“I just need some space” is a disingenuous way to tell a romantic partner you’re Just Not That Into Them. As the top Michigan court ruled last week, it’s also a disingenuous way to attempt to remove from the Michigan midterm ballot an abortion-rights referendum that received 325,000 more voter signatures than the required 425,000. 

But that’s what Citizens to Support Michigan Women and Children argued last month in a complaint to Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers. The anti-abortion group alleged the proposed ballot measure text, which sought to explicitly insert into Michigan’s constitution reproductive rights up until fetal viability, lacked enough spacing between words, rendering the verbiage into “groupings of letters that are found in no dictionary and are incapable of having any meaning.”

To be clear, the amendment is at the very least legible. Restaurants and magazines probably shouldn’t employ the ballot measure’s maker to design their menus or page layouts, but it’s not the “hodgepodge of nonsensical gibberish” that Citizens to Support Michigan Women and Children made it out to be.

Part of the proposed amendment to the Michigan constitution.

AP

Independent 20th Century—the newest venture from the Independent art fair—makes a compelling argument that the typical fair set-up, a multi-story sprawl of the art historical canon, needs rethinking. There are just 32 booths featuring famous and unfamiliar 20th-century artists. It unfolds over a single floor of the Battery Maritime Building, steps from the Staten Island Ferry send-off. It’s intimate and tightly curated, and a blessed departure from Spring/Break and the Armory Show, which both opened this week. 

The baseline of quality here is high, chock-full of highlights, and many galleries matched the unusual circumstances with ambitious offerings. Below, a look at six stellar artists getting their due there.

Norwegian artist Ane Graff is becoming increasingly known for her works that consider the body’s internal world and the countless outside forces that might interrupt it.

In a new group of works presented by Oslo-based dealer OSL Contemporary at the 2022 Armory Show, Graff undertakes a close examination of materials found in household spaces and outdoor repositories. The works, all made this year, trace the ways in which such materials are capable of wreaking silent havoc on bodies and natural settings.

Situated in the booth, alongside four silk-printed paintings, is a series of Graff’s glass sculptures expanding on her 2021 work The Goblets (Chronic Fatigue, Brain Fog, Depression, Memory Loss, and Generalised Anxiety Disorder), each of which is named for various disorders related to mental ailments. In the installation, a group of crystal cups have been filled with vibrant concoctions that appear like the kind of poisonous matter found only in natural settings. Cased in glass bell jars and displayed on painted white tables like clinical experiments, these works draw on Graff’s research into the environmental factors that can have corrosive effects on a person’s mental states.

“It did take me quite a while of experimentation to come to a place where I could start to make visible how both the materials and our bodies become something new through their exposures through a mutual touch,” Graff told ARTnews. “For me, that’s what the goblets make visible—they are materials coming together creating new growths.”

The artist’s sleek aesthetic adds to the works’ dystopian tones. Each cup is filled with material pollutants linked to disease that are found in everyday materials, ranging from medications and cosmetics to food and road dust. Graff invokes feminist thinkers, considering the ways in which materials interact through various channels with the body’s functions. A core tenet of the relatively recent feminist “new materialist” thinking is that matter is multiple, without hierarchies, and that it moves between nature and culture, as well as bodies and environments.

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Typically, organizations stow their archives away, keeping them far from public viewing. But the Kitchen has taken a different approach at the Armory Show, where it’s turned its archive outward.

This year at the fair, the Armory’s organizers launched a new section devoted to art nonprofits, inviting the 51-year-old alternative arts space to inaugurate the new series dubbed Armory “Spotlight.” Founded as an artist collective in 1971, the Kitchen is one of the most esteemed organizations of the kind in New York. Its Chelsea home currently undergoing a multiyear renovation, it has temporarily relocated to a loft in Westbeth Artist Housing.

Its booth acts as an informal guide to some of the Kitchen’s greatest hits, with audio recordings and printed posters acting as stand-ins for performances, exhibitions, and events that the organization has staged over the decades.

Playing over three speakers are recordings of a selection of experimental music by John Driscoll, David Tudor, and others; they compete with the background noise of the fair for visitors’ attention. These recordings were previously released through albums between 2004 to 2015 in an archival preservation project. The endeavor made the audio clips available to the public after being long held in storage.

Making up some of the Kitchen’s archive of printed materials referenced on the booth’s wallpaper are programming calendars, posters, and flyers for individual events. It’s a nod back to a previous pre-digital era; the practice at the time was to wheat paste those materials around the city in various contexts.

Since its opening on Thursday, the 2022 edition of the Armory Show has seen a good number of sales. Though the sums here are more modest than those of other international fairs, a lot did sell at various price points, showing that the fair is still attracting collectors who are eager to acquire work by closely watched artists as well as by emerging ones whom they are likely still learning about.

[See the best booths at the 2022 Armory Show.]

With nearly 250 exhibitors across some 250,000 square feet at the Javits Center, just north of Hudson Yards in Manhattan, there is a lot of art to see at the fair, which runs until Sunday. Below a look at highlights from the dozens of sales that occurred.