An ideal venue for fools and their money

It was like a scene from Hieronymus Bosch as the rich gathered at Frieze. Then there was the art...

Stephen Bayley
Sunday October 14, 2007

Frieze Art Fair
Regent's Park, London NW1; finishes today

What is the role of the mobile in contemporary art? Mobiles are dynamic sculptures. Alexander Calder was the best-known practitioner: his mobiles were witty and delicate arrangements of flat metal in primary colours, suspended from and separated by lightly tensioned rods and wires. Their profiles changing with the merest gust of wind, mobiles were nice commentaries on spatial relationships and the play of light, possibly even commentaries on the evanescent nature of experience itself.

They have them around the pool at the Colombe d'Or, the hotel in St Paul-de-Vence where artists paid their bar bills with paintings and sculpture. I know a collector who has a Calder in the bathroom of his Chicago apartment. The other role of the mobile in contemporary art is the 3G thing you clap to your ear as you barge, head down, through the teeming throng of the Frieze Art Fair. They seem to be obligatory.

Just heard someone say into his handset: 'I hef sin you riding plane to Berlin.' Most men have no hair. Women have yes hair. The bald (or shaved) men are in black. The women have legs. Lots of them. I am standing in what, rather preposterously, is known as the Private View. I say preposterous because the giddy scrum of rich intercontinental punters, circling in orbits of self-love, looks as though Hieronymus Bosch has art-directed a Prada fashion show in Frankfurt airport during a crippling baggage handlers' strike. It stretches the semantics of privacy to absurdity. And as to the 'view' bit - that's misleading too.

The Frieze Art Fair is in its fifth year. Other specifics are its site in Regent's Park, London, in a vast, spare structure of 21,000 square metres. This was designed by the Shoreditch-Canadian architect Jamie Fobert who came to notice several years ago when he won the commission to design the Kettle's Yard Gallery in Cambridge. There are 151 stands from galleries in 28 countries. League leaders are UK and the US with 34 each and runner-up Germany with 25, as neat a summary of the geopolitics of the contemporary art business as I can manage.

It is not at all like an art gallery. In my experience, it is more like the sort of events they have at Birmingham's NEC. Perhaps the Gift Fair (where you can buy novelty keyrings). Or possibly even more like Maxx Power, the exceedingly popular event where C1 youth eating testosterone sandwiches displays its extravagantly customised Vauxhall Corsas to pouting girls wearing not terribly much.

I am standing here with two glasses of champagne. This is not mere greed, it is a survival stratagem. The big thing at this vast Private View is knowing where the drinks are. Later, I discover that there is a source behind the scenes, a single point of access. Serving girls leave with full trays of bubbling flutes which are immediately depleted by greedy hands, like estuary seagulls at a landfill, even before they circulate in the forum. It rather puts me in mind of the myth of Sisyphus.

You will notice I have not yet mentioned the art. This is because to comment on the merit or quality of what's on display at Frieze is irrelevant. Once, the direction of contemporary art was determined by lonely, radical geniuses with a vision and an atelier. Now it is determined by hedge-fund managers, or by Deutsche Bank (headline sponsor) redeeming itself in a maelstrom of (mostly) college-standard tat. Art has leapt the species barrier. Its value (as opposed to cost) is no longer determined by critics and connoisseurs, but by all those hundreds of thousands of non-doms who want rapid access to culture without having to work very hard for it.

I bumped into society decorator Nicky Haslam and asked him what it was all about. 'There's nothing here which makes any intellectual demands,' he said. Then I was bounced into Chelsea jeweller Theo Fennell, no stranger to money, and asked him the same question. 'There's a line between having a laugh,' Theo said, 'and having merit.' He did not say, but was unambiguous about, on which side of the line we stood.

Contemporary art has become what money men call a new asset class. It has attracted a new type of collector. People feel it is the influence of Charles Saatchi who started collecting, they say, because the art world gave him useful access to the New York drawing rooms where he wanted to do business for his advertising agency. Previously, he had been just as keen on go-karting. Because of the Saatchi Effect, contemporary art, once difficult (or have you not read Uber das Geistige in der Kunst?), became the optical equivalent of easy listening. Factor in the fact that no one can afford a Titian any more and you get the Frieze Art Fair (and its equivalents Art Basel and the Venice Biennale and Art Basel Miami).

By overheating the art market, Frieze enhances the carbon footprint of Apollo's chariot. There is a trickle-down effect everywhere. In a Sotheby's sale of modern masters timed to coincide with Frieze, an oil painting by Lyonel Feininger (an interesting personality, but a modest talent) is estimated at a preposterous $12.5m. I think I saw a Warhol for $35m in Frieze's tent, but it may have been the champagne.

The event itself is a work of dizzy entrepreneurial genius by organisers Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, who founded the influential magazine that gave the fair its name. Here I must go easy on Frieze because Slotover is the son of good friends of mine. His father is Stockhausen's agent, his mother a children's book publisher. Stockhausen got into trouble when he called 9/11 'Satan's greatest work of art'. I wonder if that is what gave Matthew the idea for Frieze...

ROBERT KUSMIROWSKI

A 20TH CENTURY HISTORY - Katerina Gregos

CONFRONTED WITH Robert Kusmirowski’s work, one is immediately immersed into the past. Kusmirowski’s oeuvre explores ideas of history and its representation, as well as memory, but also demonstrates in an uncanny way the artist’s identification with an imagined collective past. Working in a variety of media, all his work is painstakingly handcrafted and constructed in such a way as to appear as if it were a genuine relic of the past, excavated from the annals of early 20th century history. Kusmirowski’s sculptures and installations consist of meticulously two- and three-dimensional objects made with paper, cardboard and wood as some of his basic materials. Such is the perfection of his craftsmanship that his works bear the patina of time in a manner that completely subverts the fact that they were made in the present. Kusmirowski’s practice consists primarily of falsifications, fakes or forgeries of situations, ordinary objects of different sizes (from stamps, vintage photos and postcards to bicycles), and reenactments and performances which refer to events that occurred or might have occurred long ago, recreating an intimate iconography of the past. Most of his works appear as though they could have been taken out of a historical museum, and indeed everything the artist produces looks as if it exists in a time capsule and feels almost awkwardly uncomfortable in the present. In that sense Kusmirowski manipulates not only objects but also time and place; he plays not only with history but with the ideas of change and transformation that go with it and how these might be inscribed retrospectively into the physical world around us. The illusionistic quality in his work is physical but also metaphorical, questioning the boundaries between reality and artifice, original and fake. It is no coincidence that Kusmirowski began his artistic career as a copyist of documents and objects from the Polish People’s Republic, his country of birth. There are no simple appropriation tactics to be found in the artist’s practice; rather than appropriating objects or images, as is customary, Kusmirowski appropriates an idea of the past, whether imagined or mediated.


He fuses real historical events and incidents with imagined ones, often inserting himself as protagonist in certain situations to create a hypothetical sense of individual or collective memory, an open-ended mental space about which each of us can hypothesize, fantasize and reflect on. The simulated patina and precise craftsmanship of his work thus creates a nostalgic atmosphere of bygone times that operates by association and evocation rather than as a straightforward narrative. Kusmirowski thereby activates cultural memory but also stirs up an ecumenical sense of nostalgia and melancholy, something many people experience as they grow older. There is a certain fatalistic aspect to his work and also a fetish that goes beyond the historical, a kind of artistic obsession/identification with the aesthetics and lifestyles of times past. In addition, his work is also a poignant comment on the fragility, futility and fleeting nature of life. The viewer must suspend disbelief at all times. In one of his first large scale installations (D.O.M, 2004), Kusmirowski made a recreation of a Polish cemetery for the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw. At the Ujazdowski Castle, Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, and then later at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, he made a life-size replica of a Communist era artist’s studio which mirrored itself (Double V, 2005).

Kusmirowski completed a walk from Warsaw to Paris (Map of Auschwitz, 2004), which is documented in two photos and a map/itinerary of the countries through which he walked. The walk is a reference to Constantin Brancusi, who walked from Bucharest to Paris one hundred years earlier. At the 4th Berlin Biennale, he presented Wagon, a work initially made for Novart, Festival of Young Art, in Krakow in 2002: a full scale simulation of a ’40s transport wagon from a train. The work was haunting with its realism — including the smell of old railway carriages — bringing to mind, among other things, the hundreds of trains that made the sinister journey to concentration camps. Kusmirowski performs magic with his materials, creating a sense of illusionism so akin to reality that one cannot believe it is a counterfeit. In this sense he is an artistic Houdini that leaves no clues as to the means by which he performs his magic deeds. The artist conjures an entirely fascinating and uniquely personal, nostalgic retro-world, which is as immersive as it is escapist. However, through digging up the ghosts of the past, Kusmirowski prompts the viewer to reflect upon the present.

The Joker

Richard Prince at the Guggenheim.
by Peter Schjeldahl October 15, 2007

The immense art-world success of Richard Prince, the subject of a large and seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim, depresses me, not that I can gainsay it. If “quintessential artist in a generation” were a job opening, Prince, fifty-eight years old, would be an inevitable hire, having hit no end of avant-gardist sweet spots since the late nineteen-seventies in photography, painting, and sculpture. His contemporaries Cindy Sherman and, off and on, Jeff Koons are better, for stand-alone works of originality, beauty, and significance. But they don’t contest Prince’s chosen, Warholian ground as a magus of contemporary American culture. (Koons tried, but his attempt was too weird for comprehension, let alone assent.) Prince’s works make him an artist as anthropologist, illuminating folkways by recycling advertising photographs, cartoon and one-liner jokes, soft-core pornography, motorcycle-cult ephemera, pulp-novel covers, “Dukes of Hazzard”-era car parts, celebrity memorabilia, and other demotic flotsam. His bald rip-offs of painting styles from Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and, lately, Willem de Kooning make him an artist as irreverent art critic, razzing exalted reputations. Prince can seem to cover, in an insouciantly corrosive way, the whole topography of the aesthetic in present high and low life; and he is acute enough that a refusal to play along, for the nuanced pleasures that he provides, would be bigoted. But his is a shallow, brittle, ultimately desolating conceit—seizing on things that are a-twitch with a little vitality, and chloroforming them. Prince’s nearest approach to identifiable emotion is the exiguous zeal of obsessive collecting. (He’s a bibliophile, with letches for authors, including Nabokov and Kerouac.)

Prince was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949, and grew up in a suburb of Boston. He has said that his parents were spies for the Office of Strategic Services, and that his father served in Vietnam. Caution is in order, however, regarding Prince’s autobiographical accounts. In 1985, an art magazine, ZG, published an interview with him, conducted in 1967 by J. G. Ballard, the English writer of dire fantasy, when Prince was eighteen years old and under detention in London for want of a valid passport. The interview, in which Prince describes his father as a diabolical manipulator of minds, was a lively hoax. Also in the eighties, Prince collaborated with the late Colin de Land, an eccentric dealer, to make the work and shepherd the career of one John Dogg, a fashionable and, it later turned out, nonexistent sculptor. Prince’s devotion to the put-on is among his bona fides in a generation—that of punk, deconstruction, and David Letterman—addicted to vertiginous irony: in-jokes with nothing in them. An appropriate bonus of the catalogue is a series of interviews about Prince, by the hipster’s hipster Glenn O’Brien, with leading technicians of waggery: ad and magazine people, cartoon editors (including Robert Mankoff, of The New Yorker), a car designer, the Hells Angel Sonny Barger, John Waters, and Phyllis Diller.


Prince attended college in Maine and arrived in New York in 1973, where for ten years he worked various low-end jobs (notably, assembling magazine tear sheets) in the Time & Life Building. He started to show in 1975—small, gnomic paintings, prints, and photo-and-text works. His emergence on the scene is commonly, and lazily, associated with “Pictures,” an epochal 1977 show at the non-profit downtown gallery Artists Space. He happened not to be in it. (Neither was Cindy Sherman, the first artist who comes to mind in the same connection.) Curated by the critical theorist Douglas Crimp, “Pictures” announced a movement of menacingly cold-eyed appropriation, as in the work of Sherrie Levine, who became known for her no-comment photographs of classic modern photographs. Prince had taken to photographing magazine ads, enjoying the strangeness of, in his words, a “reality that has the chances of looking real, but a reality that doesn’t have any chances of being real.” He refused an invitation to appear in “Pictures,” he has said, because he was put off by what he deemed to be Crimp’s dogmatism. (Crimp has denied inviting Prince.) An admirably bristly independence is apparent in his move, eleven years ago, from Manhattan to rural Rensselaerville, New York. There he filled a tacky house with some of his works and collections of this and that to such striking effect that, in 2005, the Guggenheim bought it as an in-situ work of art, titled “Second House.” (In June of this year, lightning set it afire; what to do with the intact but charred remnant is undecided.) Flirting with self-forgetful realism in the nineties, Prince took elegiac photographs of woebegone back-road sights, such as a basketball hoop in an overgrown meadow. That mood passed.

Prince has dubbed his retrospective “Spiritual America,” keying it to his 1983 photograph of an infamous Garry Gross photograph, published by Playboy Books, in 1976, of a naked Brooke Shields, aged ten, her prepubescent body oiled and her face given womanly makeup. Prince applied the title—which comes from Alfred Stieglitz, who coined it for his 1923 photograph of a gelded workhorse’s rear end—to the work, to a show consisting of nothing else, and to the one-off gallery, in a Lower East Side storefront, that first hosted it. His unbounded enthusiasm for the awful image offers queasy-making testimony to his character as an artist. He sees in the photograph, he has said, “a body with two different sexes, maybe more, and a head that looks like it’s got a different birthday.” And he enjoyed the spectacle of Shields’s failed later effort, in a lawsuit, to quash Gross’s picture, which her mother had authorized for four hundred and fifty dollars. It gave him a “patriotic” feeling, he has declared—“that is to say if I was to have heard that this type of activity over a photograph was happening in another country I would have considered moving there.” (Note the piled-up subjunctives: Princean grammar.) The Guggenheim’s chief curator, Nancy Spector—who, working closely with the artist, has installed the show with excellent rhythm and clarity—hastens, in an essay in the catalogue, to defend the work as social criticism, “a portrait of desperation” exposing the American pursuit of fame at any cost. But she thereby fails to credit (if that’s the word) Prince’s omnivorous connoisseurship of kink, as in paintings (which have been selling for millions at auction) from covers of semi-smutty romance novels featuring nurses. He doesn’t diagnose decadence. He swims in it.

Certain of Prince’s works, early on, nailed tropes of the “Pictures” sensibility for good and all. His gorgeous prints of the cowboy photographs in Marlboro ads, a stock-in-trade since 1980, stick us with the fact that those pictures are beautiful. Any opinions we may have about advertising, cigarettes, and the West founder in our visual bliss. And I remember laughing with amazed delight when I first saw some of the “Gangs,” from the mid-eighties—big sheets of rephotographed, gridded photos, such as amateur shots from motorcycle magazines for which guys posed their girlfriends, lasciviously, with their choppers; or of big waves from surfer publications, which emit formulaic, subcultural rapture. If I liked one of those pictures, it occurred to me, I would be fated to like them all, insatiably; and for a moment, still, at the Guggenheim I can feel locked into their wavelengths of avidity. Prince’s sensitivity to mores of what John Waters calls the “upper-lower class” yields oracular coups. Prince has been onto something, certainly, with his corralling of antique Borscht Belt gags and an oral tradition of mildly off-color jokes, as texts drawn or stencilled onto his paintings, usually with no thematic relation to the visual elements. For example, “I got good looking kids. Thank God my wife cheated on me.” Do market considerations govern Prince’s choice of relatively tame jokes, in genres where the best tend to be the dirtiest? (I miss certain gamy favorites of mine.)

Prince’s most ambitious works cheerfully vulgarize familiar features of Abstract Expressionism, minimalism, and Pop art. Most successful, and very snappy, are his sculptural, para-minimalist adaptations of hoods and body parts from the Dodge Challenger and other preposterously overpowered coupes from pre-oil-crisis days. The forms, lovely in themselves, receive applications of paint and putty that evoke the never completed customizing projects of youthful owners. Dicier are his pastiches of styles that, unlike minimalism, are poetic in essence. The wandering, lost-sheep brushstrokes in Jasper Johns’s classic early paintings excite because their gestural tension and sensitive touch create a surfeit of expressiveness. When Prince imitates them across expanses of collaged bank checks—a recent series of large canvases, with stencilled jokes—the effect is toneless and slack, though decorative. It makes me wonder if he even knows what he’s dealing with. His recent, raucous takeoffs on de Kooning’s “Women,” incorporating ink-jet images from female and male pornography, bespeak a tin eye. By presenting distorted figures, Prince seems to have de Kooning mixed up with Francis Bacon. (De Kooning’s pictures are lyrical improvisations of line and paint, in which glimpses of figuration come and go.) An adept of juvenile sarcasm, like Prince, is well advised not to invite comparisons with grownups.

NEUE HEIMAT - BERLIN CONTEMPORARY

A show curated by: Ursula Prinz und Anne Haun.

featuring:

Nevin Aladag (Förderpreis GASAG)
Michel de Broin
Christina Dimitriadis
Martin Dörbaum
Markus Draper
Paul Ekaitz
Nina Fischer und Maroan el Sani
Christine de la Garenne
Eva Grubinger
Erla Haralsdóttir und Bo Melin
Mona Hatoum
Anton Henning
Jeroen Jacobs
Takehito Koganezawa
Lucas Lenglet
Via Lewandowsky
Tea Mäkipää
Birgit Ramsauer
Mandla Reuter (GASAG Kunstpreis)
Miguel Rothschild
Michael Sailstorfer
Yehudit Sasportas
Florian Slotawa
Costa Vece
Maria Vedder
Jorinde Voigt (Förderpreis GASAG)
Brigitte Waldach

A very nice show to see with some outstanding works.
I have to say with shame, that after living in Berlin for almost 4 years we´ve never been at the Berlinische Galerie.
If I can give you one advise, don´t wait as long as I did!!
It´s a great museum!
Also the collection of older works by a.o. Grosz, Liebermann etc. shouldn´t be missed, I´ve seen some amazing works.

Folkert de Jong

Dutch artist Folkert de Jong returns to the HVCCA with a massive site-specific installation entitled Mount Maslow.

Opening October 21, 2007
With an Artist Talk at 4:00pm and reception to follow

De Jong is one of the most innovative young sculptors today whose first museum exposure in the US was at the HVCCA in two seminal exhibitions: "Figure It Out" and "Reverence."

In his work, De Jong stages chaotic figurative scenes using Styrofoam and polyurethane foam. His works are often concerned with historical issues as well as current issues of the moment such as wars and the abuse of power. His works convey an uncanny and dream-like quality where the perverse often collides with the familiar.

The concept behind "Mount Maslow" originated in De Jong's interest in the work of Abraham Maslow, psychologist/philosopher, who proposed 'a pyramid of needs' in his 1943 paper 'A Theory of Human Motivation'. Maslow's theory contended that as humans meet 'basic needs', they seek to satisfy successively 'higher needs' that occupy a set hierarchy. For De Jong, it seems inevitable that humans will always seek more through whatever means necessary, yet the peak of the 'pyramid of needs' is something elusive and intangible: spiritual fulfillment.

In "Mount Maslow" a Styrofoam snow mountain structure reaches up 18 feet on which are two bearded figures in mountain climbing gear. They appear to have halted to stare at a prophecy. Carved in the endless ice of the glacier in giant letters are the words 'Hamburger Hill'.

Set in May 1969 during the Vietnam War, 'Hamburger Hill' is a movie based on an account of the strategic assault by the U.S. Army on a well-fortified position of the North Vietnamese Army. 'Hamburger Hill' is a favorite of some on the political right, with its bombastic macho posturing. Here the struggle is seen as noble. De Jong once again acknowledges that the retelling of history requires many voices; all renditions of war are relevant.

Layering references to spiritual aspiration, war, popular culture, and philosophical propositions, De Jong performs a signature remixing of complex contemporary social and political issues. "Mount Maslow" functions ambiguously as both a monument to the human quest for progress and a stark memorial to the waste that results when egotism is confused for transcendentalism.

Michael van den Besselaar

what we've just seen is not real

The paintings of Michael van den Besselaar play with the visual culture that has increasingly come to determine our lives. His series of paintings are about looking and being looked at, about what is real and what is not, about what memory does to us, about pictures that we believe and about credibility. They demonstrate how images convey the suggestion of truth, but in fact open the door for numerous interpretations.

At the heart of this exhibition at New York’s Black & White Gallery are groups of television sets: The Time Machine Mirrors. They are the product of the optimistic years when capitalism was victorious and technology was there to improve things. But these painted televisions are, in fact, merely believable casings for the images the artist displays on them. As a messenger of reality, the television has become a deceptively objective window on the world. Van den Besselaar draws on images from the fields of news and entertainment that have become icons, images that have lodged themselves in the collective memory. These pictures seem to be clear enough, but they lead to numerous associations and even to confusion. With his interplay of nuances and accents, he opens the door for all kinds of associations. And he leaves us with open ends, at the most with the undermining conclusion: ‘What we’ve just seen is not real’ – or at least: it’s not the only reality.


exhibition from october 18th - novenmber 24th 2007
Black & White Gallery, New York

ArtForum Berlin

Here a little overview from the Berlin Art Fair.
To be honest I tried my best, went 2 times because the opening was very crowded ...
But in the end my opinion was the same, not much going on at this fair.
Probably a lot of money was made, but i wasn´t swept off my feet from the quality.
If you search hard enough off course there´s some good works to be seen, but this fair still doesn´t make this extra difference it claims it does.
I won´t even speak about the curated show going alongside the Fair, because well you couldn´t really tell the difference ....
I guess most visitors use the fair as an excuse to come to Berlin and party, wich is probably the better way to spent time here...

Well here are some photographs, wich are not necesairly the best works on display but give you an idea of what was going on.

The Vincent Award

The Vincent Award is an important biennial award to stimulate European artists whose work is highly relevant to the art of today. For every edition five artists are nominated and invited to an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. During the exhibition the winner will be announced and granted the prize fee of € 50.000.

Nominees
The Vincent Award aims at stimulating contemporary art in Europe and aims to be a means of communication and discussion within a free, united and peaceful Europe.

An international jury has announced the names of the artists shortlisted for The Vincent Award 2008. The artists in the running are: , Peter Friedl, Liam Gillick, Deimantas Narkevicius and Rebecca Warren.

The exhibition of The Vincent Award 2008 will be running from June 20 until September 30, 2008 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. During the Award Ceremonial Day on September 12 the winner will be announced, as well as the winner of the Audience Prize, that is new to this edition.

Earlier editions of The Vincent Award were won by Wilhelm Sasnal (2006), Pawel Althamer (2004), Neo Rauch (2002) and Eija-Liisa Ahtila (2000).

My pick for the winner this year: Francis Alÿs !!!!