Installation by Laurina Paperina at Perugi Artecontemporanea at Pulse. Inside the brain “house,” an animated film plays on a tiny LCD monitor. (To see more of the work from this project, click through to the artist’s website and go to the Braindead project.)  

After hitting a couple of the fairs, art fatigue starts to set in. Most galleries, in hope of selling enough work to recoup the 10-30 grand they spent to commandeer a booth, cram their nooks full of work by half a dozen or more artists (though there are exceptions, like Perugi Artecontemporanea, above, at Pulse). Generally, this makes for an exhausting art-viewing experience that really challenges any kind of deep engagement with the work. (You’d be at each fair for a day or more if you spent 15 minutes on each artist. Besides, if you went to Miami Basel in December, some of these smorgasbords look  awfully familiar.)

The Volta Show takes a different approach. Each booth at Volta is devoted to a single artist and the whole endeavor is curated by the fair director. Even though there’s less work on view, the result is something more memorable, like an exhibition, and tends to prefer installations over walls hung with paintings and drawings (though there’s some of that, too). Two of my faves were an installation enclosed by a steel (or steel-looking) fence with barbed wire by Jota Castro at Elaine Levy Project (inside, a lightbox graphic read “motherfuckers won’t die” and then listed a couple dozen US senators) and David Ersser’s life-sized slacker den meticulously constructed from balsa wood (picture a futon, record player, crunched beer cans and video game controllers all made of cool, monochromatic veneer). Look under “artists” on the Volta website to see a pic.

Pulse Art Fair, though it follows the traditional format, has made a point of embracing performance-based or relational works, notably The Lounge of Ethereal Fun by Jenny Marketou, an artist who has taught at USF in the past. Yesterday, when I visited her in the lounge, which is a dedicated, red-carpet VIP space for serious collectors aged 6-14 (see this Wall Street Journal article for background), she was gearing up for a busy day of tours of the fair with the aforementioned small collectors today. With play a theme in so many of the works on view, it’s not hard to see how children would find a lot to enjoy. (My own taste being fairly juvenile, I consider myself a competent judge in this matter.)

Then there was this project, pictured below, by artist Mary Coble at Conner Contemporary of Washington, DC. (As fair goers buzz around, the artist is having hate speech slurs she has collected from people who have experienced them first-hand tattooed onto her skin.) In a nutshell, my reaction was: fascinating project, but why at Pulse, if not merely for media attention? Huddling around to watch an artist be tattooed– and she didn’t look like she was enjoying it at all, by the way– at, of all places, an art fair rubbed out the impact of what she was doing with a kind of cheap, temporary titillation. I would rather see a book or a gallery show of the sobering results of her project than join the tittering crowd for five minutes. Maybe I will change my mind about that. Still, for me, this is a project to keep an eye on in the future.

Mary Coble, far background on the table, being tattooed at Pulse.