How Bazaar

“These objects come to us in forty-year cycles,” John Radtke, an antiques dealer from Santa Fe told me as we chatted at his booth at the Nameless Art + Design Show. “That’s our chance to find them and see them. Then they get bought and go into someone’s house for another forty years.” Radtke’s display included a set of asymmetrical, hand-ornamented chairs and a century-old cashbox with prismatic enameling, but his centerpiece was a frame filled with a grid of 153 Polaroid portraits taken at a class reunion in Springer, New Mexico, sometime in the 1970s. Radtke and his collaborator Garett Miller had found the photographs stacked by the register of a junk shop not far from the school. Beneath the period fashion—cowboy hats, beehives, and colored sunglasses, worn indoors—the subjects appeared remarkably at ease. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were each doing a small part in creating a piece of vernacular art.

Nameless, an antique fair dedicated to work by authors who are either anonymous or little known, held at a rentable gallery space on West Twenty-Sixth Street over the first weekend of February, exists to showcase exactly this sort of find. Now in its second year, the show is a league apart from the typical outdoor NYC flea, yet it still felt relaxed— even subversive—compared with the more regal Winter Show taking place simultaneously at the Park Avenue Armory, where Boucheron brooches and Bernini bronzes commanded princely sums. The Springer set was one of Nameless’s newer offerings, hardly an antique at all, but it was typical in both its tenderness and the precarity of its survival. Whether a mechanical whirligig featuring a pair of lumberjacks who can saw a log when the wind blows or a pair of senior cords with a skunk drawn on the butt, the pieces on display (and up for sale) were unusual and uncanny yet perfect each in their own way. It was hard not to imagine the lives of the artists around them, especially with little biographical information to fix them in place. If there was a spiritual center of the show, it may have been a framed, two-by-two-inch bed sheet that had once lived in an old doll house—a precious fragment of a world within a world.

Many of the displays at Nameless suggested some kind of transformation—from banal to eccentric, normal and boring to strange and delightful. A wooden figure with a crooked face and a cartoonishly large head held out a tray that challenged would-be competitors to throw a penny into a small hole. The game seemed like something that would get old quick, but the crudely painted man holding the target had a strangeness that wouldn’t let go. It was as if even he understood that the penny toss was merely pretext for his own amusing existence. Elsewhere, the transformation was material, as everyday objects metamorphosed into unexpected crafts. Camel cigarette packs were folded and woven into a pair of baby shoes, cigar boxes were penknifed into intricate picture frames, and bottle caps redeployed as the building blocks for bowls and chains. The chains weren’t really wearable, and the bowl would struggle to hold in a helping of minestrone soup, but they were fun nonetheless, impressive examples of the brut genre known as tramp art. At the booth curated by Threadbare, a vintage clothing and textiles show, I was stopped in my tracks by dozens of leather postcards—already something of a deep cut: greetings with cheeky messages imprinted via pyrography, dating from just after the turn of the twentieth century—stitched into a long woman’s coat, with text from the cards knit into the shoulders and sleeves. The United States Postal Service banned leather postcards in 1909, and the coat was made sometime in the 1930s. That means the designer was likely a fellow collector themself—perhaps one working just shy of the forty-year timeline identified by Radtke.

Pieces like this were self-evidently remarkable. On my first pass through the gallery’s small loop, I was taken by the vision of the sculptor who made a small bestiary from a tangle of sticks and the dioramist who depicted Adam and Eve scurrying through a dreamlike Eden under a thicket of too-big fruit. Those were the showstoppers. When I circled back, I found myself equally drawn to the other works that filled out the booths, small, idiosyncratic artifacts I would have likewise passed over had I seen them at a Goodwill or an antique mall. Here, I looked closer. By eschewing a canon of artists and styles, Nameless called attention to the eye of the collector, and I tried to see what the collector—and all the collectors before—had seen. Or maybe how they had seen. What vision did they have to select these objects from the Brimfieldian sprawl of America’s lost and found?

When I put this question to Adam Irish, an organizer as well as a vendor, he told me that each piece he handles “opens up my imagination in some way.” For him, the namelessness of the objects holds a mirror up to its viewers, giving them a chance to ask what gives them pleasure, without deferring to established valuations and hierarchies. “This whole show is designed so there are no permission slips,” he told me, referring to the works’ un-Googleability. “And so it forces people to be present and take stock within themselves of the art they’re witnessing.”

I didn’t buy anything myself, even though the prices were fair. (The items mentioned above range from $85 for the baby shoes to $4,400 for the Springer photos.) But next time I’m at a flea market, or keeping my eye toward the curb as I walk down the street on trash day, I know I’ll be 25 percent more likely to trust my gut on something strange.