Frieze 2009: Small Paintings and Smaller Egos

Left: Tony Cragg's "Bolt", stainless steel, at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

What I loved this year about Frieze was the hordes of youngsters, toting cameras and notebooks, looking intently and arguing about the works at the fair. Had the collectors all come and conquered already? No, for here was a tall blonde vaguely Eastern European stunner with her trophy-holder, eyeing works picked for her by a famous art consultant. And there was a nattily-dressed lady, begrudgingly letting me take her photo. All is not lost, long live the art fair!

In contrast to last year's Frieze, several trends could be observed: a fascination with the pedestal, small geometric paintings with a labored hand, less video and shock value, and more conceptual sculpture. Booths were all tightly packed, with even the blue chip galleries cramming in 2-D and 3-D works, on the floor, on the dealer's desk, and in front of other works.

David Zwirner showed a prominent Neo Rauch, a gigantic Luc Tuymans (at right), and a naughtily-pierced Annie Sprinkle portrait by Alice Neel (at left).
White Cube had a crowd-pleasing marble portrait of the "pregnant man" by Marc Quinn, but also a series of twelve small ceramic sculptures by Rachel Kneebone (at right) titled "The Stations", whose intricate and layered meaning counteracted the obviousness of the Quinn work. Carter's black and white paintings were sold at several galleries, as were the dark yet faint Gothic-y paintings of Michael Bauer, the chopped photos of John Stezaker, and small paintings by Phillip Allen (at left) combining delicate geometric areas with borders of gloppy thick paint.

Right: Gareth Moore "Neither Here Nor There" at LuttgenMeijer, Berlin.

A big hit this year was the "Frame" section of Frieze, showing smaller galleries that presented a single artist's work. Gareth Moore's sculpture installation looked great, with no booth walls to interfere with its sea of dismantled chairs. Lisa Cooley presented black and white photographs of knives hand-made by the artist, Erin Shireff (at right), that first looked as old-fashioned as Irving Penn, but still held their own as a documentation of odd objects. Daniel Silver at IBID Projects showed abstracted marble busts on idiosyncratic pedestals, using auto-biographical materials. Even at Frame, there were echoes of art history and a longing for tradition, but re-imagined by younger voices.

Above left: Daniel Silver, at IBID Projects, London.

Right: Peacock lady preening.

Left: Towering heels on an abstracted concoction.

Frieze 2009: The Year of the Broom

On Thursday, the first public day of Frieze Art Fair, a fey rather bored gallerist admired his shoes, and as I was about to turn away from the tedium in his booth, I heard him brag that all the works had been sold within the first hour of Wednesday's private view, so the gallery owner simply didn't know what to do with himself. Bring out the violins indeed!

Right: Hurvin Anderson @ Thomas Dane Gallery, featuring a bucket made of records.

Left: Stella Hamburg bronze at Galerie Eigen & Art.

While Frieze definitely had less brash oversized works, less adventurous installations or booth-deconstructions, and certainly no Icelandic disco (Club Nutz was a bust when I poked my head in), by all reports the art market has survived, and for that we should be grateful. With less bombastic one-offs, but sadly less fun booths, this year's Frieze provided an underhanded sense of humor about the recession, as exemplified by one booth with empty store shelves of white pegboard. At a Polish gallery, a banner screamed "Long Live Capitalism", and the recession-chique theme continued with not one but three (!) sculptures of life-like brooms and mops. One artist even went on about all the analogies in cleaning up/making art, and the exceptionally humble prop was a great wink at art fair glitz. Will Miami Basel bring us Q-tips and sponges?

Left: Richard Hughes, at The Modern Institute, Glasgow. Two mops in resin, with rainbow of peeled paper on the wall.

Zoo 2009-- More Warehouse, Less Wares

This year's Zoo Art Fair moved from the very Royal Academy in London's West End to more decrepit digs in a series of East End industrial warehouses, some from the Victorian era. Although the actual space increased from last year, Zoo was filled with a series of curated exhibitions, and a print selection, to make up for the fact that the number of galleries went from 58 to 22. Aside from the shrunken numbers, Zoo was hampered by its layout--while the spookily unrefurbished spaces lent an air of discovery to the exhibitions, the galleries themselves were squeezed into odd configurations, and the overall effect was of an overhung group show, rather than discrete galleries. I hope that next year they can utilize the space with more expertise, and exploit the adventurous side of London's East End without sacrificing art-viewing.

Mildew on the walls of Zoo.....

The free-flowing champagne at the opening did little to camouflage the relative paucity of decent art. There were some standouts, all British, including Brown Gallery of London, (at left) which covered its space in paintings, and MOOT, an artist-run space in Nottingham.

Bristol's Works/Projects gallery (at right) had an eye-catching booth covered with wallpaper on the floor and walls, and featured photo-based works by Richard Wilson which seemed very sci-fi apocalyptic and yet were made with old-fashioned cut-and-paste and paint.

London's Riflemaker gallery had several old-timey technological works by American artist Juan Fontanive, one using Super 8 film to create an Op-art drawing, and another a hand-drawn flipbook of a hummingbird, both pieces clickety-clacking the artist's clear preference for machines made by hand, as if from 100 years ago.

Left: Richard Wilson, "Earthquake Pavilion."

The message fit right in with the environment: London's East End has gentrified quickly, and yet its underpinnings are as apparent and deliciously unrefined as Zoo's space. There is room for a contemporary art fair that does not require the smooth apparatus of Frieze to function. More art fairs should take risks and find not-ready-for-prime-time spaces. Luckily, London has plenty of them.

Right: Juan Fontanive, "Movement #3".

Mary Boone Always Booming

Right: Trio of Richard Tuttles.

Left: Mary Heilman in front of Malcolm Morley painting "Goalie".

On Saturday Sept. 12, downtown Mary Boone featured a group show, titled in honor of one of her gallerists Ron Warren . The show was a celebration of her venerable 80's artists--Peter Halley, Julian Schnabel, etc--, as well as her more recent stable of artists--Luis Gispert, Hillary Harkness, Chie Fueki. The opening was sprinkled with appearances by Hillary Harkness, Barbara Kruger, and Francesco Clemente.
Mary Heilman, wearing a backpack that looked just like one of her paintings, requested to pose "in front of my friend Malcolm [Morley]", and MB artist Chie Fueki showed off her black and white and read all over ensemble.

Right: Mary Boone artist Chie Fueki.

Left: Baby posing thoughtfully in front of Barbara Kruger's "Untitled" (All Seeing/All Knowing).

Below: Pink-coiffed dog.

First Thursday!

The first Thursday after Labor Day always brings giddy excitement, and this year was no different, despite fears of a mass gallery exodus. Chelsea's streets were packed with all kinds of art-gawkers, and several stretch limos reassured the sweaty brows of many a dealer. Marquee names like Maya Lin didn't hurt either. Filling the main space of Pace, her mound of wood chunks was unfortunately far too reminiscent of Tara Donovan, Phoebe Washburn, and too many others to stand out, however her squished-in topographical mountains in the backroom at least brought some scale confusion, as she conspicuously wedged among them, looming like the architectural goddess that she is.
Right: Maya Lin speaking with ArtForum's Knight Landesmann.

At Zach Feuer, Dasha Shishkin's rich paintings filled the space with golden tones, and a more relaxed version of her anatomically twisted and detailed figurative work. As an added bonus, she placed on the list of Feuer artists who unabashedly show the gory nature of childbirth, i.e. Dana Schutz and Danica Phelps.

Right: Dasha Shishkin at her opening.




At Galerie Lelong, a wild woman of indeterminate provenance pranced through the show of all-white work by Jaume Plensa. We commend her attention to detail, pattern, and color, as an all-black outfit of short skirt, stacked platform heels, and slinky top seemed all the rage, perhaps due to the overlapping of Fashion Week.
Left: at Galerie Lelong.

Speaking of Fashion week, Thursday ended with an outpouring of long legs and fabulous get-ups at the Juergen Teller opening at James Cohan. While in his photos the actress Charlotte Rampling languidly posed nude at the Louvre, I much prefer the clothed models in Teller's commercial work for Marc Jacobs.
Still, his opening did not disappoint, chock full of celebs and fashionistas, and even one Jeanne-Moreau-channeling ingenue photographing said celebs/fashionistas.

Right: John Currin and Rachel Feinstein peering at Juergen Teller photo.




Left: Louis Vuitton at James Cohan.

Back to School in Art-land

Still recovering from Burning Man, I dusted off, got my hair did, and managed only a few shows on Wednesday, the traditional back-to-school day. On the Lower East Side, Franklin Evans opened the fall season at Sue Scott Gallery.

With pieces of tape forming a transparent room within the gallery, bubble-wrapped mounds squishing underneath one's feet, and pattern blossoming everywhere, Evans's show would have been the perfect summer feat: color, fun, and playfulness.
Thank god we grown-ups can still appreciate these elements come fall.

Left: The artist behind his colored pieces of tape.

This Object Is/Is Not Art

Just came back from Burning Man, and being a newbie I didn't have high expectations for anything other than people's fashions. Still, as a friend asked at 1 a.m. at the playa, "But is it art?" Specifically, we were looking at a miraculously wavering dotted line of blue lights, creating a gigantic wavering cursive across the night sky. Up close, it turned out a series of balloons had a teenie LED attached, and anyone could grab any of the line, and pull or gather it, making their own gigantic drawing that could best be appreciated from half a mile away. My sarcastic answer was that the balloon-lights would have to be about Death, or any other Topic, to be Art. But why all the capitals? Really, could the utter simplicity and mystery of the blue dotted line, and its status as an unambiguously participatory event, not be enough? If I had glimpsed it one night from afar, walking through Central Park, or perhaps if it was situated in front of the Biennial and well-coiffed UESiders had the chance to pull the balloons down Fifth Avenue, would it switch from a lower-case to an upper-case A?
Back at the playa, that great chunk of desert in which Burning Man happily played, the line of balloons brought six of us together, made us cross the darkness while guessing at how big the blue lights actually were, and what pulled them--the wind? Human hands? A machine? Those moments of wonder, along with the actual moment of discovery, capped by one of us giddily running into the darkness while pulling a chunk of the "drawing", created its own particular Art, and I am happy to report that as opposed to most of the summer shows in Chelsea, it stuck in my mind far longer.