"Frieze Has the Art Fair Mastered: The British Brand Hits a Home Run With a New Event for Older Art " @adamlindemann

Last week, London hosted three major art fairs and several smaller and younger ones, enough to make any sane person wonder: have we reached the point of art fair overkill? I’ve often thought—and written—that the art fair scene has gone overboard, and now I’m not alone. On his Facebook page New York magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz recently lamented the explosion of art fairs and the new custom among hungry galleries to send out email blasts from them announcing how many works they’ve sold. “We’ve built a worm into the system,” Mr. Saltz wrote. “The system is self-supporting and draws its power from everyone.” The point is timely, because London’s annual Frieze art fair—the highlight of a week of art parties and hobnobbing in British style—has sprouted a second fair, Frieze Masters, for more “historical” artworks. I was there for the opening of Masters, and it forced me to change my tune. And so, in the words of the great Marcel Duchamp, I will now “force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

 

Since 2003, Frieze has brought dozens of galleries from all over the world to London every October, and showcased some of the best and worst in cutting-edge contemporary art. The show happens under an architect-designed big top in Regent’s Park, and it has been a smashing success since its inception, drawing thousands of buyers and gawkers who feast their eyes and empty their wallets on fresh pieces of art. By riding the Saatchi wave of hipness and hotness in British art, Frieze founders Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover succeeded in crowning London as the world’s second great capital of contemporary art. For one crazed week every year, London’s parties and gallery openings rival anything New York can offer.

 

So, in 2012, has the sinking world economy affected London’s weeklong art bonanza? Apparently not, since several New York galleries continue to open across the pond in a big way. There was plenty of “friezing” at the opening of Pace’s brand-spanking-new space in the Royal Academy building, which featured the unlikely pairing of painter god Mark Rothko with Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Then there was the opening of a swanky new townhouse outpost for David Zwirner, who presented a large Luc Tuymans show well-tailored to European taste. There was even an all-new gallery for Milan’s ever-popular Massimo De Carlo featuring new work by Piotr Uklanski, as well as sundry other extensions, expansions and pop-up shops.

 

With so much going on, it seems that now almost everyone is saying that art fairs are “out of control.” I’ve thought so for quite a while, yet when I satirized Art Basel Miami Beach less than a year ago, some readers were confused, while others, like Mr. Saltz, attacked me as if I had committed heresy against their church. Funny how quickly the tide turns in art’s little pond. In his Facebook post last Friday, Mr. Saltz proved he’s a switch hitter, rightly pointing out that we have “a hundred art fairs and international biennials … skyrocketing prices during a worldwide economic contraction. The art world’s reflexes are shot; its systems so predetermined that they’re driving us; we’re no longer driving them.”

 

This may be true, but the dynamic has changed for good and there’s no turning back. I can no longer think of the art fair phenomenon as “out of control,” because the fairs are the ones firmly in control. They control a large percentage of gallery sales, and therefore exert a big influence on the size and shape of art; they are a huge force behind art-buying habits and tastes. Fairs are no longer a good or bad thing, they are the thing, the new reality. Fewer and fewer people go to gallery shows, because sadly, people just don’t have the time or the interest. Or perhaps it’s just easier and more fun to show up in London, Miami, Rio or Dubai to see your friends and party like a rock star, while picking up a painting by a hot artist. These days, art fairs are the only weapons smaller galleries can wield against the large and ever-more-powerful auction houses, which continue their incursion even outside the sales rooms, with the expansion of their own privately brokered art sales. Fairs give the art-buying experience an auction-house sense of urgency, and those impulse sales keep many smaller galleries afloat.

 

Understanding the delicate balance between art and the art market is where the founders of Frieze have proven their mettle. Remember last May when they launched Frieze New York on Randall’s Island and drew dozens of galleries from around the world? Back then, I thought New York needed another art fair like I needed a root canal, but I was wrong. It was a big success—the place rocked, and it was packed. I was at first skeptical about the new London fair, Masters, which ran simultaneously with Frieze in another tent, across Regent’s Park: why would a company cannibalize its own business by running two fairs in the same town at the same time? The stated charter included only a subtle difference between the venues: “old” Frieze (now called Frieze London) shows only newish work, whereas new Frieze (Frieze Masters) is limited to “oldish” art. The criterion for “old” seemed pretty random: the work merely had to predate the year 2000, meaning in order to qualify for inclusion, it only had to be 12 years “old”!

You may recall that London already has a modestly successful fair for older and more expensive art that runs concurrently with Frieze, the two-year-old PAD (Pavilion of Art and Design), located conveniently in Berkeley Square. No matter, the Frieze duo forged ahead and hooked up Masters with a whopping 175 of the world’s top galleries, easily dwarfing the two-year-old PAD and creating a fantastic new art fair experience, arguably the best I’ve ever seen. Pace Gallery had a $17 million early black mobile by Alexander Calder that was drop-dead, and Helly Nahmad rivaled it with his own colorful 1960s Calder mobiles fancifully twirling to a ’60s bossa nova soundtrack, one of them priced at $20 million. I got to ogle a sumptuous 16th-century portrait of Jesus by Luis de Morales at Madrid’s Galería Caylus, priced at 250,000 euros, and then swoon over Donald Ellis Gallery’s Navajo chief’s blanket, arguably the finest in the world (the ultra-rare first phase), justifiably priced at $2.5 million; now that’s fun. Frieze Masters was an unqualified success, another feather in the cap of the British franchise, and a considerable feat.

But what does Masters mean in the grand scheme of things—and what does all of this say about the market today? Remember the story of the Greek god Kronos, king of the Titans. He came to power by castrating his father, Uranus, and then, fearing his own children (the Olympians) were destined to do the same to him, he ate them (Zeus was spared and eventually overthrew him, fulfilling the prophecy). Like Kronos, Frieze Masters has castrated its father—this year’s Frieze, newly dubbed Frieze London to distinguish itself from its younger New York sibling, logically lacked the energy and testosterone of prior Frieze fairs. It was crowded with art and people but lacking in quality, although, to be fair, there were hidden treasures. Why would the Frieze founders jeopardize their successful franchise by creating a fancier and more mature version of the same thing? Going forward, collectors will demand a higher-quality experience—more bang for their art fair buck—and the new Masters fair delivers the goods. This is not a bad thing; now the Frieze London fair can keep to its original course and stay true to its commitment to be younger and, hopefully, edgier.

 

In a sinking world economy, dollars will, in all fields, seek out the best values. The feeding frenzy and knee-jerk hunt for the hot, the new and the trendy will not come screeching to a halt, but it is definitely slowing down. Art collectors are bound to get smart and demand quality. Frieze has anticipated this shift and built an all-new venue, one that is both elegant and sophisticated. The decision to emasculate your own art fair by creating a new one must have been a tough one, but in the clash of the titan art fairs it was a smart bet, and it paid off. Frieze Masters could also work well in New York, where fairs of historical art are generally to be found in the fustier confines of the Park Avenue Armory. I hope to “see you real soon”!

-By Adam Lindemann

"Technology Advances, Then Art Inquires: ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ at the New Museum" via Notes from the Bass Museum - George Lindemann Jr

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Ghosts in the Machine , at the New Museum, features some 140 works, including “Movie-Drome,” a mix of projected films, slides and drawings on the walls of a hemispherical room, by the filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. 

By 
Published: July 19, 2012

If “Ghosts in the Machine,” an ambitious, multitasking, somewhat austere exhibition at the New Museum were itself a machine, it would have lots of moving parts, but not all of them would be performing with equal efficiency.

Walking through this enormous show, which has been orchestrated by Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s associate director and head of exhibitions, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, its curator, can call to mind one of Marcel Duchamp’s lesser-known quips. In a 1963 interview in Vogue, cited in Calvin Tomkins’s 1996 biography of him, Duchamp claimed that the aesthetic life span of an art object — what he called its “emanation” — “doesn’t last more than 20 or 30 years.” Referring to his most famous painting, the 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” he added, “I mean, for example that my ‘Nude’ is dead, completely dead.” Mr. Tomkins suggests that his subject was half-joking, but only half.

The New Museum show repeatedly proves Duchamp about half right. As smart and thought stirring as this exhibition is, it is also a little short on living, breathing artworks, and slightly overloaded with rather stale ones and other objects and diagrams that, altogether, function primarily as interesting period pieces or historical artifacts.

In the catalog Mr. Gioni writes that the show was not conceived as “a classic historical survey” but as a “cabinet of curiosities.” Casting a wide net and moving quickly and a little capriciously across time and national boundaries, it sets out to examine some of the artistic reflections of our machine-haunted, technology-dependent era, especially in the second half of the last century. It is far less interested in bringing together established masterpieces than in using unfamiliar artworks to shed light on a machine-infested terrain that is as social and psychological as it is visual. The exhibition contains just enough powerful art — including some surprising resurrections — to pull it off.

The show’s mixture of marginal art movements and neglected objects ranges from 1960s Op Art paintings by Bridget Riley and Julian Stanczak to a reconstruction of Wilhelm Reich’s notorious Orgone Energy Accumulator from 1940; sitting in it was supposed to unblock the flow of life energy. There are constant swings among decades, allowing you, for example, in the museum’s lobby, to peruse “The Way Things Go,” the brilliantly witty 1987 video of chain reactions involving ordinary objects by Peter Fischli and David Weiss that is often likened to the creations of Rube Goldberg, and then go upstairs and study some drawings from the 1930s by Goldberg himself, sharpening your appreciation of the analogy. There are works by machine-obsessed outsider artists, healers and mental patients, including a series of suspended wire constructions by the self-taught American sculptor Emery Blagdon (1907-86), who thought they could cure illness. One of the show’s few dips into the premodern era is an 1810 engraving based on the delusional drawing by James Tilly Matthews, an Englishman who is generally considered the first person to receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia, that depicts his domination by a machine he called the Air Loom.

A majority of the show’s roughly 140 artworks, diagrams and related objects date from the mid 1950s to the mid-’70s — the halcyon years of postwar art and, not coincidentally, the beginning of the technological blossoming in which we currently find ourselves. The machine theme means that the show largely avoids the period’s dominant styles — especially Pop and Minimalism — favoring the more science- and technology-focused tendencies that they overrode or shunted aside. These include not only Op Art but also Kinetic art and what might be called op-kinetic hybrids, pursued in particular by little-known Italian artists. There are also several computer-generated films and a cache of wan computer-made drawings. This show repeatedly reminds you that every major scientific advance has artistic repercussions, artists who see it as the basis for something new and revolutionary, a way to go beyond conventional notions of touch, authorship and personal expression (even though it sometimes seems that the baby has been discarded with the bath water).

The largely abstract Op and kinetic works are balanced by profusely image-based efforts that predate Pop’s embrace of popular culture, or dissent from its emphasis on painting while also presaging 1980s appropriation art. These include two impressive resurrections of almost-never-seen works: “Man, Machine and Motion,” a large, rather stilted but nonetheless proto-Pop labyrinthine photo installation from 1955 by the British artist Richard Hamilton, and “Movie-Drome,” from 1963-66, by the American avant-garde filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. A dense, hallucinatory mix of projected films, slides and drawings splayed across the walls of a hemispherical room — originally a converted silo in Stony Point, N.Y. — it saw action fewer than five times. An enthralling rediscovery suggestive of a cross between an animated Rauschenberg silk-screen painting and the Internet’s deluge of images, it is a tantalizing rediscovery.

Duchamp is of course one of the show’s foundational presences, represented by a 1959-60 reconstruction of “The Large Glass” from 1915-23, one of modernism’s earliest and certainly most significant depictions of the machine in art. Its subtitle — “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” — highlights the eroticized fusion of machines and humans that is one of the show’s underlying themes. Next to it stands a frightening bedlike structure inspired by the implement of torture central to Kafka’s 1919 short story “In the Penal Colony.” Complete with an overhead array of needles, it executed its victims by inscribing their crimes on their bodies and was commissioned by the influential Swiss curator Harald Szeemann for his 1975 Duchamp-inspired exhibition “The Bachelor Machines.” (Prior exhibitions about the machine are among this one’s subthemes.)

In another gallery you’ll come across “Crash!,” a short film that the British science fiction writer J. G. Ballard made with Harley Cokeliss in 1971 (more than 20 years before the release of David Cronenberg’s Ballard-based feature of the same name, without the exclamation point). A meditation on the car as the central form and fantasy of modern society — and on the car crash as a kind of wish-fulfillment or consummation — it is both insightful and noticeably dated, especially in its juxtaposition of scenes of a car moving through a carwash and close-ups of a woman showering.

As usual, the stronger works provide built-in criticisms of their neighbors. On the third floor, for example, the rather clinical inertness of the Hamilton photo installation is pointed up by “The History of Nothing,” a 12-minute film from 1963 by Eduardo Paolozzi, another proto-Pop artist working in Britain, that will be new to most viewers. Combining drawings, engravings and photographs with a grinding, spluttering sound track, it depicts a dreamlike urban landscape with a personal intensity that leaves the Hamilton in the dust, while suggesting a missing link between Max Ernst’s collages and the 1968 animation of “Yellow Submarine.”

On the second floor most of the mechanized kinetic works and the eye-buzzing Op reliefs and sculptures keep the eye busy without giving the mind enough to do. Some feel like precursors to nothing so much as screen savers. Exceptions include a piece by the French-Argentine artist Julio le Parc in which big black-and-white moiré circles amusingly suggest woozy eyes, and a small, sweetly solemn motorized aperturelike wall piece in painted wood by the Belgian Pol Bury. More convincing, however, is the straightforward kineticism of Hans Haacke’s 1964-65 “Blue Sail” — a big square of blue chiffon held aloft by the blowing of an electric fan — and Gianni Colombo’s small, dark 1968 walk-in environment, “Elastic Space.” It surrounds the viewer with a luminous, attenuated grid of white cord that is gently stretched this way and that by a quietly whirring motor. Standing inside this work is like inhabiting something akin to a living organism, a friendly, encompassing, unified ghost-machine.

“Ghosts in the Machine” continues through Sept. 30 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery at Prince Street, Lower East Side; (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org.

via bassmuseumpres.tumblr.com

Rachel Harrison: ‘The Help’

 By 

Published: May 31, 2012
Greene Naftali
508 West 26th Street
Chelsea
Through June 16

Rachel Harrison’s traveling survey that originated at Bard College in 2009 was outstandingly good, and this gallery show makes a worthy, change-of-pace follow-up. As always, her sculptures combine the handmade and the ready-made, with the handmade predominating this time. 

The main element in several new pieces is a lumpy, faceted column of Styrofoam and cement painted, somewhat haphazardly, in rainbow colors. In a laconically sardonic way that Ms. Harrison has made her own, these forms seem to acknowledge the reascendancy of abstraction on the art market, while suggesting that a once-vital Modernist mode is badly in need of cleaning and pepping up. This is where ready-made components come in. Several columns are supplemented by the addition of housecleaning hardware (a bucket, a carpet sweeper, a Hoover vacuum cleaner) and one has a large poison-pink plastic container of the protein supplement Syntha-6 perched on top.

Will any of this really help the Modernist enterprise? A set of 20 colored pencil drawings leaves the matter in doubt. Most quote familiar images painted by long-gone masters like de Kooning and Picasso, who were power generators in their day. But in Ms. Harrison’s drawing these old stars are dwarfed by a new one: Amy Winehouse, with her messy, anarchic energies, beyond-help passions and sculptural coiffure. To knock art with wit and persistence, as Ms. Harrison does, is to in some way be hooked on it. Such was the spirit that motivated  certain artists she seems to admire, like Marcel Duchamp and Paul Thek, and that propels the seriously funny sculpture in this show. Constructive criticism is one term for it; tough love is another.