image, as that
of his famous map of Italy in a wood cutout, an old photo
of a couple, and the photo of the artist himself wearing an
astronaut’s suit in the center of a rosette which is
an honorary symbol from Ancient Rome. Cavellini’s living
connection with mass culture, using his own body and persona
as both the subject matter and the living matter of art is
something to be understood as very contemporary, unique. In
this regard, the work in this show is particularly relevant
to connecting with and interpreting contemporary art today.
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Martin Weinstein
AFP Galleries
By Mary Hrbacek
Weinstein establishes a hierarchy of meaning in his work;
feelings of hope and optimism suffuse these images of the
landscape that he translates in his symbolic universe of the
mind, with musings on philosophy, time, memory and reality.
These paintings on acrylic sheets express a looming sense
of the eternal that coexists with the transient, ambient elements
that define everyday existence. Ephemeral effects, such as
shadows, clouds, wind and sunlight percolate with movement,
evolving the works from a mere optical transference toward
a statement of perceptive appreciation and metaphoric interpretation.
Various times and diverse weather conditions co-exist in the
same unified work. Weinstein portrays the past and the present
in one image, using size to symbolize a larger, higher self;
the small figure suggests a memory of the distant past. Stroked
notations form colored rays of light that alternately flicker
in the clear air around and through the hills and slopes of
the landscape.
He uses composition to express meaning; flowers are enlarged
and employed metaphorically outside of the garden, as an emblem
of the artist’s own identity. They exude both beauty
and joy, when isolated in a foreground location. Weinstein
seems to identify the foreground with the present, while the
view in the distance overlooking sky, river and mountains
may refer to the future. In some of the paintings, opaque
dark shadows hint at dreaded underpinnings, but the concomitant
flowers provide a stubbornly positive balance to the compositions.
Time, memory, eternity and stages of personal growth, from
the ego self to the higher self, infuse the works with a sense
of philosophical completeness.
In these pieces, the artist empathizes strongly with the
immediate natural vistas that he observes daily. The view
provides the basis for the various dramas of light and darkness;
changes in the weather interact playfully in plexiglas layers.
The transparency echos the film media, adding a keynote of
shifting surface displays that contrast with the essential
constancy of the view that overlooks the sloping hill leading
to the river. Weinstein is as concerned with surface effects
as he is with eternal forms.
Today it is unusual to encounter an artist with a philosophical
focus. William Kentridge comes to mind as a vastly diverse
artist who also explores the nuances and vagaries of optical
perception. Weinstein’s art is steeped in conviction.
The work encompasses gripping images of the moment, with visas
that represent eternity. He seems to elaborate his imagery
much the way a diarist records personal responses, combining
them with observations regarding time, and the seasons of
the year. Above all, these works convey a sense of the miraculously
varied experience that life offers to everyone who looks up
for a glimpse of the sky.
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