Art: Positions makes contemporary art fun for all
Art Basel | Miami Beach | 2007
December 6-9, 2007
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Article and photos by Claire Austin.
Niru Ratnam of London’s Store art gallery was excited about Lisa Oppenheim’s re-worked photographs from the Depression Era being shown in his gallery’s allocated shipping container, into which potential buyers and curious art enthusiasts tracked sand from the surrounding beach. Happily overwhelmed by the attention his gallery was receiving, Ratnam hoped that Store would win a coveted spot in the Art Basel: Miami main fair at the Miami Beach Convention Center next year.
“It’s best to do this [exhibit on the beach] when you’re younger, and move up to the main fair when you’ve grown a bit,” he said.
Ratman may have been talking about his gallery’s age and experience, but Art: Positions is the ideal place for our age bracket. While it’s great to visit the main fair to see the major names in art today (Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami), the gallerists who run the shipping containers set up annually on the beach across from Collins Park for Art Basel often show explorative emerging artists. In the quieter final days of the fair they are a great source for help in understanding the artists’ work. The smaller space makes the works easier to digest than those displayed in the sprawling lines of booths at the main fair, and the artwork in the containers is often more fun (Ara Peterson did one interior wall of mirrors and one of wood in dizzying shape and color patterns for the New York gallery “John Connelly Presents”).
More and more, Art Basel Miami Beach (or, to use The New York Times’ acronym, A.B.M.B.) is coming to represent the art world at its best and worst: billionaire collectors looking for an appreciating investment fly-in to buy art before the fair opens to other major collectors, let alone the public. Luxury brand names encourage the idea of art as status symbol by sponsoring artwork focusing on their products and exclusive parties.
At the same time, A.B.M.B. opens up the often-intimidating contemporary art world to non-buyers with open (and mostly free) events like concerts and satellite art fairs. It allows the city’s creative community to come out in full force and is helping put Miami on the map as a major cultural destination.
An appropriate theme for this years’ fair was “cross-pollination.” Much of the work would have been at home on T-shirts and album covers or in music videos and advertisements. Whether you think this ambiguity is good or bad, it is art’s inevitable direction; everyone from fashion designers to T.V. producers and graffiti artists looks to contemporary art for inspiration (many are entering the art scene themselves) and this often comes full circle. In one container, Vitamin Creative Space gallery from Guangzhou, China screened a video of a “RMB City,” a town artist Cao Fei designed on her computer to be built on Second Life.
As always, there was a free concert on the beach on opening night. Iggy Pop and the Stooges played an incredible set, with all the intensity of a 25-songs-in-25-minutes show but with a sax player and a few gratuitous guitar solos. At one point, the brick wall of fans in front of the stage got up onstage and sang and jumped along to “No fun to be alone.” Iggy thanked the crowd for the company, saying “it gets so lonely at these art shows.” Jeffery Deitch of New York’s Deitch Projects gallery first held the annual concert (with Fischerspooner) when the fair began in 2002. The show’s managers took it over in 2005, and Deitch has since hosted other alternative music acts at the Raleigh hotel.
This year he arranged a “Heaven and Hell” bill of performances by CocoRosie and The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black that epitomized the ever-thinning line between rock and performance art. The concerts at the Raleigh are technically not open to the public, but you can easily see and hear them from outside the roped-off area by the pool or on the other side of the gate leading to the beach. Before launching into his final song, Iggy said, “It’s not my fault that we live in a death culture.” At A.B.M.B., though, the culture couldn’t have been more alive.
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