Pulse Quickens on Day Two

Photo by GION

Pulse director Helen Allen with Geisai fair impressario Takashi Murakami

Courtesy the artist

Carrie Villines's photo "Rat, Trucker" is on view at Geisai.

Leo Villareal Takashi Murakami Dasha, Gaga, and Gago Party for MOCA Crazy for Koons A Showdown for Doig at Christie’s In the Right Circles Murakami's Geisai Fair Moves from Miami to Taiwan Blum & Poe Times Four

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But no matter: Pulse was having its biggest and strongest show ever, according to Allen, and the vernissage on Tuesday night “had all the right people.” By which she means people like Arnold Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum; Laura Skoler, a collector from New York and vice president of the New Museum’s board of trustees; and collectors Raúl de Molina and Lily Estefan, John and Julie Thornton, Tony Goldman, and Jean Pigozzi.

Now, with artwork on offer worth, Allen estimated, $15 million, with prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to several hundred thousand (for offerings such as artist Leo Villareal’s neon constructions at New York gallery Gering & López's booth), all the galleries had to do was sell, sell, sell.

Things got off to a slow start. “Wednesday was a throwaway day,” Allen said, “because everyone was at the Convention Center” for the Art Basel Miami Beach vernissage.

Pulse quickened on Thursday, when cars could be seen parked for blocks around its location at 2136 NW First Avenue, far from the Midtown constellation of seven satellite fairs.

The address may be bleak, but people were making the trip, if not necessarily buying right away. Right at the show entrance, Chelsea gallery Magnan Projects was showing a knockout sawhorse and pieces of “lumber” made of glass by Mexican artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda, on offer for a mere $9,500. Magnan said that a lot of people had stopped to look, and many had promised to come back. “It’s so reasonably priced!” he said.

Miami gallerist Diana Lowenstein has booths at both Pulse and Scope and says both have been equally busy. At Pulse she has a gorgeous vase-shaped construction made of tiny, precise curls of Korean paper by Gye Hoon Park, a steal at $6,000 that as of Thursday no one had “stolen.”

Taiwan-born artist Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao’s large-format “Grand Concourse” photograph, showing a magical Bronx with streaks of taillights in the foreground and Yankee Stadium in the background, was a star at Chelsea’s Julie Saul Gallery, which also reported having lots of shoppers.

At Birch Libralato’s booth, a piece of wall art by Canadian artist Micah Lexier — who writes a phrase first with his wrong hand, then scribbles it out, then has it laser-cut out of rolled steel — was called Revelation, because it would be a revelation when the owner figured out what it said. Price: $15,000. The work is one in a series of 38 unique messages, which was 60 percent sold out back home at the Toronto gallery. There were no offers as of this writing at Pulse, but Birch Libralato had sold a large abstract by another Canadian artist, Martin Golland at the fair; the piece is expected to go into a corporate collection.

Several galleries had important sales to report: Chelsea’s Schroeder Romero sold a large tapestry by Andy Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth for $15,000. A figurative painting by Terry Rodgers sold to new collectors for $65,000. The Sagamore Hotel in Miami bought four large photographs by Miami artist Lee Materazzi for $1,500 each from the local Spinello Gallery. And New York’s Max Protetch sold two electronic touch-screen works for $25,000 each.

New media at Pulse seemed especially smart this year. One of the best works was German artist Arnold von Wedemeyer’s seven-minute video at Frankfurt’s Galerie Anita Beckers: Maelzel’s Return on Time Still Life II, a time lapse of fruit, a rose, a chess board, and an ominously ticking pendulum. The French, who so brilliantly gave us jolie/laide (pretty/ugly) should also have a word for wonderful/terrible, which is what Still Life II is. It’s wonderful, but watching it, you feel yourself getting older by the second. The gallery immediately sold three in the edition of 10, the first of which went for $ 9,800.

Even better was German artist Stephan Reusse’s Monkey Talk, for which he made a film of monkeys playing, then turned it into a green laser silhouette, which in turn was playing on a wall in Vienna gallery Lukas Feichtner's booth. The gallerist almost apologized for the price, $50,000. “The laser box has to be specially created in Germany,” she said. Where is the American museum of new media that will buy this piece?

Brooklyn artist William Powhida’s renegade pieces at Schroeder Romero were low-tech, but they packed a big punch, especially his hand-drawn New York Times Arts & Leisure section and his cranky lists of things that are wrong with the art world. “He’s our little star right now,” the gallerist said.

Although there weren’t many large-scale pieces this year, one room-sized installation on view seemed perfect for Miami: Ohio-born artist Libby Black’s Work Out, a complete gym made entirely of paper, at San Francisco’s Marx & Zavattero gallery, priced at $61,500 for the whole thing, including a wall mirror.

Pulse looks out for emerging artists, and on Thursday, the fair awarded its Pulse Prize to the most interesting work in its ImPulse section devoted to them; the $2,500 prize, sponsored by the Financial Times, went to Emilio Chapela Pérez of Mexico City for a set of bound books called According to Google.

Pulse is also the stepparent to Japanese superstar Takashi Murakami’s juried Geisai Art Fair, which is devoted to emerging artists who do not yet have gallery representation, and which takes place right upstairs. While the Pulse building and tent are deliciously air conditioned, Geisai does without (thus the Geisai freebie: plastic fans).

It’s possible that with the art market so hot, as it was until recently, almost any artist could find a gallery. But many of the artists at Geisai seemed like low-hanging fruit. The pleasure here is that the artists themselves are the ones manning the booths, from Japanese artist Mayu Daigen, who was offering $2 postcards and a sweet $4,000 nude painting in broken English (pointing was the order of the day), to Kyoko Nakamura, who does the kind of obsessive hand-lettered screeds that were big in the American art world a few years ago. Hers are primarily in Japanese, but the energy and wit come through.

Down at the far end of the sales floor, Brooklyn-based photographer Carrie Villines (who is also a designer at ARTINFO) drew a crowd with her deadpan color portraits of people at home. The work was, of course, Arbus-esque, but felt more like laughing-with than laughing-at. Her subjects include a young Hasidic boy, a woman trucker and her two dogs, a soccer mom, and a man who invented the society to protect corduroy, which meets on 11/11 each year, the date that looks most like corduroy, of course. The unframed color prints were priced at $900 each and will tempt a lot of collectors.

“All of Miami feels a little more subdued this year,” said Pulse director Allen. “But people will buy.”

Linda Lee is the editor in chief of www.MA2Dweek.com, a Miami Web site that covers Art Basel.