Every satellite fair claims to be the corrective to the main one and almost all of them are simply the same fair with cheaper booths and worse lighting. Barely Fair, which ran April 3rd through 19th in its sixth edition, is the exception, and it earns the distinction through a single constraint: every participating space gets a booth measuring twenty by twenty by twelve inches.
Thirty exhibitors, drawn from artist-run spaces, commercial galleries and curatorial projects across several countries. The constraint is not a gimmick. A dealer who cannot fill twenty inches has nothing to say at forty feet.
It is run by the Julius Caesar collective, established in 2008, currently co-directed by the artists Tony Lewis and Roland Miller, out of their own project space in McKinley Park. Their stated position is that the fair is itself a conceptual work — an enterprise driven by possibility rather than by finance, which is the inversion of the model it parodies. One must occasionally take an artist's framing at face value, and this one holds up, because the scale makes the usual incentives inoperable.
At One-Twelfth
Hand-sewn tea-stained linen. Batting. Plywood. Printed paper at a scale where the printing is visible as printing.
Good Naked showed a dog roughly two by two by one and a half inches, hand-sewn from tea-stained linen with the batting pushing out the seams — an object that reads as rustic at full size and, at this size, as a deliberate exercise in how little material can carry a sculpture. Meg Duguid, an MFA of 2006, had work in. The Art Newspaper covered the fair alongside Neighbors and reached the conclusion that smaller alternative formats are now outperforming the majors, which is a sentence the majors should read twice.
Fabrication is the unglamorous half of this fair and nobody writes about it. Somebody built thirty identical boxes to tolerance, in a project space, for free.
The Posture Of Looking
Visitors bend. That is the behaviour, and it is the whole piece: to see a twenty-inch booth you must get your head down to the level of the work, which puts an adult in a posture of deliberate effort that no wall hang ever requires. Nobody photographed these booths from standing height. Two people lay on the floor. A man asked a co-director whether the works were for sale and was told yes, at scale-appropriate prices, and laughed as though that were the joke rather than the model.
Barely Fair is not a miniature of an art fair. It is a full-sized argument that the art fair has been the wrong size all along.
Cover image: McKinley Park lagoon / Wikimedia Commons