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From We’ll Make a Lover of You. Painting by Sas Christian.
The
Art Swarm
By Omar Sommereyns
Navigating through the panoply of events spawned from the Basel animal that has swept through town every year since 2002 will be quite a test in the art of discernment. It’s all about choices — and wise ones at that. There is, of course, the requisite visit to the Convention Center to browse through the hallowed booths of the fairs’ reigning Queen Bee — Art Basel Miami Beach — and see what all the buzz is about. Yet, throughout this frenzied week, venues of all shapes and forms have set up camp to showcase generous second helpings of artwork. In fact, there are more of what we shall call “alternative events” this year than any other, which can make the art viewing process rather overwhelming. But you can solve that with a bit of shrewd planning. Good readers, it is now a swell time to celebrate. Art Basel Week is here. Art and cultural events abound during the day, debauched parties at night and, well, it is the damn time in Miami when the sophisticates take over the philistines.
--------- Of the several alternative fairs vying for attention on both the mainland and the Beach, -scope Miami, now in its fifth year, seems the most promising, especially since the fair has decided to branch out from its more intimate confines at the Townhouse Hotel and pursue bolder curatorial ambitions.
“We wanted to show people that we do something a lot different than other fairs,” says Alexis Hubshman, -scope’s founder. “The hotel aspect was our incubator, but we simply outgrew it. One of the great things about it was that it gave viewers that sense of comfort, where you could just walk into any of the rooms and relate, spend time with the artists, the galleries, kind of like being in the same life raft as everyone. But, you know, three or four years later, my galleries are growing, and really that intimacy got claustrophobic. We couldn’t work on the scale that we wanted.”
Rejecting the notion of a banal, collector-geared art bazaar, the idea, Hubshman continues, was to create a venue that would really distinguish itself and provide an appealing, even enchanting, experience for the viewer. Hence, -scope is treated as a welcoming art pavilion this year, housed in a 45,000-square-foot tent space in Wynwood’s Roberto Clemente Park and fronted by a monumental entrance of 24 stacked shipping containers creating a castle-like effect. As viewers enter, they will be greeted by Augustina Woodgate’s Where the Wild Things Grow, a fanciful portal into the fair of oversized glades of grass (up to six feet high).
“We want to break down the idea of a fair geared toward the jaded collector — and god bless him because he keeps me in business — instead to create an experience that is memorable for the viewer, one that brings you back to that childlike state of bliss and wonder.”
Another compelling facet of the fair is the 25,000-square-foot outdoor sculpture park, featuring, as its centerpiece, the Sanchez Brothers’ massive, crushed Greyhound bus, in which holographic videos of various people, ostensibly the passengers, reflect on death or near-death encounters.
Behind the would-be maestros looms a 36-foot-wide, 16-foot-high curved sheet rock coliseum created by artist Tomas Rivas.
There are several interesting galleries with booths at –scope this year, including New York’s Jack the Pelican and 31GRAND, Shanghai’s Gallery 55, London’s Charlie Smith, and Miami’s Spinello Gallery, but most enticing are the ways in which this fair is attempting to break from the mold.
“We want to give artists and independent curators an opportunity, and that’s what I’m most proud of,” Hubshman says. “We’re not sure where we can be yet, but we always want to explore and push the boundaries of the art fair grid.”
Given its relevance and its past success in New York, Brussels, Cologne and Paris, the Digital & Video Art (DiVA) container village on Ocean Drive is another fair worth a look-through this year. Twenty-four shipping containers will be on display, each hosting video work by artists from a certain gallery. The gallery selection runs the international gamut, from New York’s Art Moving Project to the Hoet Bekaert Gallery in Gent (Belgium) and G-Module in Paris to the Chi-Wen Gallery in Taipei.
Previously, DiVA has exhibited its digital and video work in hotels; hence the container context is of particular interest here.
“We are all very excited by the project,” comments Thierry Alet, the fair’s director. “It allows us to break from the hotel format, and be on Miami Beach [rather than in Wynwood or the Design District], echo in a singular way the BIG guy project [the Art Basel Miami Beach Positions containers] and present video art in a setting that allows the gallery to completely control the environment – that is, sound and light.” Alet says DiVA’s main criteria in selecting artists and galleries for the fair were “quality and dedication” in the field, which is expanding rapidly as the range of possibilities in video and digital media gets wider (see the equipment boom – iPod, cell phones, video games, web-streaming, animation software). The only Miami gallery with a container at the DiVA fair – Damien B. Contemporary Art Center – will showcase work by French artist m lafille and local Aki Shiroza, the latter will display, among other pieces, his Center of the Universe, a digital video that needs to be perceived through the drink-hole of a Heineken beer bottle – its “spirit,” so to speak.
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For those anticipating what Matthew Barney’s next big vision is, Alison Chernick’s No Restraint journeys to Japan to document Barney and collaborator/wife Björk in their creation of Drawing Restraint 9, a fantastical tale of two Occidental guests meeting on the deck of a whaling ship filled with a colossal mold of hot petroleum jelly. As it gradually begins to cool, the ship’s passengers perform a series of rituals, donning costumes of skin, fur and bone inspired by traditional Shinto wedding dress. “After directing a documentary on artist Jeff Koons, I was intrigued with capturing the process of making work, from inception through execution,” Chernick, who previously directed The Jeff Koons Show, writes in her director’s statement. “When Matthew Barney walked me through his storyboards for his next art film, which would take place on a Japanese whaling vessel off the coast of Nagasaki, I knew that this process would be as interesting as its result…. My intention was to reveal the essence of his work while allowing the viewer to go with him on this journey to Japan.”
During a recent interview, Chernick pointed out the challenges she faced working through the rigors of different cultures, especially since she was filming on a big whaling vessel where young Japanese men were working while an American artist poured 40,000 pounds of petroleum jelly onto its deck. “The formality of Japanese culture was a challenge when it came to documentary production, where you never know exactly what you need to be prepared for,” she says. “Each day had a certain amount of variables and we were constantly balancing our needs with our boundaries. Once we overstep, we lose the game. I came pretty close on several occasions.”
Barney unleashes a new set of iconography in Drawing Restraint 9 and, thanks to the access provided into his creative approach, insight gleaned from Chernick’s film could also possibly demystify the hauntingly beautiful, yet somewhat abstruse imagery in The Cremaster Cycle.
“No Restraint does go into The Cremaster Cycle, but only in the sense of it relating to his work as a whole, his vision, and how the Drawing Restraint series and Cremaster connect, which they do, very much so,” says Chernick. “[Barney’s] creative process is exactly that – a process. As is the case with most artists, it’s amorphous and evolving.”
Between the openings at all the Wynwood galleries and independent exhibits going on throughout the city, there will be an abundance of choices to make when it comes to going to non-fair shows. So we suggest you try some off-kilter options. Just for kicks. You might see something new.
Ordinary supermarket carts may not initially appear as distinctive art pieces, yet Faktura Gallery’s second annual Pimp My Kart showcase and run cleverly flips the script, transfiguring these quotidian objects into inventive, bona fide sculptures, each undergoing a peculiar metamorphosis as handled by the individual artist’s touch.
Gallery owner/local artist Jacquelyn Jackson Johnston has invited more than 30 artists to participate this year, including Christian Alexander, Jacqi Brown, Julie Kahn, Johnny Robles, Angela Helen Roell, Susanne Bifano and Susan Natasha Gonzalez, Stian Roenning, Damian Rojo and Kiki Valdes.
For instance, we’ve got Bifano and Gonzalez making an inflatable house that can be unloaded from their cart, inflated and walked through. Then there’s artist Jacqi Brown (remember “The Dope Art Dealer,” published Sept. 14?) who is building a cart fused with a three-wheeled bicycle; the piece boasts a custom paint job, a “dope art” vestibule and even a chrome spinner.
“I was inspired by the creativity of many homeless people as displayed in their use of shopping carts, either as mobile janitor units, recycling bins, or even storage and sleep units,” Johnston says.
A bit of context is needed here in order to fully ascribe the impetus for such a project. Johnston founded her gallery in Little Haiti, on a gritty warehouse-lined road, wholly set apart from the scene in Wynwood or the tawdry, clean-cut spaces in the Design District. Here, the city’s downtrodden and the homeless crackheads roam around, occasionally popping into the gallery for a fill from the keg at an opening or posing as parking “security guards” and soliciting tips in exchange for a watchful eye. Um, yeah.
So, it would only be natural for Johnston to gather inspiration from her surroundings. But take note, this isn’t simply an art show meant to impress the discerning Art Basel crowd. Rather, Pimp My Kart is all about giving artists the opportunity to work with an unusual medium in complete creative freedom and flick off the haughty art establishment galloping away on its high horse. Besides the opening party where all the installations will be on view, the artists will also be riding their carts throughout the city, on the mainland and on the Beach.
“An important element for me is to give something back to the inspiration of the art,” Johnston emphasizes. “All too often we take inspiration, and take and take, but never give anything back to our ‘muse,’ if you will.... All the proceeds will go to the Community Partnership for the Homeless, and our widespread presence will hopefully generate more awareness and interest in helping the homelessness situation in Miami year-round.
“It is very important for me to separate Faktura from the overly commercial nature of Basel, to demonstrate our artists' commitment to community service and outreach through artistic production,” Johnston adds.
Over on the Beach, We’ll Make a Lover of You at the ArtCenter/South Florida is another show that’s been garnering much anticipation in the months leading up to Basel Week. Curator and local artist Francesco LoCastro has been organizing eye-popping Lowbrow art shows for several years now – including his past Parallel Universe series — and this newest endeavor seems like a prime culmination feature the genre’s top creators (Sas Christian, Shepard Fairey, Doze Green, Todd Schorr, Gary Baseman, Robert Williams and more).
Three reputable galleries are presenting this exhibit — Merry Karnowsky from Los Angeles, Jonathan LeVine from New York and the Shooting Gallery from San Francisco. The opening event is Friday evening. Additionally, LoCastro says this is, arguably, the first fully-Lowbrow show that’s been sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
“Lowbrow,” in its nature, is an equivocal term. Yes, it does generally refer to artwork that’s been influenced in one way or another by comix, Surrealism, Pop Art, punk rock, hot rods and, most recently, graffiti and street art. But it’s also an unmistakable sensibility and one that was originally shunned by the art world bigwigs.
“I think that it’s a term used for anything that starts in the underground,” LoCastro says. “But it’s definitely outgrown that. Lowbrow work’s being shown in museums all over the country now. And anyway, what’s considered lowbrow and highbrow is up to the critics and the art world. In the end, it was just a way to make people understand that this was something different…. But the comparison has always been made by the people on the outside, people who usually aren’t familiar with the work.” What’s key here is that the Lowbrow aesthetic relates to a whole generation of people on a level that other artwork simply can’t.
“Lowbrow is merging into the general art market in a pace that I never expected,” LoCastro adds. “More and more people are getting into it, bigger collectors and galleries are becoming interested, and some of the artists have shown in museums all over the country and in Europe. But even more, there’s been incredible support from the younger underground kids, almost like MTV doesn’t appeal to them anymore and they’ve found something else they can idolize. They might not be able to afford the work, but they’ll buy the magazines, go to the shows, get the posters.… They’re growing up and believing in it as a true art form. In some way, shape or form, this movement will infiltrate the art world all the way to the top.” See our Basel listings for information regarding the aforementioned events.
Comments? E-mail omar@miamisunpost.com. |
