Photo: Kunning Huang/CKA/Courtesy of Independent
In the early 1980s, a group of artists took over an abandoned shipping terminal on Pier 34 in search of an alternative to the commercial gallery and studio system. There, on the Hudson River waterfront, David Wojnarowicz wrote poems and painted murals alongside Luis Frangella and Mike Bidlo, while Peter Hujar and Dirk Rowntree photographed scenes of impromptu happenings and performances, before the site was demolished in 1984. It was, quite literally, a fertile ground for queer artistic freedom. “The floors of the rooms were seeded with grass and flowers, creating small fields to rise through the dust of plaster and between the objects of installations,” reads a 1983 statement by Bidlo and Wojnarowicz. “There is no rent, no electricity, no running water, no dealers, no sales, no curatorial interference. There is 24 hour access, enthusiasm, deep sudden impulse and some sense of possibility for dreaming.” Downtown Manhattan, and particularly the Lower East Side, where most of these artists lived, also offered cheap rent, appealing to small galleries like Gracie Mansion, Civilian Warfare, and Nature Morte. Together, they helped launch the careers of these and other pioneering artists like Gretchen Bender, Barbara Kruger, and Laurie Simmons.
Almost half a century later, the resurgence of the LES as an artists’ hub is being shaped by small, independent galleries; artist-run nonprofits like 99Canal and the Abrons Art Center; blue-chip galleries like Perrotin; and the East Side outposts of Chelsea galleries such as Hollis Taggart. Elizabeth Dee, the founder of Independent — the 17-year-old art fair focused on artists making their New York debut — wanted to embrace the moment. “There’s an incredible renaissance happening on the Lower East Side, and we wanted to be a part of a quickly evolving gallery neighborhood,” she says. After Independent launched at the former Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea and ran there until 2016, it has now grown out of its home of the past nine years, the 28,000-square-foot Spring Studios in Tribeca. For the first time, it will take place at Pier 36, which stretches off to the west of Corlears Hook Park.
While Spring Studios is essentially seven floors of polished film and photography production studios, the fair’s new home is a sprawling, single-story venue, a 75,000-square-foot building known as Basketball City. The space is even more spare than the Tribeca studios — it’s primarily a sports-and-entertainment facility, where the floors are lined with gray carpet and industrial lights hang from a corrugated metal ceiling, and it feels like a warehouse more than anything. Dee appreciated that quality — something that would “reflect the grittiness of New York.”
The Independent has taken over Basketball City on Pier 36.
Photo: Kunning Huang/CKA/Courtesy of Independent
The pier is about a 12-minute walk from Dimes Square, but it’s visually severed from the neighborhood by the FDR — you have to go under the overpass to get there. Dee leaned into the difficulty of the trek and commissioned Solid Objectives Idenburg Liu (SO-IL) to design the exterior and entrance to the building, and Diogo Passarinho Studio for the exhibition design and visitor experience. “We went all together to the site visit, and we understood this kind of roughness that the space had,” says Passarinho, who in 2018 collaborated with Dee on the exhibition design for Independent Brussels. “There’s awkwardness, weirdness, a bit of angst, anxiety — but we’re claiming it.”
A rendering of the SO-IL design shows the scale of the entrance.
Photo: Courtesy of Solid Objectives Idenburg Liu (SO–IL)
The architects Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu considered wrapping the cluttered-looking façade, but that quickly became cost prohibitive and wasteful, especially for a single weekend. Instead, the drama is in the entry itself. At the loading dock, a brightly lit tunnel lined in reflective fabric is sealed off from potential rough weather by layers of PVC strips commonly used in refrigerated slaughterhouses and cold-storage facilities. It’s a purposefully unwieldy entrance, a small gesture that echoes SO-IL’s concise interventions at other art fairs, most notably the first three editions of Frieze Art Fair held on Randalls Island from 2012 to 2015. “We really wanted it to be a threshold moment,” says Idenburg. “It almost feels like going through a car wash or something … you have to sort of puncture through in a way.”
Once you make it inside, images of garbage heaps cover the walls of the reception area from floor to ceiling, enlarged to the point of abstraction. These are blown-up photographs by Independent Debut artist Nikolas Ventourakis, and that enveloping image creates a quasi-immersive environment that visually separates the outdoors from the fair. Overhead, Passarinho has installed a metal-truss ceiling covered in a stretchy tulle fabric, in effect creating a room-size lamp that cycles through different light temperatures — something that is repeated in the restaurant, where the glowing ceiling hovers over diners like a serene UFO.
Diogo Passarinho Studio’s exhibition design includes a reception area wrapped with images by Nikolas Ventourakis.
Photo: Andy Romer/CKA/Courtesy of Independent
Passarinho also installed room-sized fabric structures that emit light, like this one that hovers over the dining area.
Photo: Natasha Moustache/CKA/Courtesy of Independent
In a fair already known for doing away with the central aisle and identical-looking booths of most art fairs, this edition of Independent has made other, distinctive choices. The paths through the fair are less linear and meander around customized booths of varying dimensions. Perhaps most strikingly, in the center of the space, a large structure made of galvanized-steel scaffolding houses 20 recent works by Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons, displaying pieces that have never been shown in New York.
At the center of the exhibition floor, a scaffolding structure displays Comme des Garçons designs never before shown in New York.
Photo: Andy Romer/CKA/Courtesy of Independent
Across the floor, a lot of the work installed by participating galleries seems to share a moody, dystopian outlook. “All of these things are kind of landing into the same energy,” says Passarinho. Los Angeles– and New York–based gallerist David Kordansky is showing sunny landscapes interrupted by cartoonishly nightmarish characters by Jason Fox, while Chakaia Booker’s abstract sculptures in reptilian looped black rubber at David Nolan feel both fragile and menacing. The legacy of downtown artists from the 1980s likewise gets its due. Sprüth Magers is presenting a large-scale sculptural installation of Gretchen Bender’s TV Text & Image series of Trinitron monitors playing television broadcasts superimposed with texts like “People With AIDS” and “Where Truth Lies.” And Superhouse is showing a group of rarely seen wall-based assemblages by Dan Friedman from 1985 that integrate graphic design, art, and furniture. Here at the pier, with fewer exhibitors and double the space, all of the work gets to breathe. It might be a bit daunting to get there, but the discomfort is part of the experience.
