Fruit of the Loom Sweatshirts Painting Frieze Art Fair
I have seen painted erections and sculptures of offset world war female munitions workers, a perished inflatable dildo and several elephants, and a welcoming lavatory attendant. But non all at the same time, though the conjunction would not surprise me.
They are all at the 14th Frieze art fair – which opens in London on Thursday – among hundreds of other things, lovely paintings and light-headed sculptures (a stag covered in glass baubles, anyone?), not counting the people, some of whom are performers. Everyone is a performer at the fair. Even attempting to write about it is a performance.
A white-faced waiter in an empty eating place proffers a minor blackboard, with some sort of schematic face up drawn on information technology. The paintings on the wall behind revolve, and there's not a tabular array to exist had. My Heart Will Proceed, reads the neon over the door at Frutta gallery, from Rome. Not your usual trattoria, and then. The guy does his mime creative person thing, lifting an countenance and twisting his mouth when I ask if he'southward the dealer or the artist, and if there's a table. The eatery is a stand at the fair, and has zippo to sell except maybe the gear up, or possibly the whey-faced goon with the board.
There are several quasi-real phase-sets here, with method-acting gallerists and collectors trying hard to be someone important, a worthy recipient of the things on prove. Art fairs are ever like this, the art reduced to the status of phase-prop. More usefully, artist Julie Verhoeven has taken the office of concierge in a suite of the fair's toilets. Ask if she does assisted toilet-breaks, and her eyes calorie-free upwardly as she bustles about, saying she loves a chip of debauchery.
But I don't come across much cottaging going on in the pink for a boy, blueish for a girl lavatory décor, with its croched scatological toilet seats, the embroidered turds on her trolley (these are an acquired sense of taste), and the tasselled fringe of bright white tampons down by the Harpic bottles, cleaning rags and Toilet Duck.
Verhoeven has turned the loos into an infantilist's fun-house, making the usual business of closed-door deals and sobbing collectors more an entertainment than usual. I suppose yous could call her project social sculpture. I telephone call it a laugh.
A Gentil Carioca from Rio de Janeiro fills its stand with its ain trolleys or piece of work stations, by Brazilian collective Opavivara!. These as well accept social purpose. A wheelchair provides the base for amplifier, speakers and a karaoke auto, in that location's a pram-cum-barbecue unit, and best of all a moisture bar set up on a supermarket trolley, with all the booze and fruits. Mine's a caipirinha, but there isn't time, either for a drinkable or a song.
If you want respite, at that place is Dominique Gonzalez Foerster's remade 1970s room. With its period brown walls, daybed and mirrors, it corresponds to a clarification of pic-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder'south ain bedroom. The things this room might have seen, merely hasn't. Just it is total of a kind of lassitude.
Gonzalez-Foerster's R.Westward.F is an imaginary as well equally a real space, a transposition of somewhere she has never seen. Information technology has been congenital (at Esther Schipper'southward stand up) as role of a section called The Nineties. Several galleries are presenting works and installations from the menstruation including early Maurizio Cattelan (a spoof Lucio Fontana painting, cutting with Zorro's mark) and a Carsten Holler infant'due south cot, elevated on ridiculously high rods above a set of wooden wheels. One breath of wind and the kid would be flung to its doom.
Anthony Reynolds Gallery, in the same section, has a show of the candid, intimate photographs of Richard Billingham'southward dismal family unit life in a Birmingham high-ascent. They remain wonderful, awful images, and accept more bite than much at the fair, or anywhere else come to that. Billingham has spent much of the past 20 years escaping the success these images had. Sometimes early success – and a great body of work – can pursue an artist down the decades in unforeseeable ways.
The best affair about the fair is to run across works for the start time, or that i had simply known by rumour or reputation. Seeing things for oneself matters, in an age where fine art often gets bought on the force of an internet image.
Betty Tompkins has for years been painting the female body, oft in stark, in your face up detail. Turn a corner at the P.P.O.W stand and there is her Ersatz Cunt Painting, a kind of pink glow. Side by side to information technology are a series of pocket-sized canvases called Women's Words, each emblazoned with often derogatory names given to women and parts of their bodies, from the affectionate Beloved to the Village Bicycle, from Fleck of Crumpet to Dirty Erstwhile Slapper. They jostle over the wall, like a crowd of leering blokes.
Some art works need seeing only once, and sometimes even that is in one case too oftentimes. There are fewer novelty sculptures of people in abject and ludicrous contortions of human being distress than previously. Gagosian shows potter Edmund de Waal, but no matter how good his books might exist nothing convinces me about his precious little pots. Hauser & Wirth has a mad and outragiously crowded stand dedicated to the impossibility of recreating an artist's studio. This is slap-up fun, every bit you work your way through the stagey, cluttered salon finding the real and imitation artworks of a fictitious creative person, all made by the gallery's own roster of artists – from Mark Wallinger to Phyllida Barlow, Leon Golub to Martin Creed.
And and so, at the far end of the fair, I come up beyond Jesse Darling's March of the Valedictorians, a group of mutually-supporting chairs on aptitude-legged stilts, a kind of wavering community not sure of its place. Only similar an artwork, just like a human being crowd. It sticks in the head and stays at that place.
London'southward Seventeen gallery has a ophidian eating its own tail as a seating arrangement, where you lot can sit and spotter John Rafman's virtual-reality video, in which, apparently, you lot brainstorm in an art fair and drift into a horror pic. You don't need VR for that, and in whatever case the art market is itself an Ouroboros.
Art fairs can requite fine art its lame name. Only work at it and things stick out. Some works, one feels, are merely made to be hung on an art off-white wall, the bearers non so much of ideas or a sensibility but of a stylish name and the glamour of the gallery that tried it on and moved it forth. Some things are destined for a museum, while others get resold in the parking lot or in a hotel bedchamber, or dorsum in Verhoeven's loos, the unlucky and unlikely dupes of a moment'southward enthusiasm or a passing whim.
Some things arrive on their stands cosseted in bubble-wrap, but to be embalmed over again at the end of the fair, then unwrapped again a few days, weeks and months after at another fair – in Paris in a week or ii'south fourth dimension, at Art Basel Miami, or, if they get lucky, at Frieze Masters a few years down the road, where they volition be rediscovered as the works of a hitherto unacknowledged genius. By which time their toll has quintupled and a critic like me will be cursing the blindness with which they reacted the commencement few times around.
These thoughts had me pressing the buzzer next to the ornate bronze lift doors Ryan Gander has installed in a wall at Johnen Galerie. "Lift to Culturefield," reads the sign. Just the doors don't open and the elevator is going nowhere. It is nothing just a dream of escape. There isn't 1.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/oct/05/frieze-art-fair-2016-review-everyones-a-performer-in-the-boozy-fruity-house-of-fun
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