While Frieze New York has more exhibitors this year than last — around 190 to last year’s 180 — there’s still not enough room for everyone, and competition for entry was fierce. The second edition of the fair sees a reshuffling of galleries, with 60 joining for the first time, including heavyweights Marian Goodman, Peter Blum, and Luhring Augustine. Scads of others — including Friedrich Petzel, Maccarone, David Nolan, Nicole Klagsbrun, Michael Werner, and Experimenter (Calcutta) — dropped out. Whether due to fair exhaustion (“fairtigue”) or to simply not making the cut this time, the turnover is a reflection of the pressures dealers face in today’s art world.

Newcomers in the Focus section include New York’s Untitled, and dépendance from Brussels, while first-timers in the Frame section like Simone Subal from New York and Berlin’s Circus will present solo booths by Frank Heath and Sophie Bueno-Boutellier, respectively.

As for the more intriguing question of why galleries didn’t return — there are roughly 40 — the overwhelming explanation is exhaustion from the sheer number of fairs dealers now attend. “We couldn’t do Frieze and then [Art Basel] Hong Kong right afterwards,” said Gordon VeneKlasen, director of Michael Werner Gallery, “so we chose Hong Kong. It’s just not possible for us to do everything in the world.”

For some dealers, the decision was out of their control. “This year, very simply, I was not accepted,” said Nicole Klagsbrun, who applied before deciding a few months ago to close her Chelsea gallery after 30 years in the business.

Though her decision was motivated by chagrin over the “whole system,” which prioritizes fairs over gallery shows, Klagsbrun asserted that galleries need to stay in the art fair game to remain attractive to artists.

For younger galleries, the notion that entry to Frieze New York can make or break them instills a kind of panic. “They’ll get to do it one year, and then they won’t the next year, and they’ll feel like they’ve done something wrong,” said Phil Grauer of Canada Gallery, explaining his peers’ reactions to the fair’s modus operandi, in particular with respect to Frame, a section geared toward emerging galleries, those in business six years or less. “But it’s the fair rolling through the new young meat.”

While the Frame and Focus sections, which cost exhibitors less than the main section, are aimed at newer galleries, Grauer says the divisions have less to do with age than economics. “The main section is first class,” he said comparing it to airline seating. “Focus is business traveler — but it’s pretty much coach. Frame is like you’re running drugs for someone else. They let you in and then they kick you to the curb.”

-Rozalia Jovanovic, BLOUIN ARTINFO on Huff Post Arts & Culture

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

This show reminds me of the time I danced for hours at a club in Cologne, caught part of an arthouse film next door, and then somehow ended up at a bar where a bunch of people I didn’t know were drinking like it was the end of the earth. Ok, so that never happened. But I feel like Cosima von Bonin’s current show, The Juxtaposition of Nothings at Friedrich Petzel is a close approximation of that experience.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

Von Bonin has always balanced her killer soft sculptures and fabric wall pieces with a deep investment in context and place-making. At Petzel, in collaboration with musician Moritz von Oswald, the focus is less on individual works and more on a sort of behind the stage/back alley voyeuristic adventure where the spectators are exhausted and drunk with cultural consumption. A puppy lies limp, arms laid out flat, staring at a video on loop. A floppy eared pimp-like bunny character with an eye patch appears to have found a friend in a bright red dog.  Even the light post is out for a smoke, as this show is at once chuckle-worthy and noir.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

Viewers accustomed to the almost clinical reimagining of minimalist form in Von Bonin’s previous work might be put off by the glut of audio and video equipment on display here. But the sound is sharp and deployed with precision.  Each tightly contained audio zone adds a different layer to the show as pulsating dance beats blend into more spaced out jams. Moving around the gallery, you become part of the orchestration, as most of the animal sculptures are either on a sound stage, absorbing a video, or emitting a sound track of their own.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

The back room seems to unwind from the activity of the main gallery like a club that lets out into the street at the end of the night. Sophisticated cardboard sculptures of a mailbox, café signage and a street lamp hang on the wall. A slumped over bloodied bird sits alone on a bleacher—here, the alienation of today’s technological self-absorption sets in.  While this theme isn’t terribly new (think Kraftwerk, Radiohead, or Kanye), von Bonin and von Oswald play the space between the handmade and the machined perfectly. While a lot of technological collaborations seem to blast off with an über-corny futuristic vision, the artists here spare us the space travel allusions.  The characters in this little drama are too busy livin’ to know that they don’t have a future anyway.

Wade Guyton, Untitled (2008). Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 84 x 69 inches.

The untitled canvas above is an excellent example of how Guyton manipulates a well-known set of cultural markers. Materially, it is composed of linen stretched over supports in a rectangular shape; therefore, it participates in a system of objects commonly classified as painting. There are thin lines on this canvas, some overlapping and creating a black mass on the right, and some thinned out, creating grayer areas on the left. There is no representational subject matter—it is an abstract composition—so we could say that this work is expressionistic and builds on the history and conventions of mid-century American modernist painting. But look at the caption: this work is not created by an “original” vision, or a brush in the hand of an Author, but instead printed on an ink-jet printer. Gray areas are created where the printer is running out of ink, the blacker areas exist where the old print cartridge is exchanged for a fresh one. The white line in the center? That’s where Guyton folded the cloth in half because it’s too wide for the Epson 9600 to print in a single pass. Guyton rejects aesthetic decision-making in favor of the vagaries of mechanical reproduction and the limitations of technology. Further, I find it intriguing that he uses only black ink. Unlike color printing, black is associated with a specific mode of ink-jet printing: the publication of information and text. The side-by-side rectangles echo columns of print.

What are we to make of this? Is it a parody of modernism, with its tradition of “great-man” authors creating heroic (even macho) works? Does Guyton thumb his nose at our expectations for a painting to be the cumulative effect of a series of decisions about color, line, shape, and even texture? What does the work tell us about aura, or digital reproduction, or the presentation of information? And what does it tell us about the culture we live in now? Guyton himself gives few answers.

Installation view, Friedrich Petzel Gallery 2007.

There’s a great line by art historian Benjamin Buchloh: “Appropriation of historical models may be motivated by a desire to establish continuity and tradition and a fiction of identity.” Guyton simultaneously follows and breaks a lineage, participating in a system in order to disrupt it. He appropriates the symbolic form of modernist painting and restages it in a new digital context. Creating the work by mechanized means provides a kind of counterargument to the original claims of modernism and contributes an example of what art critic Jan Verwoert has called, “art production as the gradual reshuffling of a basic set of cultural terms through…strategic reuse and eventual transformation.” Like other kinds of appropriation, Guyton’s work borrows the history and symbolism of the form to which it refers, making another link in a chain of associations and producing a new document that interacts with the system that it both inherits and succeeds.

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Guyton’s work is currently on view at Malmö Konsthall (November 11 – December 12), Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (October 21 – November 20), westlondonprojects, London (October 15 – December 11); and will be exhibited at Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach (November 26, 2010 – January 8, 2011).