Much of the press coverage of the Frieze Art Fair this year has been witty, funny, and just a little snide. It is perhaps unsurprising that Reviews of the fair have focused on the marginal apparatus: on the parties, the celebrities, the sales. This of course may be a semantic point in itself, that the glamour and the money is as much a content of the fair as the art itself. In The Guardian Tim Adams wrote:
“Laughter always seems the appropriate response to the Frieze art fair though; to its marriage of corporate machinery with the high camp of self-appointed global taste-makers*; to the rococo hierarchy of VIPs and celebrities and Deutsche bankers whose canapes are jealously guarded by hired muscle whispering into headsets under the legend “making art accessible”; to the prospect, on Wednesday’s private view, of so much expensive plastic surgery eyeing up so much expensive plastic art.” [*Watch out the spokesman for Deutsche Bank in an interview with The Monocle saying as much with no trace of irony.]
The acute sentence finally curdling into maliciously vacuous punning on the vacuous. So why, after taking into account the laudable dismay at creativity conditioned by commercialism, is it so hard to write about the art? An unvaryingly acidic review of the fair by theartsdesk.com might have inadvertently provided another answer: “In art fairs artworks by different artists are hung cheek-by-jowl, often without labels, let alone proper explanation”. So curated intent may be harder to discern. (This certainly seemed to be the case at this year’s fair.) Sometimes however, the lack of the expository and the telling-you-what-to-think of ‘proper explanation’ – often so standardized in contemporary art galleries as to constitute an opaque and unyielding language of its own – is, well, simply a relief.
There is some benefit, some spark and awakening to be reaped from the frisson and incongruities, or indeed unexpected congruities of the ‘cheek-by-jowl’ hanging of works by different artists, not to mention the possibilities of engagement made possible by the jostling together of different gallery spaces.
This was particularly the case with the Frith Street Gallery and XL Gallery spaces, whose entrances yawned against each other. The XL Gallery space was arranged around technology and the corporate, with a spiraling iphone interface, overpopulated with apps, by Aristarkh Chernyshev & Alexei Shulgin, dominating it. Two works by Alex Buldakov, Files and Reflections worked particularly well in conversation with each other.
Files, a wall of shelving lined with files ravaged by some Godzilla was placed next to Reflections, a comparatively muted projection of two leaves of a mobile but apparently unchanging text, too distorted and projected too quickly to read, let alone to interpret. The instinct to preserve and crystallize in some way those flashing pages was felt more keenly next to that desolation of the archival instinct, in all its suddenly lovable blue and red.
A fracture in the theme, but notable, was Igor Moukhin’s photograph From Monuments and Series, depicting the feet of statues engaged in football. This is an unusual subject of a monument, and it is a compassionate photograph, conjuring up the cheers of a stadium and an audience which never existed, and telling of some of the emotion that a camera, particularly in close up, can erratically, almost irrationally, bestow upon its subject.
Next to this the Frith Street Gallery space looked positively comprehensive, with no overt theme but a wonderfully rich variety of textures, surfaces and subjects, the sub-title of which might as well have been ‘Range’. Tellingly then, though the space was dominated by a sculpture, the curators chose to show a fine and delicate ink drawing by Cornelia Parker, entitled ‘Bullet’, of damaged netting.
Other works included Massimo Bartolini’s ‘Dew’ made from Car Paint on Iron, and capturing in permanence a transient effect (a work that was unphotographable). As if to further announce that the organizing principle was one of almost indexical range, Daphne Wright’s Swan, ashen and half-alive was placed in front of the exaggeratedly banal London street scene by John Riddy London (Weston Street). Fiona Tan’s large work on paper Cloud Study (an extremely finished study) proved a good advertisement of her show of film and photography currently on at the gallery. Placed on the exterior wall of the space was Fiona Banner’s Summer 2010, with white font spelling just this phrase by being covered, while the rest of paper was sunburnt, presumably over this summer. Whether it was intentional or not, it seems a rather witty condensation and speeding up of the process of producing contemporary art, finished just so in acceptable style. It was a wonderfully rich and virtuoso selection, an unashamed best of.
At the Wilkinson Gallery AK Dolven’s Selfportrait Berlin februar 1989 Lofoten august 2008, 2010 was accompanied by just the right amount of commentary, and the blurry images would have been meaningless without it. The artist performed the same act, standing still while she turned the camera around her body, and then transferred the results from super 8 film to a 2 channel video. The films were shot 20 years apart. The overt political resonance (the first film was shot by a naked Dolven in the sight of GDR guards) is concentrated into the personal by the choice of shooting the same act but on a mountaintop in a different location so many years later. In this way the piece can contain the meanings of an unrecognisable political landscape without letting that meaning overwhelm it entirely, the individual shaped by the political and public retaining a shape of its own in spite of those forces. It is a movingly simple self-portrait locating the artist’s body in time and space.
One of the most quietly bizarre and sweetly humorous pieces was shown by the FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY: Rezi Van Lankveld’s Xxxxxxxxxx, with its economic palate is an accomplished painting hovering phantasmically between abstraction and figuration, with two cartoon eyes hovering near the top of the painting punctuating its straight face The artist’ habitual method of approach is to to lay wooden boards on the floor and pour layers of oil paint onto them, and so those strange eyes which require a double take are an arresting inclusion. The FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY also showed Troy Brantuch’s enigmatic Untitled, an almost fetishistic fur collared and tailored jacket emerging greyly from its black background, and Seth Price’s Artist Monogram, made using car enamel on PETG, vacuum formed over a rope, which seem to present face on a slice of a surface covered irredeemably with oil.
In contrast to these highly finished pieces Georg Herold’s Gram was made from wooden laths, lacquer and wood and presented on a rickety chipboard table. It is a horribly collapsed and diminished thing, caught somewhere between final despair and cross-armed self-consolation – the wooden laths and nails make it look simultaneously flexible, like those children’s (or artist’s) wooden models that collapse with an orchestrated push of a button, and then hopelessly rigid. Of course you can’t touch to find out.
While some gallery spaces seemed confused about what to do with the mdf walls given to them, GALERIE RUDIGER SCHOTTLE accepted the nature of the art fair gallantly, by using their walls to interrupt the small space, giving the visitor in turn some space to interpret each work. Adorning the outside wall was the bleakly humourous Some Dust by Chen Wei, the only piece that made me laugh out loud. Inside the compactly winding space, highlights included Janis Avotinis’ Untitled a barely there figure on a horizon, and the queasily composed and candy coloured photograph of a young girl hovering illogically on a horizon by Lorette Lux.
Rodney Graham’s series of pen and crayon works on paper benefited greatly from their placement next to Maria Bartuszova’s bronze sculpture The Rain, a defiantly simple, evoactive and blown up depiction of two drop or shards of rain (not quite) hitting an eroded surface.
GIO MARCONI’s space was also well presented, and highlights included Rosa Barba’s large scale draping of text, entitled The Personal Experience behind Its Depiction, which, though the subject of the inarticulate curled inevitably in, was as well written as it was presented, folding into illegibility only when the fabric lay crumpled on the floor. Text based works in contemporary art are usually badly written.
Strangely satisfying were the three white sacks enfolding chair legs awkwardly splayed, like something kidnapped, by Marcus Schwinald – though why they were satisfying I am afraid I cannot explain. Also by Schwinald was the painting Edith, taken from a series of painting by the artist that seem to add strange contraptions and prosthesis to historical subjects, walking the line between the discoveries of a revisionist historian and the augmentations of a maverick prankster.
In unhappy coalition were the MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY, ZERO and the DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, which all decided to show works by just one artist each, works that formed a series and proved homogenous from a distance. Persisting in their initial intention, (one can only imagine the galleries sizing each other in the preparatory stages) was inadvisable – their spaces were deserted, populated only by a hastily erected DO NOT TOUCH SIGN next to one of the more inviting, or invitingly tactile, works. A more imaginatively used space was BQ Gallery, who dared to show a solo presentation by the artist Friedrich Kunath, outside of the designation of FRAME (the section of Frieze devoted to solo artist presentations). Here the white walls were stapled over with blue fabric and covered in Kunath’s eccentric works, and the space was transformed into a slightly disheveled but equally cosy bedroom. The video of a man in a baggy snowman suit, carrying a briefcase and struggling against an arid landscape with nowhere to go, played over a piano soundtrack was particularly great. It was an art house version of Raymond Brigg’s classic, making the human fact of simply being here seem horribly relentless when melting is not a possibility.
We would love to hear what pieces defined Frieze Art Fair 2010 for you?