Impress Me!

Dec. 6, 9:30 p.m.:  We’re flying over Georgia, heading to the biggest art event in the world.  Art Basel Miami Beach and its satellite fairs and events will bring in 43,000 visitors from around the world, 1,600 of them journalists, and will produce half a billion dollars of sales in art alone.

Dec. 6, 10:30 p.m.:  Rose Butman, my best friend from art school, is waiting for us at the Fort Lauderdale Airport.  She lives 35 minutes from South Beach, and we will be hanging out at the events with her and her husband Charlie.  We head to their house to plot our assault.

Dec. 7, 10:30 a.m.:  We easily find a parking spot a block from the Miami Beach Convention Center, where Art Basel Miami Beach is held.  We pay $10 for the all-day spot.  The general public’s admission is $30 a day.

I highlight each booth on the convention floor map that has significance to me.

I have an agenda in mind for attending this event.  It is motivated by the cultural oddities that exist in the contemporary art world.  Like the fashion industry, the art world is full of fads, trends, pretensions and a whole lot of hype.  I am going to compare the two biggest fairs in town, Art Basel and Pulse Miami.  Art Basel is the alpha fair, very international, with 250 of the world’s greatest galleries in attendance.  Pulse, though still international, has more of an American presence, with the smaller, less “blue chip” galleries in house.  My aim is to see who has the substance, and who will impress me the most.  I’m assuming there will be a clear favorite.

Dec. 7, 12:00 p.m.:  The doors open and I head to a booth where I hope to see a Marylin Minter.  Minter is a photographer and a Nuevo photo-realist painter who was a hit at the last Whitney Museum Biennale.  She is also considered the world’s best painter with commercial enamel paint, painting fetish images of women’s feet or cleavage, ornamented by jewelry and designer clothing.  She splashes dirty water on her subjects and emphasizes all the light refractions glinting off the drops.  The booth is missing her work.  The other gallery that handles her work has none in evidence either.  I’m pissed off, and wander up a side aisle, stopping at every booth.  The work in most of them doesn’t captivate me.  One booth has a pull cart in the middle overflowing with fruit. That’s all.  I spot a couple of well-dressed people who look like collectors studying it seriously.  I want to go tell them it is just promotional hype and to ignore it.  I am seeing way too much work that looks like freshman art school assignments.  A large, ripped drawing of minor skill sags off the wall, overhanging its counterpart on the floor.  I walk away.

I enter Reena Spauling’s Fine Art/New York booth.  What a joke.  In an attempt to be clever and ooooh-so-edgy, Merlin Carpenter, the artist whose work they have hung, has produced a series of black text on white canvases.  The first canvas is blank.  Excuse me, but I’ve seen that done before, and it was lame and affected the first time.  The next canvas proclaims, in crude lettering, “Die Collector Scum.”  At least the spelling was right.  The rest of Carpenter’s paintings seem to address the Basel event in the same manner.

I revert back to my highlighted map as a guide.  At Roberts and Tilton Gallery of Los Angeles, I encounter the work of my second most anticipated artist at Basel.  Kehinde Wiley can best be described as a 21st century hip-hop Velasquez.  His larger than life portraits of young, urban black men striking the heroic poses appropriated from centuries of commissioned portraits of royalty, generals and the wealthiest bourgeoisie equalize the depiction of human dignity.  He pulls elaborate, patterned backgrounds – derived from fabric and rug design – into the foreground, to surround his subjects.  He finishes his social commentary by using the ornate gold frames favored by museums in previous centuries.  The wall engulfing “classic,” a painting with three figures and a horse, exceeds my expectations.

I continue to skip my map and see new work by Robert Longo, David Salle and Eric Fischl.  Longo’s new series of giant sleeping faces seem to exaggerate curly eyelashes.  This gives them a disturbing hint of cuteness, but his huge charcoal of an attacking shark’s jaws is satisfying.  I come across other random work that attracts me, by artists with whom I’m unfamiliar.  There seem to be running themes touching on both bestiality and Pinocchio.  Overall, though, there is too much safe “blue chip” work.  The early 20th century pieces seem small and dull next to the contemporary work.  The Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art genres fair well, but I didn’t come to an international art fair to see work that I could view in a museum. I hunt down the gallery that has street art king Barry McGee’s work and find only a very small wall grouping that seems weak.

I run into what I find to be the most irritating piece of the event at Germany’s Klosterfelde Gallery.  It is an installation by German “lecture” artist John Bock.  It is a found object/video installation.  It consists of a huge, stuffed patchwork figure with all the definition of a sock person.  It leans in a corner; surrounded by, and covered with, the type of junk you throw in your driveway while cleaning the garage.  There are two small video screens playing something totally uninteresting in the figures’ legs.  The artist seems to hold any evidence of ability in contempt.  Although I see plenty of high-level work, it is too spotty.  I leave Basel a bit let down.  I expected so much more.

Dec. 7, 9:00 p.m.:  We head to Art Basel’s Art Positions, located in 20 shipping containers on the beach.  This venue is where there is supposed to be exciting work by emerging artists.  It turns out, with maybe one or two exceptions, to be a large mess of poorly executed conceptual or craft based installations.  It is embarrassing.  One container seems to contain no art at all, just some damaged plywood and a crudely painted black plywood triangle leaning in a corner.  I’m sure the artist has a large body of rhetoric to legitimize it.  I think of how superior most of the University of Tennessee degree thesis exhibitions are.

Dec. 8, 2:00 p.m.:  It is time to check out Pulse Miami and Geisai Miami, a juried fair that gives artists without gallery representation exhibition access.  After the letdown I felt at Basel, I’m apprehensive.  Two steps into the door, and I’m swept away.  I’m surrounded by booth after booth of terrific art.  It is all variously dynamic, witty, gorgeous, edgy, gritty and skillfully executed.  There are no pretentious airs and absurd hype.  There doesn’t need to be; almost everything here, at one of the top two “secondary” fairs, is pure substance.  I wonder if this is just my bias.  I poll my companions and anyone else I talk to at Pulse.  They all back up my reaction.  I spend hours walking around in a state of indulgent distraction.  As an artist, I’m inspired.  The use of media is incredible, especially new media, such as video, interactive screens with video based tracking systems, and digital animation.

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung’s political videos at New York’s POSTMASTERS Gallery are a blend of bright, cheap Asian magazine advertising design and classic Monty Python animation.  The technique is flawless, the humor brutally hilarious.  At Catherine Clark Gallery of Los Angeles, Andy Diaz Hope has tiled his photography inside rows of medicinal gelatin capsules.  From a distance, it appears to be a photograph projected on a textured surface, but on close inspection, each tiny capsule has a rolled segment of the larger photograph encased in it.

Galleri Faurschou of Copenhagen has a neon light and etched mirror installation by Erik Frandsen that fills its entire booth.  The light, a spaghetti ball of multi-color neon tubes, is suspended in the center of the booth, reflecting on the rows of mirrors engraved with glass soda bottles.  Chicago’s Carl Hammer Gallery displayed the work of Marc Dennis, a hyperrealist who usually works with bugs and plants.  The large oil at the entrance of their booth seemed to have been inspired by Chaim Soutine’s paintings of hanging beef carcasses.  Dennis’ version loses the gory feeling of the earlier artist’s work and looks slick and sensuous.

Sleek, controlled and luminous surfaces seem to dominate the work at Pulse, whether it is a seven-foot-tall, retro-shaped wooden television painted by Ma Jun with traditional Chinese porcelain decorative motives, or Pepe Mars’ colorful mixed media sculptures of primitive creatures.

The portraiture also follows in this same trend.  The collaborative team of Asgar/Gabriel, based in Austria, use near-neon colors in its large-scale, idealized portraits of contemporary youth.  The blurred backgrounds suggest both the depth of field employed by photo-realists and commercial airbrushing.  Fahamu Pecou, an Atlanta-based artist, is showing part of his extensive series of hip-hop stylized self portraits showing himself posturing on the covers of all the world’s leading art magazines.  Basing the series on the concepts of media propaganda and marketing, his acrylic paint surfaces retain the translucent brightness one finds on high-gloss magazine paper stock.

We finish up the fair by playing with Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive video screens.  The camera mounted inside the top of the screen tracks whomever walks in front of it.  The screen records your moving image in what looks to be even lower than eight-bit resolution.  The image then cycles rapidly through progressively higher resolution as you stand still to watch it.  We leave Pulse deeply satisfied.

Dec. 9, 10:00 a.m.:  After two days of foot-mutilating gallery crawling, I realize I’ve just touched the surface of what this annual event offers. I’ve missed Flow, Scope, Red Dot, Design, Photo, Aqua, Aipad, Art Now, Bridge… should I go on?  And if it isn’t altogether obvious, Pulse is the winner in my little Basel/Pulse competition.  The underdog won simply by not playing trendy games and by only showing accomplished 21st century art.  I think that was the best revelation – that the work commonly being produced now has a level of energy, skill, intelligence and dynamics great enough to make its counterparts from a century ago appear a bit drab.  Perhaps we have entered another Renaissance.