DiVA Hits the Streets

NEW YORK—This year’s edition of DiVA could not feel less like an art fair, especially in comparison to the stylish, well-appointed trade shows uptown at the piers. The five-year-old digital and video art event, which has its roots in the hotel-fair approach, added a semi-outdoor component last year, with some galleries setting up inside shipping containers on the streets of Chelsea—despite the neighborhood’s history of turning into a ghost town during fair week. This year DiVA has dropped the hotel altogether, tacked the subtitle “The Streets” onto its name, shortened its roster of galleries from 26 to just 9 (after several dropped out), and confined itself to a constellation of 20-to-33-foot-long shipping containers dispersed throughout Chelsea and a hub and event space at White Box. In other words, it is now a world away from the champagne and soft carpeting of The Armory Show.

Beating the other Armory-week fairs out of the gate, DiVA, which is run by the nonprofit Frère Independent, held a soft opening and V.I.P. reception on March 22 in advance of its official run from the 25th to the 30th. Several participating galleries were still setting up as the event began, grappling with how best to present—and sell—work in ad hoc spaces prey to the noise of Westside traffic. Some dealers embraced the format head-on, showing installations that either complemented or contrasted with the street-side location, while others did their best to re-create a typical fair booth. All seemed excited about the prospect of inserting themselves into the flow of Manhattan street life, though few reported sales at the opening.

Located at the entrance to a parking garage underneath the High Line on 23rd Street, Westchester County’s Kenise Barnes Fine Art has the most fully realized installation of the nine: a suburban secret garden created by painter and video artist Lisa Dahl. An Astroturf floor splashed with aromatic grass oil and bounded by fresh flowers and a miniature white picket fence set the backdrop for On the Homefront (2006), a video in an edition of 10 and priced at $950 to $1,400, which filled the space with the shouting and machine gun fire of American troops engaged in a firefight in Iraq. Small paintings of suburban houses blotted out by glow-in-the-dark pigment line the container ($850 each), while near the entrance, another video work dealing with the suburbs, Lawn (2007), loops on an iMac (edition of 5 beginning at $850).

Last year Barnes participated at Red Dot, a fair held in the Park South Hotel, but she says that she prefers the container, even if it does require collectors to do a bit more legwork. “It’s a bizarre way to show,” says Dahl of the shipping container. “But hotel fairs are just so claustrophobic. Here we can open our doors and see the world go by. Even people parking their cars in the lot stop in and ask what’s happening in here.”

Another first-time DiVA participant, Gallery Vartai from Vilnius, Lithuania, also went with a single artist. Lithuanian artist Ray Bartkus has turned the booth on 25th street into a roughshod workshop that recalls the neighborhood’s remaining garage spaces, filling it with several lightbox lambda prints (priced at $7,000 each) that resemble street-side advertisements. Created over the last few years in conjunction with the artist’s Web project www.thisisreallybadnews.com, they depict fabricated scenes from cable news broadcasts and Web searches that parody media-generated paranoia. One shows the legs of a news anchor dangling above a desk as if the talking head had been hanged from a boom mike just out of frame. Another shows two anchors pointing guns at each other while one calls out such violent wire service headlines as “American Hostage Beheaded” and “Maoists Kill Four in Nepal” with selected letters highlighted in red to spell, whether out of irony or hope, “Love is All, All is Love.” The installation’s political point seems excessively blunt, but according to a gallery staff member, that was part of the plan. “Our artist was into showing on the street because it let him fit his ideas directly into American reality and American life.”