The Dimes of March
This was the scene last Saturday at New York's hard-to-ignore Reena Spaulings Fine Art on Grand Street, an artist run space that avoids exact categorisation by embracing the many possibilities that it could be –commercial gallery, project space, or ever evolving collaborative artists project- and all under a false identity. Reena Sapaulings was invited to make work for the concurrent Whitney Biennial 'Day For Night' where even the curators are at it – selectors Chrissie Iles and Phillipe Vergne invented themselves a third curator, Toni Burlap, even assigning her a catalogue essay, with the justification that it was not only reflecting an artistic zeitgeist but was an important strategy for ‘complexification’. Spaulings exhibition ‘The March of Dimes’ (a reversal of the slogan for the huge American charity the March of Dimes which gets full billboard coverage this month in the city) included many of their closest artist allies such as Seth Price and Jutta Koether, and was ‘complexified’ by Ei Arakawa’s four-day performative disruption to proceedings. Arakawa oversaw a small renovation project in the gallery, involving repainting and laying carpets, as well as inviting a dancer to move around the activity. One participating artist began to see the redecoration clearly as the creation of a bank, a Dimes of March bank - a brilliant further complexification indeed, were it for real.