Art Fair Fever
Lots of great things at Pulse: Georges Rousse’s Jan Dibbet’s inspired photographs of geometic shapes inset into architectual space at Robert Mann.
Jeff Brouw’s Ruscha/Becher/Evans-ish series of farmhouses (also at Mann).
Joe Deal.
I liked Venske and Spanle’s carved marble floor sculptures that look like polyresin pours. 
Adam Fowler had nice collages of pencil lines he drew circles with (Margaret Thatcher).
Pavel Zoubok’s generally blah gallery lit up with a Holli Schorno’s mechanical collage (her opening at the gallery is next week – I’ll be trucking up there to see it).
At London’s Museum 52, Nick Waplington – an English photographer – had two on the wall. Each of a lower class family with ragtag kids and a wrecked home situation. Ghastly but riveting in their horror. One of the little girls looked thirty though she was likely 11. Also at Museum 52 was an excellent series of miniature pencil drawings by Frank Selby. He found photographs of wartorn or disaster-stricken areas that had no people in them. He then drew them on vellum in a size about 2″ x 1″. Mighty fine!
Also of note are Amy Rathbone, Jochim Bandau, and Luigi Ghirri. Scope was a horror. A complete wreck. It’s evidence of an art world craving for youth so badly that literally anything and everything as long as it is young gets tossed up on the walls. Figuration dominated and booth after booth had juvenile pieces – naked girls, screaming children, sloppy child-like paintings, fluorescent colors… It was as if a cacophany of BFA students in their sophomore year had flown the coop for spring break and settled into Scope for the week.Nevertheless, in the face of such crap (and I imagine the few good galleries that were selected must have cringed at the work all around them), a few artists stood out. Quiet work was hard to find, but the good artists I saw included Johannes Ruchhansen, Graham Dolpin, Suzanne Sinclair (a little porny, I know), Michael Wittle, and Jorn Vanhofen.
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Lisa Hunter