Art Basel Miami Beach
At Art Basel Miami Beach, a sprawling art fair that runs through Sunday, a wall-to-wall text piece by Barbara Kruger spells out two quotations. One from Goethe observes, “We are the slaves of objects around us.” The other, from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, reads, “He entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word and looked at all objects with a wild and distracted stare.”
David Hammons, “Esquire (or John Henry)” (1990)
These lines truly sum up the experience of a frenetic fair that embraces more than 200 galleries and numerous ancillary exhibitions and events in other locations in the Miami area. To take in so much art in so short a period of time is by turns thrilling, numbing and totally mystifying.
The sense of art as merchandise is overpowering. A vast majority of what you see is portable and palatable. Most galleries offer variety-store-like mixes of works by different artists in a kind of sample-sale ambiance.
An installation at T293 by the French team that goes by the name Claire Fontaine consists of a crude sculpture of a blue horse, an obscure reference to a popular symbol of political liberation from the 1970s. The words “Is freedom therapeutic?” are spray-painted graffiti-style on the walls.
Thomas Struth, “The Rothko Chapel, Houston” (2007)
Back at the main fair, in Hetzler’s booth, there’s a large glossy photograph by Thomas Struth in which two people are seen from behind sitting in rapt contemplation of a triptych in the Rothko Chapel in Houston. To a Postmodernist skeptic, such quasi-religious reverence seems an amusing historic artifact.
Frank Benson, “Chocolate Fountain #1″ (2008)
A sculpture by Frank Benson at Taxter & Spengemann that looks to be a working fountain of liquid chocolate turns out to be an object of solid, glossily painted stainless steel. The tension between appearance and reality is curiously delightful.
Evan Penny, “Murray Variation 3″ (2008)
At Sperone Westwater, an oversize head and shoulder portrait in sculptural relief of a grizzled middle-aged man by Evan Penny is so realistic in every detail you can’t help but feel a part of your psyche responding as though it were in the presence of a supernaturally living being.
The NADA, or New Art Dealers Alliance, fair abounds in works of imaginative metamorphosis. See for example, the spooky conflations of abstraction and photographic distortion in sculptures by Ryan Johnson at Guild & Greyshkul.
The most transporting single artwork on view in Miami, however, is not at any of the commercial fairs. It is an astounding installation in an exhibit called “The Station.” “Hello Meth Lab with a View,” by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, is a walk-in simulation of the grungy interior of a house whose occupants have been producing crystal meth.
Barkley L. Hendricks, “Noir” (1978)
An exhibition called “30 Americans” at the Rubell Collection calls our attention more urgently to social and political reality. The show includes several generations of artists who have come of age since the 1960s, from David Hammons, Robert Colescott and Barkley Hendricks to Kara Walker, Rashid Johnson and Kalup Linzy.
If any one piece in the show could be taken as emblematic, it would be a neon sign spelling “America” in large letters by Glenn Ligon. The glowing white tubing has been painted black on the front but not the back, so that the letters appear backlighted by white light, a neat metaphorical reversal of our nation’s historical racial landscape and an eloquent testimony to the poetic power of the well-formed object. N.Y.Times
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