Artists and dealers have resorted to extreme measures over the past two months, doing whatever they can to keep the art business thriving during the coronavirus pandemic and the economic shutdown that has accompanied it. With galleries and museums closed for the community good, the usual ways of getting product to the people have been obliterated.
The big action has been online, of course, with regional galleries, like VisionsWest and Mirada Fine Art, employing advanced software to recreate the gallery experience virtually. Others, like Walker Fine Art, are offering video tours of their exhibitions. There have been scores of artist talks, Q&A’s and demos delivered via social media channels, all designed to keep the energy flowing.
And because the experience of viewing art just isn’t the same on a computer screen — or, sorry to say, even close — there have been valiant efforts to get painting and sculpture in front of whatever actual human eyes might encounter them. Uptown’s Leon Gallery has a very large installation positioned in its storefront on busy 17th Avenue. The artist collective known as ZEEL opened a show last week in the windows of a new and unoccupied commercial space on Platte Street in LoHi.
In what will one day become the stuff of legend, downtown’s K Contemporary actually rented a roving billboard trailer and spent a few days driving blown-up versions of artists’ work through the streets of Denver and Boulder.
These efforts have ranged from valiant to foolhardy. Every bit of it has kept some spirit alive, though none of it has offered the sort of deep connection between object and viewer that makes art so crucial to our lives. Looking at art through a sheet of glass, squinting through the glare and pretending not to see your own inevitable reflection on the clear pane simply doesn’t work. It’s been a sterile and detached experience.
That’s not likely to change this week as galleries begin to reopen with restrictions, and a bit of paranoia, in place. Good luck communing with a lovely oil landscape while new rules about masks and distancing and locked doors and appointment viewing lurk in the background.
All of this extensive context above is to show just how desperate the art world is to develop a new way of displaying its wares — and to underscore how fabulous and weird and wonderfully successful last week’s live-stream opening of Foreign Form’s new exhibition of artist-made sculptures turned out to be.
If there’s a model for everyone in the commercial gallery world on how to move forward, this just might be it.
With its gallery and retail store still on lockdown, the Foreign Form team knew their show — featuring work by 40 international creators — was in danger of sinking, so it developed a multimedia, online presentation that was both dazzling and high-tech, and turned it into an event. The hour-long presentation came across as a combination of slickly produced fashion show and low-end QVC product push. The art spun around on a rotating pedestal allowing 3-D viewing of objects while easy jazz played in the background. A narrator introduced each piece and artists appeared in video clips talking about their process.
At the end, viewers were invited to stick around for a full-blown live music set from the Los Angeles DJ Illo Illo. It was the first time I felt genuine excitement over new art in months, and I want more of it, and long after the pandemic is over.
To be clear, neither Foreign Form nor its exhibition are conventional in the current art scene. Foreign Form is hybrid art purveyor that describes itself as “somewhere between a concept store, a fine art gallery and cultural hub.” This particular show is on the high-concept side with artists delivering up customized versions of a popular (and super cute) collectable toy called Minky, which is made by the ultra-trendy company known as Blamo.
The standard Minky is a 7½-inch tall, monkey-like creature, hand-carved from pod wood. Minky has big ears, a blank stare and an ambiguous gender, and sells for $160 on the Blamo website.
But Foreign Form invited artists to make Minky their own, to use whatever materials and embellishments they wanted to turn a consumer product into something more like a piece of art.
The artists had their way with the monkey, adding paint and designing costumes, cladding on doodads and carving in designs.
Some went to extremes. Santa Fe’s Talia Migliaccio charred her Minky over an open flame and used a process employing dirt and beeswax to cover it in pin-pointed tattoo patterns (priced at $444). Denver’s Jaime Molina transformed his specimen into a futuristic scout of sorts, outfitting the toy with an astronaut’s helmet and an embroidered little flag to plant in new worlds ($1,200). Los Angeles artist Hans Valor chopped, carved, punctured and reassembled his into a working lamp ($2,700). Brooklyn’s Tony Farfalla made a mold from Minky and recreated it as a porcelain replica adorned with gold leaf (again, $444).
The virtual show was produced by Foreign Form’s three partners — Jason Siegel, Sammy Steen and Mike Delaney — and it was powered by the special effects of the super-talented, Denver-based creative company called FRNDS Agency. (You can still see it online, anytime.)
The Minky show worked for several reasons. It was fresh and something of an adventure. It was also tongue-in-cheek, with several humorous elements and lots of personality. It wasn’t perfect. Watching it still felt a bit removed from the usual gallery-opening experience, and I was missing the ability to go shoulder-to-shoulder with pals, to toast the work with a glass of wine and to check out what other people were wearing. The running message board positioned on the right side of the screen did allow people to share comments on the work (but it was all way too nice, lacking the clever, and sniping, asides between friends that can make openings fun).
But it was also effective in getting the job done. FRNDS Agency created a display that actually showcased art in a way that made it visible, understandable and buyable. The proof: Seventeen pieces sold before the night was over; commerce in the low tens of thousands of dollars took place.
In some ways, it was superior to the usual opening, where crowds can make it difficult to see the art, where artists are too busy greeting and hugging to talk meaningfully about their ideas, where the wine usually sucks and all that clever sniping can get on your nerves.
And it was risky and new.
“We didn’t know what we were doing or how you do it,” said co-owner Siegel. “We just had this idea and we ran with it.”
Virtual openings aren’t likely to replace in-person events that make galleries and museums crucial places for people to come together. The art is still removed, and these events are expensive to produce. Galleries, despite their polished nature, are small businesses that would have to stretch budgets unreasonably to create a multimedia extravaganza for six shows a year.
But it’s easy to see them becoming a permanent fixture, a complement to the current way of connecting art and viewers. They’re accessible to all, not the least bit intimidating, and good for business. They bring people together in alternative ways, and they up the game for curators, bringing innovation and inspiration to the job.
“This opens up an entire new medium to be artistic with,” as Siegel puts it.