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# Are We Having Fun Yet? Spring/Break 2014
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/are-we-having-fun-yet-springbreak-2014/
- Published: 2014-03-08T00:44:18.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:17:20.000Z
- Description: In a small room on the top floor of the Old School building at the corner of Mott and Prince Streets, floor-to-ceiling shelves are lined with pictures of disembodied heads and torsos adhered to off-brand canned goods.
- Author: Mostafa Heddaya
- Tags: Art, Armory Week, Review, Walter Robinson, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

![IMG_2239](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2239.jpg)

Detail of Grace Villamil, “Midi-Midinette (Wernicke’s Tune)” (2014) (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic)

In a small room on the top floor of the Old School building at the corner of Mott and Prince Streets, floor-to-ceiling shelves are lined with pictures of disembodied heads and torsos adhered to off-brand canned goods. An infernal German pop song from 1960 is piped in on loop, indifferent, or perhaps complementary, to the cutout photograph of Klaus Biesenbach leering at you from a tin cylinder of sliced peaches. A glance downward reveals a floor carpeted in Astroturf, the fake lawn material alternately known as a [euphemism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing?ref=hyperallergic.com) for grassroots dissemblance. Yes, the mugs gracing the room, nearly all belonging to curators, are definitive of the so-called art world, or something like it, but this installation, “Midi-Midinette (Wernicke’s Tune)” by Brooklyn-based artist [Grace Villamil](http://gracevillamil.com/news/?ref=hyperallergic.com), isn’t really out to make some hectoring critique.

In at least one way, “Midi-Midinette (Wernicke’s Tune)” refracts the [Spring/Break Art Show](http://www.springbreakartshow.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com), of which it is a part. This smaller fair defines itself as a curatorial confab (“curator-driven” is the official verbiage), with each room organized by at least one but often a suspiciously large handful of individuals, given the size of the rooms in question. Though I am sympathetic to the curatorial task, and understand that groups and collectives of curators can bring together disparate perspectives, curator inflation can produce increasingly canned results. (Try as it [might](http://hyperallergic.com/94144/art-rx-89/), contemporary art is not the Wu-Tang Clan.) Hence Villamil’s piece, which distills the banality behind so much pretension in the white-picket guild of art’s shelf-stockers.

![IMG_2231](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2231.jpg)

Grace Villamil, “Midi-Midinette (Wernicke’s Tune)” (2014)

But linger in the installation awhile, as I did on two occasions — the mobbed opening on Wednesday and an eerily empty afternoon yesterday — and what was once agitating becomes hypnotic, even pleasurable. “Midi-Midinette,” the song from which the exhibition derives its name, is [an obscure 1961 Continental pop effort](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4eV6l8EgcU&ref=hyperallergic.com) by the then-18 German starlet Conny Froboess, cheerily recounting a promenade with a paramour in Paris. The cheesy orchestral flourishes project the song’s quaint innocence in the face of the hip rock-and-jazz-inflected kitsch music that was breaking out at this time from [yé-yé’](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C3%A9-y%C3%A9?ref=hyperallergic.com)s pioneers in the countries surrounding Germany. The song is great because it is also an embodiment of a scenester’s greatest fear: earnestly missing a trend.

It might be a little ungenerous to call Spring/Break a scenester’s imagining of an art fair, but that’s largely what it is — how else does one explain something like a one-car drive-in movie theater (the largest installation), or the central hall featuring cracked and dried bovine blood projected onto the walls from transparencies? It’s all pretty *cool*, but none of it is that interesting. According to the organizers, the fair’s theme this year is “[PUBLICPRIVATE](http://www.springbreakartshow.com/about/?ref=hyperallergic.com),” but that can more or less mean anything, which I guess is the point. Assimilating the works on view into this dyad is largely a fool’s errand. Besides, attempting it might ruin the fun, and ruined fun is the enemy of cool.

There are several substantive exceptions: Vanessa Albury and Rachel Rampleman’s *The Sun That Never Sets: Spectacle and Normalcy in Time* and Benjamin Sutton’s *The Monstrous Self*. In the first, curators Albury and Rampleman present a Debordian collection of new-media works (and old-media works about new media). It sometimes feels a bit phoned in, like the wall-mounted monitor playing a screen-capture recording of a *World of Warcraft* game. But Joe Namy’s “Testify” (2014), projected footage of tourists holding iPhones and iPads aloft before the Bellagio fountain in Las Vegas, though it sounds simple, has a frisson-inducing quality of witness to it, and is one of the most effective works at the fair.

![IMG_1968](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_1968.jpg)

Caroline Wells Chandler, detail of “Cowabunga Pizza Time” (2013)

Another notable work at Spring/Break is Sigrid Sarda’s “[Rule 34](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule%5F34%5F%28Internet%5Fmeme%29?ref=hyperallergic.com): Charm” (2013–14), from writer and curator Sutton’s *The Monstrous Self*, a morbid figurative sculpture of a decomposing female corpse holding a telephone, sprinkled liberally with gold-painted maggots. (As it turns out, “The maggots are real” is not as reassuring as one would hope when said aloud.) Sarda’s body shared the coffin-like room with a number of paintings and sculptures on the walls, including Caroline Wells Chandler’s “Selfie as Chocolate Chip Cookie” (2013), which, together with her “Cowabunga Pizza Time” (2013), are contributions *par excellence* to the Junk Food Uncanny, whose recent practitioners number [Cameron Gray](https://artsy.net/artwork/cameron-gray-junkfood-nation?ref=hyperallergic.com) and [Christopher Moss](http://theodoreart.com/artist%5Fimages/moss/2014-moss-exhib/fries.jpg?ref=hyperallergic.com). (The latter is currently on view at [Theodore:Art](http://theodoreart.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com).)

Finally, though there’s a lot of new-media nonsense to sift through at Spring/Break, two rooms of Walter Robinson’s Hollywood pulp–inspired paintings on the top floor, curated by Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly, bring things expertly down to earth with a timeless vision of mediated anguish, desire, and fantasy. A small closet in the second room departs from the midcentury pulp theme to reveal smaller, similarly painted renditions of titillatingly intimate internet self-portraits by women. Far from succumbing to tired McLuhanite tropes, the interplay across time and medium is made startlingly fresh — a rare feat, not to mention the showing most directly responsive to the fair’s official theme of public and private.

![IMG_2214](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2214.jpg)

Monia Lipp, “At 36,000 Feet” and Rob Swainston, “Redacted” (nd)

![IMG_2216](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2216.jpg)

Jordan Eagles, “Blood Illuminations” (2014), bovine blood on projector transparencies

![IMG_2226](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2226.jpg)

Installation view, ‘The Sun That Never Sets: Spectacle and Normalcy in Time’

![IMG_2026](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2026.jpg)

Joe Namy’s “Testify” (2014)

![IMG_2217](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2217.jpg)

Installation view, “The Monstrous Self,” with Sigrid Sarda’s “Rule 34: Charm” (2013–14) in the center

![IMG_2218](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2218.jpg)

Caroline Wells Chandler, “Selfie as Chocolate Chip Cookie” (2013)

![IMG_2234](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2234.jpg)

Walter Robinson, “Golden Hooligan” (2014)

![IMG_2065](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2065.jpg)

Installation view, paintings by Walter Robinson curated by Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly

![IMG_2019](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2019.jpg)

Oh boy.

![IMG_1994](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_1994.jpg)

Will Bates and Sarah Bereza, “Fall on Your Sword” (2014)

![IMG_1991](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_1991.jpg)

Will Bates and Sarah Bereza, “Fall on Your Sword” (2014)

![IMG_2209](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/03/img_2209.jpg)

Sign on gate in front of the Old School building

[Spring Break Art Show](http://www.springbreakartshow.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com) *runs March 6–9 at the Old School (233 Mott Street, Soho, Manhattan).*