1959 –
Grille mobile, USA
The Times on line, 6 décembre 2005
The
Times
December
06, 2005
Times2
Twenty-four-hour party people
Even by Miami’s lurid standards the Art Basel
fair was brash
It was perfect summer
weather on Miami Beach for the first four days of December, so it was not
surprising that Art Basel/Miami Beach, the mammoth American offspring of a famous Swiss art
fair, became as much a social event as an art event in those four days.
The Art Deco hotels that line the shore were full of
collectors and celebrities, from Pamela Anderson to the now legendary painter
Robert Rauschenberg in his wheelchair and his friend the French novelist Alain
Robbe-Grillet. Parties in the hotel penthouses, as well as in
the homes of such wealthy Miami collectors as Nicola Bulgari and Rosa de
I went to a party in the Raleigh Hotel, where Sofia
Coppola and the fashion designer Donna Karan were among the
shoulder-to-shoulder dancers to the Cuban band, and the guests had to have the
back of their right hand stamped with a green star before they were let in. (It
is very hard to get off, but I suppose some people are glad of that.) Karan had just bought an abstract
screen by Pierre
Székely for about $350,000.
So what about the art? A few blocks
away in the Miami Beach Convention Centre, 175 galleries had brought their
highly contemporary wares for sale — and there the extravaganza exceeded the
social one by far. As one stepped in, it seemed as though there had been a
tremendous explosion, after which the whole world had settled down again in a
new form.
Everywhere there were shapes and combinations of
colour one had never seen before, as though every artist — and there were
artists from all over the world — was straining to make a new visual impact.
There were twisting, curling, dancing objects or streaks of paint, and fanciful
or aggressive masses of metal and plastic that were like nothing seen in
nature. Among them were once-familiar objects — such as the old human body —
that had been subjected to countless distortions — comic, depersonalising or
terrifying. The extremities of invention which characterise contemporary art
were on full, proud, colourful display.
One began to discern certain strands. One was for the
artist simply to exhibit the most unnoticed of objects just so that one noticed
them. Willys de Castro hung two wooden sticks on a
wall. Anna Maria Maiolino had framed some torn
squares of white plasterboard. After seeing those, one certainly looked at
things such as taps in the bathrooms with more curiosity — but not for long.
These were South American artists from a São Paolo gallery, and they already
seemed a little old-fashioned. At the Meyer Riegger
stand, the British artist Jonathan Monk, now building an international profile,
had turned a bicycle upside down and fixed it so that the wheels kept spinning.
This piece was offered as a conceptual work, as revealed by its title: Constantly
moving while standing still. In the
New York gallery Kreps there was a conceptual work by Jamie Isenstein,
whose theme seemed to be “moving about”, and consisted largely of everyday
things such as IN and OUT signs. But she added originality by hiding herself
now and then in a large suitcase — disappearance art as a variation on
performance art.
Attracting much attention among the works that showed
old things in a new light — and on sale for $45,000 from the Deitch stand — was Kehinde
Wiley’s painting Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps. This was based on Renaissance equestrian portraits
such as Titian’s Charles V, but showed a pudgy-faced figure in rainbow-coloured
draperies rearing up on his horse against a background of what looked like
Indian restaurant flock wallpaper. Another notable work in this strand was by
Thomas Hirschhorn, a series of 131 small geographical globes all with strange
excrescences of cardboard and sticky tape. It was reserved by the Philadelphia
Museum of Art on the first day.
The strongest note sounded by the show, however, was
one of would-be shock and aggression, directed sometimes against oppressive
political regimes, sometimes just bourgeois parents. Another Monk installation
contained a simple pair of panels with the observation “He walks into a
meeting/year after year”. A warning to a dull dad? A red neon sign by Iain
Baxter read: “Masturbating life makes art” — a clear adolescent cry. One felt
that rich parents would have to be masochists to buy these works.
Not that the old are as easily shocked as young
artists might think. Terrible screams came from another South American gallery
where sketchy drawings of hospital patients and other victims had been compiled
into a film. I heard an elderly, power-dressed woman say to her friend with a
smile as she passed: “Someone’s being tortured.”
There were many events outside the Convention Centre.
The most moving work I saw was at Miami Art Central, a museum set among
Spanish-style bungalows in the suburbs. Here they were showing William Kentridge, a South African artist who does brilliant
charcoal drawings that he works into disturbing films. I thought that these
genuinely caught some of the horror and pain of the late 20th century.
Meanwhile down on the beach itself, 20 shipping
containers had been turned into miniature galleries for up-and-coming artists,
and around them every night there were art performances. The most popular was
the demonstration of gurning — or ugly-face-pulling — by the two world
champions, Gordon Blacklock and Anne Woods, from
Cumbria. Some Americans came up to challenge them from the crowd, and I had a
gurning groupie shrieking for them behind me but the compere, Louisa Buck, of
The Art Newspaper, was able to declare: “We’ve shown that we British can be
uglier than you Americans.”
Opposite the main entrance to the
fair there was a block of flats called Mansfield Park. If Jane Austen had
stepped out of it and gone into the fair, she might well have wondered if
anything there would last as long as she has. But I am quite sure she would have taken a very
good look at something so extraordinary.
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