Reflections on the Armory Show, 2022

© Gordon Massman

On September 9, 2022, somewhere around noon, with VIP Pass in hand (issued to me by my sales rep for Art in America Magazine in appreciation for my purchasing an ad of my own), I entered, through a bank of chrome and plate glass doors, that refreshingly cool Jacob Javits Center where New York’s famous Armory Art Show 2022 was underway.

The champagne concession, glittering with iced bottles and surrounded by outsized contemporary sculptures, awaited its sparsely attended visitor base. The food court served, among other delicacies, tofu noodles in shiny grease proof boxes. Insignificant because I had no intention of purchasing art, I began to wander the cavernous concrete-floored acreage.

What a lollapalooza! Over 240 galleries from thirty countries as well as the odd idealistic soloist hit me head-on like a Peterbilt: Alfonzo Artiaco (Naples), Gallerie Bo Bjerggaard (Copenhagen), Galleri Brandstrup (Oslo), The Breeder (Athens), Dittrich & Schlechtriem (Berlin), Galerie Frank Elbaz (Paris), Galeria Estacao (Sao Paulo), Johyun Gallery (Busan), and of course this country’s blue-chip galleries.

Art splayed before my eyes like a shifting peacock fan of aspiration, ambition, rage, and splendor. All shook with the Iridescence of Optimism. A polite echoing murmur filled the air. There seemed no smell at all.

A little history: The original Armory Show of 1913, held at a real armory—the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Ave—shocked the complacent art world extant at that time in the United States. One might say it yanked from its roots the stubborn yet majestic MacArthur Oak Tree of Romanticism, Victorian Classicism, Realism, and Naturalism, supplanting it with the Zebra Tree of Exoticism whose fruit bore the names Duchamp, Delaunay, van Gogh, Henri, Kandinsky, Léger, Matisse, Munch, Picasso, Stella, Renoir, Picabia, Epstein, Brancusi, Cassatt, Braque, Foote, Redon, to name a few—Fauvists, Cubists, Impressionists, the most important European avant-garde. It smashed things to pieces in this conservative reactionary republic. It opened the doorway for the artists with heads full of stars, the dream machines of a new originality. André Breton, in 1924, published his seminal work, The Surrealist Manifesto, which advocated exchanging reason and rationality for automatism, the dream sequence, the unconscious, all drawn from Freud’s revolutionary book The Interpretation of Dreams. From this fertility rose not only the surrealists such as Picasso, Dali, Arp, Ernst, Magritte, Miro, de Chirico, Chagall, Tanguy but the Abstract Expressionists de Kooning, Rothko, Gorky, Hoffmann, Kline, Still, Frankenthaler, Pousette-Dart, Hartigan, Krasner, and that all-American Wyoming wild child, Jackson Pollock. The original armory show, AKA The International Exhibition of Modern Art, knocked the stuffing out the art world.

Back at the Javits Center in my sneakers, jeans, and L.L. Bean I looked for the magic of 1913. I visited every gallery. I studied, like a penguin—wings behind back—painting after painting, sculpture after sculpture. I was clean and sober, compassionate, open-spirited. I spent eight hours there. I wanted to love. I wanted to be obliterated. I wanted to see astronauts, visionaries, prophets, and geniuses.

I include in this billet-doux random images of artwork without attribution or comment—just pieces I chose to photograph representative of the whole. I must now in complete honesty make this self-incriminating observation: I saw no ferment in the field, no collective revolution, no galvanizing force set to disturb the universe. Nobody had eaten the peach. It was all quotidian, rather predictable. In short, I left the whole affair deflated and unmoved. I saw lots of painting but precious little sacrifice.

It occurs to me that the establishment art world, fueled by hyper-capitalism, academia, and complacency have sucked the juice out of art and art production. Just as every poem in Ploughshares, Agni, The New Yorker, ad infinitum is indistinguishable from the next, so is almost every painting. Conformity equals short-term success; originality equals short-term failure. There are two types of painters: those who look back and those who look forward. Only the latter, in my opinion, have a chance at becoming artists. What I experienced at The Armory Show 2022, largely, were practitioners who wanted to incorporate into their works validating echoes of former artistic movements, something that looks familiar and comforting to collectors.

Not so in 1913. The memorable artists in 1913 were uncompromising. They shaped art for themselves first, for others not at all. They stepped into the unknown, the void, risking everything, even life itself, for beliefs, for principles. They rejected reason, logic, and rationality which led nations into slaughterhouses of war. They sought through art to advance a whole new way of living in the world, one indifferent to surfaces, to dangerous superficialities. They believed the inward gaze to be supremely honest and healing.

 Notwithstanding my aforesaid comments, on September 9th, I enjoyed myself. I saw hundreds of beautiful pieces, hundreds of wonderful paintings and sculptures born of love, vision, and passion.

Exuberance splashed every surface. I was overawed, even envious of the hands that created such pieces. How on earth, I kept asking myself when viewing a particularly complex painting. And I loved meeting the directors, curators, and sales staff whose optimism abounded. Much dazzled me. I called home with a sense of exuberance. So many artists in this world. A worldwide chorus it is. I experienced so much that it blurs inside my head. I did not take notes so cannot spotlight which pieces moved me. But it is clear that art is alive and well in this deeply troubled world.

I was only disappointed in my desire to step backward in time to the original ground-breaking Armory Show. I knew, of course, that would be impossible for such galvanizing ferment like that rarely happens in history. I believe this show, for me, reflected the smooth undisturbed sailing of the current moment. Fair winds fill our sails, a comforting breeze. Yet, despite all the beauty, I yearn for the abyss and was saddened that I did not find it at the Armory Show.

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