ART FAIR RETREAT AND NONE TOO SOON
Art Basel and Frieze have been bailed out, nationalized and are presently under federal administration. Not so far fetched in a world that was up in arms when Hugo Chavez nationalized a country club, yet embraced the governmental rescue of Goldman Sachs. In real life, the Swiss government subsidized the participation of eight galleries at Frieze this year. Welcome to the post-economy economy, worse than the end of history and direr than the death of painting. Despite some denial, today’s art marketplace is in a recession. Thankfully this could spell the end of economics-ism, the movement in which new art cost a fortune and which has fortune as its subject.
The booming times brought us many art fairs, which only seemed to breed more fairs. Was this a good thing? For a dealer it’s no different from spreading one’s wares on a blanket on St. Marks Place, which is what all of us may be reduced to shortly. The rough times we are in (this fact no longer up for debate), which is sure to be a long wade, will herald a vastly changing dynamic in fairs with many unfolding stories yet to come. In my circumstances the tales started well before the onset of recession.
My relationship with Frieze, to single out one prominent fair, has been contentious: I have written unflattering articles about the too-cool-for-school attitude they display, evidenced by a quote from one of its directors saying that the hardest work was deciding whom not to invite. My never getting in over the past 5 years since moving to the UK did nothing to endear us to each other. Fatefully, one night I was seated next to the wife of the director and proceeded to launch a wine-fueled tirade that Frieze is not the Tate and its principal far from Nicholas Serota, despite his beliefs that the fair is akin to an institution. My therapist suggested an apology letter; I guess truth is no defense.
My history with fairs includes being thrown out of the Armory and Basel for various indiscretions, some deserved and others less so. One year at Basel Miami I was asked to participate with an architectural intervention, so I commissioned Vito Acconci to create a crisscross framework upon which to hang Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik, Ed Ruscha, and Acconci himself (his photos, that is). Vito fabricated igloo-shaped armatures to serve as lattice and maze to wend around. Word spread that we were trying to sabotage the traffic flow and disrupt the fair (an absurd notion, as I was after sales as much as anyone) until a Viennese dealer on the selection committee came running round, arms flailing, screaming disapproval. The following year Basel Miami went on without me.
A few years ago at the Armory show—which was meant to be strictly for primary market material, but no longer—I installed a booth with historic Mary Heilmanns, Ross Bleckner’s birds and killer Karen Kilminiks. Though sold out, I was also forced out. Was it a long-time-ago brief fling with one of the committee members or the fact that I forgot to bring my primary pieces last time around?
A few years after Acconci-gate, I was allowed back to Basel Miami, but only in the shipping container section (low on the totem pole in fair hierarchy). I elected to forego the allotted container and build my own, designed by Zaha Hadid. The problem was the piece entailed the installation of 50,000 LED lights and was nowhere near completion at the fair’s opening; the jumpsuit-clad electricians might have been mistaken for performance art, but the booth could not be entered. Not a wise approach for selling the Hadid sculptures within.
At the last Design Art Basel fair in Switzerland I suffered a bad reaction to blood pressure medication while spieling to collectors and nearly fainted. The fleeting thought was the last thing I’d see prior to sudden death would be a series of overpriced design objects—which I had commissioned. After the brief trip to the Basel Emergency Room and the normal EKG I returned to the fair to tend to my objects.
During Design Art Basel (fair names are another topic for discussion at a later date) dealers and collectors were tripping over each other trying to ingratiate themselves to Brad and Roman. Is that what we have been reduced to? It sounds like a porn-producing team rather than the saviors of the art market.
Is the faltering economy the conclusion to the endless appetite for fairs? The need to find fairs that need you will become a much easier process due to the full-court financial press we are all now squeezed in. And with that the exorbitant participation fees and artificially inflated hotel rates will come under pressure—something I recently experienced by stalling to commit to a fair until just prior to the opening, resulting in lower rates. Who said procrastination is a bad habit?
As the stock market approaches zero and the discussion has shifted from recession to depression the laptops at frieze were frequently tuned into finance sites monitoring the DOW and the FTSE rather than ARTINFO.COM Beuys famously said “Everyone is an artist”; today, everyone is an economist. After the usual lies were told to the press about the extent of sales at the latest spate of fairs (the art world’s equivalent of original sin) the lights went out for the last hour of Design Art London, don’t ask, but one of the only one’s that will still have me, a fitting end. One upside to the bloodbath: the flop of the flipper.
Epilogue (Questions by Carol Kino for an upcoming Art in America article:
How galleries are retooling the way they are doing business at art fairs? I think the main thing galleries are bringing to fairs nowadays are lower expectations.
The type of booths they install? Galleries are bringing smaller, more portable works to cut on shipping which one cannot imagine the costs of, and how expenses mount for installation help. Just to add a socket or an extra lighting fixture is outrageously overpriced, with the fair management's false pretext of the multiplicity of unions involved.
The type of work they bring? The works are more conservative, sell-able, and sometimes more happy and colorful.
Whether they do a curated show, a solo show, etc.? Solo shows will increase markedly as galleries attempt to focus, simplify and bring concise groupings of affordable works together.
Or how they are not retooling but just sticking with the same thing--it could go either way? Sticking to the same thing is no longer an option for anyone, as the recent past in the art market and world of fairs will in all probability not repeat itself for close to a decade, if ever; these are fundamentally and drastically shifting times when unbridled speculation and hyper price inflation that spurred absurd jostling for art is practically as dead as Detroit.
And comments about your gallery? We are giving very serious consideration to taking a year's sabbatical from fairs altogether as much as for the down business prospects as for a personal protest against the ever increasing absurd fees attached that have been bordering on greedy. From the booths and associative costs to shipping, and hotels. Enough is enough.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
NOTHING BUT TIME (Paul Thek, MIT Press, Feb 2009)
The newspaper works of Paul Thek, which began in earnest in late 1960’s and continued unabated until his death in 1988, had a narrative arc defined by an idiosyncratic expression of hope and beauty, and ended in a more ambiguous state of disillusionment. They are narrative parables sharing as much with literature, history and religion as with the history of art. The early newspaper works at times resemble visceral children’s illustrations depicting Thek’s inimitable ideals of happiness and love with an eternal quality above and apart from the material world. Though he exhorted to “Fall in love with your life” in note pad musings, within the same page of unbridled optimism were signs of tragedy and torment, “We’re all crying children together”.1
Though the newspaper works appeared random and at times resembled writing more than drawing, as a whole they constituted a visual diary and travelogue. There was an ascetic quality to the systematic way in which Thek recorded his life continually over the entire course of his career. You can practically hear the silence, the meditative nature of the process of the making of the newspaper works but they are also imbued with the quality of sheet music that reverberates off the page. In Thek’s work no subject evaded his mockery, mirth and empathy, a touch that managed to be both cynical and idealistic. Like fully formed pages from an oversized sketchbook, the newspaper works could appear classical, cartoonish, or like thought-bubbles, there was no telling. There were grapes on vines, potatoes, seascapes, landscapes, garden dwarfs, snakes, dinosaurs, hammers and sickles, and the Statute of Liberty—the whimsical and the lighthearted, but there was always more to be read. They offered an uncensored snapshot of Thek’s mind’s eye. These works were possessed of a many layered, philosophical, and ageless conceptual delicacy—a traditional conception of beauty in the hopeful, transcendent sense of the word. Not indulgent, self-congratulatory, or clichéd but celebratory and all embracing. On-its-sleeve emotional, and romantic nevertheless.
The spirit of Thek’s newspaper works encapsulated a hippy disregard and disdain for the establishment—subverting and undermining history and authorship—while in effect rewriting the news. The works were defined by a sense of utility in their making, by way of sparse and reduced means, while yielding immense fruits from these daily labors. History, religion, and politics of the day were replaced with Thek’s notion of a more tolerant Catholicism of his own devices. These paintings obliterated history while simultaneously creating it and traversed over the daily account of current affairs. Thek didn’t re-cite history, the canonized version or his own, but erased it like Rauschenberg’s notorious vandalism of a de Kooning drawing. He then added aesthetically and conceptually to the end product of Rauschenberg’s de Kooning gesture atop the everyday chatter of the International Herald Tribune. What became a routine for Thek was in a sense passive (repetitive markings on blotted-out newsprint) and concurrently, a Hegelian overtaking of the reportages on the condition of the world, ingesting the pulp in the process. In the many variants of his works, Thek foresaw the death of the hippy and the innocence it engendered at the hands of inexorable technological and industrial progress. Or what was perceived as progress. These newspaper artworks defaced the currency of the times, prior to the onset of the worldwide gaggle of Googlers, when newspapers held greater sway in the conveyance of news and information. Thek foresaw the condition of humanity in retreat in the face of the forward march of technology. What passes for life today largely appears on a glass screen.
Society has always devoured current events, thirsting for knowledge of the world around us; in turn, Thek consumed the news itself, marking his time and space with little concrete poems, in effect soiling the official account of the daily news like a housetrained dog. Creating lasting newspaper art was in contravention to the inherent instability, and valueless-ness of a given newspaper page. The disposable, good-for-a-day shelf life of newspapers was transformed into something immortal and everlasting, but surely the non-archival tendencies of his medium of choice were not lost on Thek. Old newspapers yellow and turn to dust over time unless measures are taken to preserve them, such as mounting on a fixed surface. Yet one slice of painted newspaper sandwiched between two pieces of Plexiglas was Theks favored method for serving them to the public. The preceding expresses the ever self-contradicting and self-negating nature of the artist himself: this was painting as wasting asset, the lifespan of the art slipping away unless curative action taken. Like the meat works, the newspaper paintings had decay imbedded, plain to the eye and touch. Like the meat works, the newspaper works symbolized fragility, vulnerability, and fallibility of the body.
By the late 1960’s Thek was abroad much of the time, hence the use of international papers with a ready supply at hand, but this could also be said to indicate yearning for what was left behind, a feeling of being homesick, and maintaining ties, a link, with the States. Thek’s self-effacing paintings might also have been an attempt to combat his absence from an America moving along without him. Missing from the New York-centric scene for so long without adequate representation in the US throughout the years, Thek was for all purposes presumed dead. How it must have eaten at him. In a way he was symbolically reinserting himself back into the picture. By using newspapers, Thek made a custom of staying abreast, keeping track, and crossing-off the passing days on a calendar. The habit of continuously working on newsprint, the familiar connotation of the newspaper—something we do first thing every day, has the characteristics of an absolution, a ritual—a discipline which is the byproduct of the hand and a confirmation of a daily work ethic.
These paintings also involved chance, in as much as the contents of a given newspaper page was never uniform or predictable and at times resembled games and brainteasers in the manner of Duchamp, employing wordplays and backwards text. Some were rendered as technical tour de forces, while others appeared crude and purposefully raw, reversing the old master level of skill he effortlessly displayed, flaunting built-in contradictions. Opposite a blank canvas, the newspaper paintings functioned as records contrasting the public and private; each work contained an unfolding social realism coupled with the personal memoir of a nearly solitary life. Entrenched in the seemingly arbitrary was the inevitability of the day-to-day goings on in the world. Thek accomplished the consummate high wire act, a feat as near impossible as improbable, of creating something conceptual and dazzling in a form practically invisible—shorn pages of a daily newspaper.
Braque and Picasso early on adapted the use of newspaper in paintings and collages cognizant of the multiple meanings implicit in such texts, but with Thek there was no collage, rather the use of the newspaper as a conceptual girder, a structure upon which to underpin the image with a built-in obsolescence like a disposable lighter. Robert Smithson’s notion of entropy depicted inherent disorder in various systems and entailed intervening in the natural landscape with human means of obstruction, like a slow glue pour in a strip mine, or shards of mirror deposited amongst a pile of boulders in a quarry. Decay, ephemera, and deterioration have long been components of Thek’s works from the meat to the scatter installations, not to mention the bulk of work abandoned through unpaid storage bills, museum neglect and nonfeasance on the part of the artist. For Thek there was a negation, exhaustion in the demanding, Judeo-Christian work ethic he firmly practiced until the end of his life.
One can imagine a detente with Warhol in which the means of mechanical reproduction were willfully laid down, in place of the reintroduction of the movement of the artist’s hand along the surface of a given page, a subject (renderings of his own pencil or brush-in-hand) frequently visited upon by Thek. The creations of Thek were on a prodigious scale, almost equal to the repetitive output of the screenprint presses of the times and touched upon some of the same Warholian issues of all manner of consumption and political folly. The Brillo Box sculpture Thek obtained and used to house his chunk of meat underscored his ambivalence and awe at the icon of easy art, and his attempt to shove some vitality and humanity back into the box.
Richard Long marks time by taking long walks, accumulating rocks and finally arranging them in patterns. Formally, a Thek newspaper painting was a simple geometric picture plane, a rectangle of pigment floating within the rectangle of the printed page, in the spirit of Jasper Johns saying to take an object, do something to it and do something else. Thek preserved and saw beauty in the mundane, fleeting character of the everyday by painting vignettes over the daily paper, with fragments of the news peeking through around the edges of the compositions. In doing so, he cast a veil over the main import of current events, partially obliterating and obscuring them, but always left a fleeting peep. He didn’t so much as kill-off the original text and image as damage it. Only a mist of the record of the time remained.
On Kawara repeatedly makes uniformly formatted paintings of a given day, date and year that compress a span of 24 hours to its most elemental form, with little or no visual dynamic. Thek went further when he wedded the conceptual effects of time to beauty. And he was the rare possessor of the painstakingly learned technical acumen to bring it off; this is something as uncommon today as it was at the onset of conceptualism. Franz West has likewise draped newspapers over furniture and installations, anchoring his works in the here and now: in West’s sculptures we are sitting on history, in Thek’s paintings we are unwittingly surfing over it while savoring the delight of a handmade image. Resembling the role of newspapers in earnestly spreading a message, Thek felt compelled to passionately communicate through his efforts.
Rather than refer to each and every artist that employed press as platform, suffice it to say that Thek’s two-dimensional dioramas were like looking through a keyhole into his personal world of imagination and concerns couched in the moment in which they were completed. Thek depicted Rembrandt in his notebooks, referenced Van Gogh in his writings, and employed the colors and brushwork of Monet. By using newspaper as palette and canvas, Thek made painting instantly historical, affixing himself to his era like a leach or parasite, physically inserting himself into advertising, politics, business and sport—and art. His means of expression were lowly and humble and readily available on every street corner at every minute of the day; the newspaper works were unassuming and scruffy like Thek himself and echoed the chore-like manner in which he took to chronicling his life. These pieces could be somewhat abject, while retaining the original function of explicating current events and occurrences beyond our immediate grasp. A delicate, feeble resource in the hierarchy of artistic media, newspaper could be seen as inferior not only to canvas but to drawing paper as well; but weakness was something valued by Thek, something in which he found strength and solace.
When Thek wasn’t painting on newspapers he was hanging them and discarding them in crumpled piles throughout the freewheeling, biblical and politically themed, room-scaled installations he constructed. They were his portable clocks to root things, freeze things in time. By choosing to save, preserve and utilize lowly newspapers, Thek was spinning garbage into gold (aesthetically, anyway) while stopping time in amber. Thek recycled before recycling. By the1980’s the city was going through an economic explosion of art, ready money and glamour. Thek was left out of this renaissance. There was cocaine snowing from the ceiling of Studio 54 literally and figuratively, and all was flash and glitter. This did not serve the politically ambitious but physically modest works of Thek very well. He responded by purposefully making work he himself termed bad painting to speak in the vernacular of 1980’s style painting (though still unassuming in scale), yet concurrently to critique what he saw as a well of mediocrity.
With the infamous, probing list of questions he required of his Cooper Union classes in the early 80’s, taught for income, Thek took jabs at smugness, grandiosity, and pretension with interrogations on money and waste, and other largely personal inquires. These queries put to his students bordered on trespass, but Thek was not concerned with superficial meanings in his own life and work, nor in others.
Concurrently, AIDS in New York in the early 1980’s was like an untold scourge claiming the lives of many and especially hitting hard the creative fields. Sexual mores came under reassessment to an extent previously unknown and homosexuals were the human face of a contagious, incurable plague, inciting fear and further prejudice. It is hard to remember a time when such a diagnosis meant invariably imminent death. During the same period the prices of a Julian Schnabel painting the size of a house went from a few thousand to a hundred thousand virtually overnight, such was the contrasting frivolity of the art world. All the while Thek was creating small drawings and paintings on paper and board of a throwaway sensibility. Rooftop sketches, landscapes, fruits and vegetables, still lifes from a time past out of touch with the inflated gesture of big for the sake of big. This was a market rife with hype and hyperbole of talent (not dissimilar the 00’s) from the likes of the Italian trio then taking New York by storm, the three C’s: Sandro Chia, Francisco Clemente, and Enzo Cucchi. In the Spring of 1985 Clemente alone had a triple venue show, embraced by collectors and critics alike, at Leo Castelli, Mary Boone and Sperone Westwater. What looked like an ad hoc flourish on a sheet of newspaper by Thek must have appeared to pale, if register at all, on anyone’s radar by way of comparison. Though clear now from the 1980’s that volume would not replace content, at the time, Paul Thek was cast aside from the glamorization and expansion of the art market, and the rollicking community that inevitably adhered to it.
Now, artists barely gaining their footing are embraced by market and museums alike, directly out of university studios. Things eschewed by Thek during his lifetime such as gratuitous shock, market cultivation, and self-branding (without trace of poetry or irony) are among the commercial stratagems on the road to approbation and material wealth. Working in a supermarket and cleaning hospital rooms at what should have been an apex of his career and in the latter part of his life for most would seem demoralizing, but for Thek was a refuge. Thek’s career was a mature, slow burn of incremental strides, but still largely overlooked in the USA. Paul Thek would have been 75 years old in 2008 (b. 1933, Brooklyn, New York) yet without a major US museum retrospective to date, though debate lingers at a few institutions. Thek’s was a life of wanting and suffering in the name of a God that for Thek meant art, creativity and above all else, productiveness. Moving back to New York in late 1970’s left Thek out of touch, out of sight and out of the minds of those who made up the New York art scene. This left him demoralized and unable to work for a brief period, pained by a crisis of meaning in his art.
In the late works, the subject matter of the newspaper paintings shifted possibly in relation to Thek’s declining health, physical and mental, and lack of professional acceptance. The full onset of AIDS and the resultant deterioration of mind and body contributed to a content shift in the late works to a more subdued, internalized, less defined state of things. There is the muddy haze of the 1981 abstraction “Untitled (Little Yellow Pitchfork)” circa 1981 featuring a small pitchfork lost in a mucky field of brown, the tool of hapless farmer and devil alike. From the same period is “Untitled (Brick Wall) from 1982 that resembles a familiar pastiche of a modernist, geometric abstraction. There was a simultaneous vein that referenced dejection, isolation, and bitterness festering in Thek noticeable in works that struck out via subtle jibes and attacks. A 1987 painting on board entitled “An Erotics of Art” was no more than an infantile, fleshy-colored mess with badly drawn female parts, while the newspaper work “The Face of God” from 1988, consisted of a crudely drawn face of a clock: is it a cruel, cold god reduced to nothing but finite, predetermined time? Offsetting his need to connect with others through his work, Thek harbored intent to abdicate, to remove himself. The earlier optimism and wide-eyed enthusiasm were replaced by doom and gloom.
Thek was disturbed by what appeared like collusion and corruption on the part of the art world to purposefully reject him; he felt excluded from a club of his peers and the accompanying whirlwind around them that ensured success and acclaim. This all must have been experienced as a tragic fall from grace from the early acceptance of his noted Technological Reliquary series. Throughout it all, Thek never completely lost his sense of hope that someday he would be recognized, but he came to the conclusion that someday would in all probability be posthumous. In general, Thek’s work had the quality of outsider art, which in a sense it was, due to its utter neglect during his lifetime. For Thek, work was all there ever was: it was emboldening and above all, holy, but for Thek work was never fully calm, which wrought uneasiness and anxiety throughout his life, and resulted in an indeterminate and unfulfilled journey.
Near the end, Thek purposefully abandoned the refinement and representational insight of his earlier works reflecting his physical and emotional state, afflicted by an incurable, stigmatized disease and career neglect in his homeland. In the last newspaper works, gone are the childlike exuberance and celebration of nature, replaced by a duller form of abstractionism, signifying loss of love, innocence, and life. His version of Yankee enthusiasm, cheerfulness and energy, which remained throughout his sojourn in Europe, were hardheartedly quelled. After a shortened but fertile lifetime of unstoppable invention, Thek became a curmudgeon scarred by disregard and inattention. Even though he was cut down prematurely, Thek still managed to produce astounding, prescient and unparalleled work in every conceivable medium. The breadth of the newspaper works alone reflect a military discipline and self-control hardly seen during the time, and rarely so today. Thek’s was a restless and relentless pursuit only now being taken seriously into consideration in relation to art before and after. Like Tonio Kroger, Thek resembled the character in the novella by Thomas Mann, with his nose firmly and forlornly pressed against the wrong side of the window of a big party where everyone is frolicking, singing, dancing (and making more money), but during his lifetime, he would always remain on the outside, uninvited.
“I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at the moment.”2 Nothing but time can suggest a metaphysical expanse, a death sentence, or both. In Thek’s case, hopefully the passage of time will ameliorate the shameful lack of recognition for his deserved output.
Though the newspaper works appeared random and at times resembled writing more than drawing, as a whole they constituted a visual diary and travelogue. There was an ascetic quality to the systematic way in which Thek recorded his life continually over the entire course of his career. You can practically hear the silence, the meditative nature of the process of the making of the newspaper works but they are also imbued with the quality of sheet music that reverberates off the page. In Thek’s work no subject evaded his mockery, mirth and empathy, a touch that managed to be both cynical and idealistic. Like fully formed pages from an oversized sketchbook, the newspaper works could appear classical, cartoonish, or like thought-bubbles, there was no telling. There were grapes on vines, potatoes, seascapes, landscapes, garden dwarfs, snakes, dinosaurs, hammers and sickles, and the Statute of Liberty—the whimsical and the lighthearted, but there was always more to be read. They offered an uncensored snapshot of Thek’s mind’s eye. These works were possessed of a many layered, philosophical, and ageless conceptual delicacy—a traditional conception of beauty in the hopeful, transcendent sense of the word. Not indulgent, self-congratulatory, or clichéd but celebratory and all embracing. On-its-sleeve emotional, and romantic nevertheless.
The spirit of Thek’s newspaper works encapsulated a hippy disregard and disdain for the establishment—subverting and undermining history and authorship—while in effect rewriting the news. The works were defined by a sense of utility in their making, by way of sparse and reduced means, while yielding immense fruits from these daily labors. History, religion, and politics of the day were replaced with Thek’s notion of a more tolerant Catholicism of his own devices. These paintings obliterated history while simultaneously creating it and traversed over the daily account of current affairs. Thek didn’t re-cite history, the canonized version or his own, but erased it like Rauschenberg’s notorious vandalism of a de Kooning drawing. He then added aesthetically and conceptually to the end product of Rauschenberg’s de Kooning gesture atop the everyday chatter of the International Herald Tribune. What became a routine for Thek was in a sense passive (repetitive markings on blotted-out newsprint) and concurrently, a Hegelian overtaking of the reportages on the condition of the world, ingesting the pulp in the process. In the many variants of his works, Thek foresaw the death of the hippy and the innocence it engendered at the hands of inexorable technological and industrial progress. Or what was perceived as progress. These newspaper artworks defaced the currency of the times, prior to the onset of the worldwide gaggle of Googlers, when newspapers held greater sway in the conveyance of news and information. Thek foresaw the condition of humanity in retreat in the face of the forward march of technology. What passes for life today largely appears on a glass screen.
Society has always devoured current events, thirsting for knowledge of the world around us; in turn, Thek consumed the news itself, marking his time and space with little concrete poems, in effect soiling the official account of the daily news like a housetrained dog. Creating lasting newspaper art was in contravention to the inherent instability, and valueless-ness of a given newspaper page. The disposable, good-for-a-day shelf life of newspapers was transformed into something immortal and everlasting, but surely the non-archival tendencies of his medium of choice were not lost on Thek. Old newspapers yellow and turn to dust over time unless measures are taken to preserve them, such as mounting on a fixed surface. Yet one slice of painted newspaper sandwiched between two pieces of Plexiglas was Theks favored method for serving them to the public. The preceding expresses the ever self-contradicting and self-negating nature of the artist himself: this was painting as wasting asset, the lifespan of the art slipping away unless curative action taken. Like the meat works, the newspaper paintings had decay imbedded, plain to the eye and touch. Like the meat works, the newspaper works symbolized fragility, vulnerability, and fallibility of the body.
By the late 1960’s Thek was abroad much of the time, hence the use of international papers with a ready supply at hand, but this could also be said to indicate yearning for what was left behind, a feeling of being homesick, and maintaining ties, a link, with the States. Thek’s self-effacing paintings might also have been an attempt to combat his absence from an America moving along without him. Missing from the New York-centric scene for so long without adequate representation in the US throughout the years, Thek was for all purposes presumed dead. How it must have eaten at him. In a way he was symbolically reinserting himself back into the picture. By using newspapers, Thek made a custom of staying abreast, keeping track, and crossing-off the passing days on a calendar. The habit of continuously working on newsprint, the familiar connotation of the newspaper—something we do first thing every day, has the characteristics of an absolution, a ritual—a discipline which is the byproduct of the hand and a confirmation of a daily work ethic.
These paintings also involved chance, in as much as the contents of a given newspaper page was never uniform or predictable and at times resembled games and brainteasers in the manner of Duchamp, employing wordplays and backwards text. Some were rendered as technical tour de forces, while others appeared crude and purposefully raw, reversing the old master level of skill he effortlessly displayed, flaunting built-in contradictions. Opposite a blank canvas, the newspaper paintings functioned as records contrasting the public and private; each work contained an unfolding social realism coupled with the personal memoir of a nearly solitary life. Entrenched in the seemingly arbitrary was the inevitability of the day-to-day goings on in the world. Thek accomplished the consummate high wire act, a feat as near impossible as improbable, of creating something conceptual and dazzling in a form practically invisible—shorn pages of a daily newspaper.
Braque and Picasso early on adapted the use of newspaper in paintings and collages cognizant of the multiple meanings implicit in such texts, but with Thek there was no collage, rather the use of the newspaper as a conceptual girder, a structure upon which to underpin the image with a built-in obsolescence like a disposable lighter. Robert Smithson’s notion of entropy depicted inherent disorder in various systems and entailed intervening in the natural landscape with human means of obstruction, like a slow glue pour in a strip mine, or shards of mirror deposited amongst a pile of boulders in a quarry. Decay, ephemera, and deterioration have long been components of Thek’s works from the meat to the scatter installations, not to mention the bulk of work abandoned through unpaid storage bills, museum neglect and nonfeasance on the part of the artist. For Thek there was a negation, exhaustion in the demanding, Judeo-Christian work ethic he firmly practiced until the end of his life.
One can imagine a detente with Warhol in which the means of mechanical reproduction were willfully laid down, in place of the reintroduction of the movement of the artist’s hand along the surface of a given page, a subject (renderings of his own pencil or brush-in-hand) frequently visited upon by Thek. The creations of Thek were on a prodigious scale, almost equal to the repetitive output of the screenprint presses of the times and touched upon some of the same Warholian issues of all manner of consumption and political folly. The Brillo Box sculpture Thek obtained and used to house his chunk of meat underscored his ambivalence and awe at the icon of easy art, and his attempt to shove some vitality and humanity back into the box.
Richard Long marks time by taking long walks, accumulating rocks and finally arranging them in patterns. Formally, a Thek newspaper painting was a simple geometric picture plane, a rectangle of pigment floating within the rectangle of the printed page, in the spirit of Jasper Johns saying to take an object, do something to it and do something else. Thek preserved and saw beauty in the mundane, fleeting character of the everyday by painting vignettes over the daily paper, with fragments of the news peeking through around the edges of the compositions. In doing so, he cast a veil over the main import of current events, partially obliterating and obscuring them, but always left a fleeting peep. He didn’t so much as kill-off the original text and image as damage it. Only a mist of the record of the time remained.
On Kawara repeatedly makes uniformly formatted paintings of a given day, date and year that compress a span of 24 hours to its most elemental form, with little or no visual dynamic. Thek went further when he wedded the conceptual effects of time to beauty. And he was the rare possessor of the painstakingly learned technical acumen to bring it off; this is something as uncommon today as it was at the onset of conceptualism. Franz West has likewise draped newspapers over furniture and installations, anchoring his works in the here and now: in West’s sculptures we are sitting on history, in Thek’s paintings we are unwittingly surfing over it while savoring the delight of a handmade image. Resembling the role of newspapers in earnestly spreading a message, Thek felt compelled to passionately communicate through his efforts.
Rather than refer to each and every artist that employed press as platform, suffice it to say that Thek’s two-dimensional dioramas were like looking through a keyhole into his personal world of imagination and concerns couched in the moment in which they were completed. Thek depicted Rembrandt in his notebooks, referenced Van Gogh in his writings, and employed the colors and brushwork of Monet. By using newspaper as palette and canvas, Thek made painting instantly historical, affixing himself to his era like a leach or parasite, physically inserting himself into advertising, politics, business and sport—and art. His means of expression were lowly and humble and readily available on every street corner at every minute of the day; the newspaper works were unassuming and scruffy like Thek himself and echoed the chore-like manner in which he took to chronicling his life. These pieces could be somewhat abject, while retaining the original function of explicating current events and occurrences beyond our immediate grasp. A delicate, feeble resource in the hierarchy of artistic media, newspaper could be seen as inferior not only to canvas but to drawing paper as well; but weakness was something valued by Thek, something in which he found strength and solace.
When Thek wasn’t painting on newspapers he was hanging them and discarding them in crumpled piles throughout the freewheeling, biblical and politically themed, room-scaled installations he constructed. They were his portable clocks to root things, freeze things in time. By choosing to save, preserve and utilize lowly newspapers, Thek was spinning garbage into gold (aesthetically, anyway) while stopping time in amber. Thek recycled before recycling. By the1980’s the city was going through an economic explosion of art, ready money and glamour. Thek was left out of this renaissance. There was cocaine snowing from the ceiling of Studio 54 literally and figuratively, and all was flash and glitter. This did not serve the politically ambitious but physically modest works of Thek very well. He responded by purposefully making work he himself termed bad painting to speak in the vernacular of 1980’s style painting (though still unassuming in scale), yet concurrently to critique what he saw as a well of mediocrity.
With the infamous, probing list of questions he required of his Cooper Union classes in the early 80’s, taught for income, Thek took jabs at smugness, grandiosity, and pretension with interrogations on money and waste, and other largely personal inquires. These queries put to his students bordered on trespass, but Thek was not concerned with superficial meanings in his own life and work, nor in others.
Concurrently, AIDS in New York in the early 1980’s was like an untold scourge claiming the lives of many and especially hitting hard the creative fields. Sexual mores came under reassessment to an extent previously unknown and homosexuals were the human face of a contagious, incurable plague, inciting fear and further prejudice. It is hard to remember a time when such a diagnosis meant invariably imminent death. During the same period the prices of a Julian Schnabel painting the size of a house went from a few thousand to a hundred thousand virtually overnight, such was the contrasting frivolity of the art world. All the while Thek was creating small drawings and paintings on paper and board of a throwaway sensibility. Rooftop sketches, landscapes, fruits and vegetables, still lifes from a time past out of touch with the inflated gesture of big for the sake of big. This was a market rife with hype and hyperbole of talent (not dissimilar the 00’s) from the likes of the Italian trio then taking New York by storm, the three C’s: Sandro Chia, Francisco Clemente, and Enzo Cucchi. In the Spring of 1985 Clemente alone had a triple venue show, embraced by collectors and critics alike, at Leo Castelli, Mary Boone and Sperone Westwater. What looked like an ad hoc flourish on a sheet of newspaper by Thek must have appeared to pale, if register at all, on anyone’s radar by way of comparison. Though clear now from the 1980’s that volume would not replace content, at the time, Paul Thek was cast aside from the glamorization and expansion of the art market, and the rollicking community that inevitably adhered to it.
Now, artists barely gaining their footing are embraced by market and museums alike, directly out of university studios. Things eschewed by Thek during his lifetime such as gratuitous shock, market cultivation, and self-branding (without trace of poetry or irony) are among the commercial stratagems on the road to approbation and material wealth. Working in a supermarket and cleaning hospital rooms at what should have been an apex of his career and in the latter part of his life for most would seem demoralizing, but for Thek was a refuge. Thek’s career was a mature, slow burn of incremental strides, but still largely overlooked in the USA. Paul Thek would have been 75 years old in 2008 (b. 1933, Brooklyn, New York) yet without a major US museum retrospective to date, though debate lingers at a few institutions. Thek’s was a life of wanting and suffering in the name of a God that for Thek meant art, creativity and above all else, productiveness. Moving back to New York in late 1970’s left Thek out of touch, out of sight and out of the minds of those who made up the New York art scene. This left him demoralized and unable to work for a brief period, pained by a crisis of meaning in his art.
In the late works, the subject matter of the newspaper paintings shifted possibly in relation to Thek’s declining health, physical and mental, and lack of professional acceptance. The full onset of AIDS and the resultant deterioration of mind and body contributed to a content shift in the late works to a more subdued, internalized, less defined state of things. There is the muddy haze of the 1981 abstraction “Untitled (Little Yellow Pitchfork)” circa 1981 featuring a small pitchfork lost in a mucky field of brown, the tool of hapless farmer and devil alike. From the same period is “Untitled (Brick Wall) from 1982 that resembles a familiar pastiche of a modernist, geometric abstraction. There was a simultaneous vein that referenced dejection, isolation, and bitterness festering in Thek noticeable in works that struck out via subtle jibes and attacks. A 1987 painting on board entitled “An Erotics of Art” was no more than an infantile, fleshy-colored mess with badly drawn female parts, while the newspaper work “The Face of God” from 1988, consisted of a crudely drawn face of a clock: is it a cruel, cold god reduced to nothing but finite, predetermined time? Offsetting his need to connect with others through his work, Thek harbored intent to abdicate, to remove himself. The earlier optimism and wide-eyed enthusiasm were replaced by doom and gloom.
Thek was disturbed by what appeared like collusion and corruption on the part of the art world to purposefully reject him; he felt excluded from a club of his peers and the accompanying whirlwind around them that ensured success and acclaim. This all must have been experienced as a tragic fall from grace from the early acceptance of his noted Technological Reliquary series. Throughout it all, Thek never completely lost his sense of hope that someday he would be recognized, but he came to the conclusion that someday would in all probability be posthumous. In general, Thek’s work had the quality of outsider art, which in a sense it was, due to its utter neglect during his lifetime. For Thek, work was all there ever was: it was emboldening and above all, holy, but for Thek work was never fully calm, which wrought uneasiness and anxiety throughout his life, and resulted in an indeterminate and unfulfilled journey.
Near the end, Thek purposefully abandoned the refinement and representational insight of his earlier works reflecting his physical and emotional state, afflicted by an incurable, stigmatized disease and career neglect in his homeland. In the last newspaper works, gone are the childlike exuberance and celebration of nature, replaced by a duller form of abstractionism, signifying loss of love, innocence, and life. His version of Yankee enthusiasm, cheerfulness and energy, which remained throughout his sojourn in Europe, were hardheartedly quelled. After a shortened but fertile lifetime of unstoppable invention, Thek became a curmudgeon scarred by disregard and inattention. Even though he was cut down prematurely, Thek still managed to produce astounding, prescient and unparalleled work in every conceivable medium. The breadth of the newspaper works alone reflect a military discipline and self-control hardly seen during the time, and rarely so today. Thek’s was a restless and relentless pursuit only now being taken seriously into consideration in relation to art before and after. Like Tonio Kroger, Thek resembled the character in the novella by Thomas Mann, with his nose firmly and forlornly pressed against the wrong side of the window of a big party where everyone is frolicking, singing, dancing (and making more money), but during his lifetime, he would always remain on the outside, uninvited.
“I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at the moment.”2 Nothing but time can suggest a metaphysical expanse, a death sentence, or both. In Thek’s case, hopefully the passage of time will ameliorate the shameful lack of recognition for his deserved output.
Monday, December 15, 2008
HOXTON NEEDS HADID (AJ: Architect's Journal December, 2008)
FOSTER AND ROGERS GRANT ZAHA HADID PERMISSION FOR HER FIRST EVER BUILDING IN LONDON. So it was December 3, 2008, but that would be Sue Foster head Hackney Planning and Ray Rogers, Design and Conservation Manager. In 2004 upon moving to London from New York, I purchased 33-34 Hoxton Square, a small L-shaped building I previously went to planning with a Zaha Hadid mixed use residential and commercial development. Though I received permission to demolish the 1980’s eyesore in 2006, right to light issues rendered the project too risky, as the finesse in the design was the roof. For those without helicopters, the building was missing the pizzazz and flow usually associated with Hadid. In the summer of 2007 I purchased 35 Hoxton Square, a decrepit garment workshop to regularize the site, providing more leeway to push the design. Back to planning I went.
This past summer was a review panel lasting into the night; to say planners are without foresight is a generalization, plainly wrong. Slow maybe, but hardworking, thoughtful and bold in the face of opposition. A member of the panel (formerly of the planning committee) expressed dismay the initial design did not go far enough. English Heritage (EH) was another story. The “strong objection” expressed by EH was to the disruption of the “harmonious visual balance” on the square by the “discordant and alien form of the proposed development”. EH would prefer that the few listed buildings on the square sit in isolation, frozen in the past. What is alien is the idea of change, job creation and innovation. The alleged harmony can more likely be described as an architectural mishmash akin to the throngs congregating in Shoreditch on a Saturday night. The EH report also referred to the harming of the social and economic history of the square, which today can be described as clubs, cars, and crime. The design appears quartz-like with a series of fractals expressed in the façade. If that’s discordant, is discordant bad? Of the letters of dissent the most amusing complained that the building would be too “dazzling” blinding neighboring residents. Building blindness sounds like a new American defense to an inexcusable transgression.
Planning was unanimously granted in spite of the protestations, another being that I intended to flip the project for a tidy profit. This was always as much about public sculpture as profit. Zaha is a treasure in every nation but her own (she’s lived here for 35 years). I have fought consultants from the beginning as they advised the difficulties of constructing such a building, and that was in a good economy. This could be the first building in London and possibly the first finished residential project by Hadid, all in time for her 2012 Olympic swimming pavilion.
Hold off the celebrations. If the reactionary mentality of EH was bad enough, Save Britain’s Heritage (SBH) has weighed in, far overreaching their remit to campaign for endangered historic buildings, urging the communities secretary to call in the scheme and revoke planning. The only thing they are trying to save here, where the buildings to be demolished are admittedly unremarkable, is some quaint notion of the way things were. This situation is beginning to recall the Cardiff Opera House fiasco of the mid 1990’s when the results of two Hadid competition victories were overturned by the myopia of the conservative city council. The fallout from an ostensibly successful planning application: Now I am in need of not only an angel investor but also a cracking solicitor and a Christmas miracle to call in the call in.
http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/comments/comment_in_aj/2008/12/hoxton_needs_hadid.html
This past summer was a review panel lasting into the night; to say planners are without foresight is a generalization, plainly wrong. Slow maybe, but hardworking, thoughtful and bold in the face of opposition. A member of the panel (formerly of the planning committee) expressed dismay the initial design did not go far enough. English Heritage (EH) was another story. The “strong objection” expressed by EH was to the disruption of the “harmonious visual balance” on the square by the “discordant and alien form of the proposed development”. EH would prefer that the few listed buildings on the square sit in isolation, frozen in the past. What is alien is the idea of change, job creation and innovation. The alleged harmony can more likely be described as an architectural mishmash akin to the throngs congregating in Shoreditch on a Saturday night. The EH report also referred to the harming of the social and economic history of the square, which today can be described as clubs, cars, and crime. The design appears quartz-like with a series of fractals expressed in the façade. If that’s discordant, is discordant bad? Of the letters of dissent the most amusing complained that the building would be too “dazzling” blinding neighboring residents. Building blindness sounds like a new American defense to an inexcusable transgression.
Planning was unanimously granted in spite of the protestations, another being that I intended to flip the project for a tidy profit. This was always as much about public sculpture as profit. Zaha is a treasure in every nation but her own (she’s lived here for 35 years). I have fought consultants from the beginning as they advised the difficulties of constructing such a building, and that was in a good economy. This could be the first building in London and possibly the first finished residential project by Hadid, all in time for her 2012 Olympic swimming pavilion.
Hold off the celebrations. If the reactionary mentality of EH was bad enough, Save Britain’s Heritage (SBH) has weighed in, far overreaching their remit to campaign for endangered historic buildings, urging the communities secretary to call in the scheme and revoke planning. The only thing they are trying to save here, where the buildings to be demolished are admittedly unremarkable, is some quaint notion of the way things were. This situation is beginning to recall the Cardiff Opera House fiasco of the mid 1990’s when the results of two Hadid competition victories were overturned by the myopia of the conservative city council. The fallout from an ostensibly successful planning application: Now I am in need of not only an angel investor but also a cracking solicitor and a Christmas miracle to call in the call in.
http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/comments/comment_in_aj/2008/12/hoxton_needs_hadid.html
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
COLOGNE ART FAIR, AN OBITUARY, 2008 (The Telegraph Blog and Artnet)
Tumble weeds tumbling down the corridors of the 42nd Art Cologne fair, the oldest fair, even predating Basel on the first public day of attendance. Time used to have it where life expectancies weren’t anticipated beyond the early forties and history has repeated itself. If you query any art dealer the world over as to their performance at a given fair, especially if you are press, you will be met with the same cheery response and wide-eyed grin: things are ducky, going swimmingly, wonderful. Sold everything. Yes, I have been guilty of such disingenuousness myself on more than one occasion; I suppose I will be asked to administer to the new portable lie detector test prior to my next press inquiry. Let it be known, after the marathon 10-hour opening and nearly week-long fair (probably the longest of them all) we have sold absolutely nothing. Not a work, not a drawing, not a photo, not a thing. Back at the hotel, church bells of the almighty gothic Dom church resounded just in front of my room and I grieved for, lamented the absence of something that used to be, though now merely a faint memory: the viable fair that was once Cologne. The cycle of life, like the present abysmal economic cycle, has once more repeated itself. I suppose it should have been of no surprise.
In 1991 the Dom itself emblazoned the cover of the New York Times Magazine section with the headline, more or less, What is the Center of the Art World: Cologne or New York? Then a few things transpired on the way to work that forever changed the landscape of art and how it is transacted, namely a deep US recession followed on its heels by a German cyclical downturn; and then, lo and behold, unforeseen by anyone, the upstarts Damien Hirst, Charles Saatchi and Jay Jopling forever changed the course of art commerce and content, for now anyway. Things happen for better and worse, sometimes in paradigmatic shifts like cell phones, the Internet, Goggle and YouTube, and sometimes in art and what swirls around it. Never before had there been such an art boom—more practicing artists, collectors, writers, museums both public and private—and general interest and glamour. If you can call anything associated with the art world attractive in that sense. Fitting that the only English language station on the hotel TV was CNBC as that is the new CNN and Bloomberg the new Artforum. But after ten years that had experienced more growth than in the previous 100 years in art market expansion we are on the verge of a setback and a possibly monumental one at that. Perhaps this is a good thing regarding art fairs, but these events appear to be the first sector in the increasingly global and bloated art world to correct. We have recently witnessed the demise of the Dusseldorf Contemporary fair, the Frankfurt fair, the Mallorca version of the Cologne fair (an anemically attended fair in a Spanish airport in the dead of summer—hello?) and others, and surely a few more will cease in the coming months. Moving the Cologne fair last from the heels of Frieze to the spring, directly clashing with the Brussels fair was also no stroke of genius.
And how has all this affected Cologne? Lest I forget to reference the coup, in all probability the first literal overthrow of an art fair director by popular press not seen since the pamphlets of Thomas Paine campaigned for American independence. However the cause in the Cologne mutiny was not quite so noble or pure. Bemoaning the tragic loss of status of Cologne a group of disaffected local galleriists signed a national newspaper advertisement calling for the resignation of the fair’s director along with a list of some other petty demands. I witnessed these antics from the eye of the selection committee, having been appointed to the position after being rejected or accepted then rejected from just about most every major fair. That these idiots contended by publicly stoning-to-death the outgoing director (all demands were summarily granted by the management of the fair owner) would restore the fair to its former glory is not only laughable but also meaningless in a wider context.
In the end, the ploy was seen as an act of pathetic, petulant children who couldn’t get their way through normal channels, publicly acting out in a world where no one really cares about or pays much heed to such insignificant issues. The problem began with the fact it’s been some years since Cologne has been perceived as the equivalent of the day sales of art fairs to Basel’s night sale. With upcoming spring auctions fast approaching, the long anticipated cracks in the market should finally begin to appear by way of the thick contemporary sales catalogues, much of them filled with works of mediocre quality. Such is the fate of Art Cologne in the present state of the world economy. With the proliferation of fairs in the recent past including the ascension of London, Miami, and even Berlin (stuffed with galleries starved of collectors) and now the inevitable winnowing in the fair marketplace, we could very well see the demise of Cologne, not so much in the near future as in now. And to think, it was the extraordinary public declaration calling for the head of Cologne’s director, an instance worse than typical art world pettiness, a public tarring and feathering no less, that put even the most calloused of the art world ill at ease, and that ultimately backfired. What was left was an aura around Art Cologne of a stinking pile of…
Ok, I am not wholly blameless in the downward trajectory of my own Cologne (mis)fortunes. Due to a rescheduling in my new director’s travel itinerary I was left without wall labels for individual works or visible identification of the artists hanging at the opening, and as a result of a lack of pre-planning we neglected to accurately gauge the booth configuration, failing to account for two inordinately sized exterior walls, which a neighbor so kindly offered to fill for me with their lovely photographs. In the world of art fairs its strictly a matter of horror vacui: the fear of empty spaces and white walls, as the little patches of fair real estate come at a high premium. Yet, you can’t pin it on my lack of aesthetic insight as my booth contained stalwarts of history books and art market favorites alike: Polke, Acconci, Artschwager, Peter Saul, Franz West and industrial designers like Tom Dixon. Admittedly a bit retrograde to the fair fare I normally exhibit, but what better time to do traditional.
The ad hoc plan hatched for the mammoth, naked outside walls adjacent to the pubic passageways was a guerilla installation by William Pope. L, the noted performance artist, that comprised potted house plants on shelves that were heavily, viscously covered in multi-coats of black and blue spray paint till it dripped off the leaves and oozed down the walls. It didn’t take long for the complaints to materialize. Though it didn’t particularly smell all that much in the immediate area of the transgression, when I subsequently went for a coffee I discovered the intra convention center wind pattern had pointed due west, with a wafting toxic cloud of ozone busting fumes—keep it from Al.
The Art Cologne staff acted swiftly and decisively: for hours on end, a three strong security team stood guard watching the paint dry on the leaves, who would not depart till they were utterly convinced the offending spray paint no longer posed a security threat to the barely there public at large, and as it was gloss finish, it was admittedly going to be a long vigilance. What a handy way to repel the few collectors trundling down the quiet aisles. In fact one of the guards ended up attempting to explicate the art to some visitors—I’d love to have been a German-speaking fly on the wall to have witnessed that conversation; to think, we were provided our very own docent, how utterly courteous. An instance of the enlightened discourse on this work, rather than how much is that wonderful art piece, was the comment: “I don’t like to be this plant”.
With fairs such as Cologne, there is an undeniable sense of community at these and other like-minded events that will admittedly be missed, along with the chance to travel to the multitude of destinations that now host them, but soon the surfeit of fairs will exist only in nostalgia. Sitting in the Art Cologne booth there was an eerie stillness, a feeling of listlessness in the air, like being part of a display in a vitrine at a museum of natural history. Though there were occasional big-ticket sales of Richter's and the like, at the same time I witnessed more than one disaffected participant that stated their intention not to return. Nevertheless the regional fairs remain strategic places to source material such as the 1973 Polke work on paper I picked up from his series of erotic drawings. But acquisitions in the face of a no business climate are a dangerous undertaking, like Russian roulette. What the Cologne gallery instigators woefully failed to recognize in their misguided newspaper petition to publicly discharge the director of the fair was that you cannot simply determine to restore the luster of a city or its importance in a global community that is constantly transforming and mutating. No declaration on the part of anyone, be it a politician, or even worse, a group of inconsequential galley owners can sway the march of time and the shifting balance of power. What the Cologne management was after was rather aptly characterized by the title of the 1973 Sidney Pollack film with Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford: The Way We Were.
In 1991 the Dom itself emblazoned the cover of the New York Times Magazine section with the headline, more or less, What is the Center of the Art World: Cologne or New York? Then a few things transpired on the way to work that forever changed the landscape of art and how it is transacted, namely a deep US recession followed on its heels by a German cyclical downturn; and then, lo and behold, unforeseen by anyone, the upstarts Damien Hirst, Charles Saatchi and Jay Jopling forever changed the course of art commerce and content, for now anyway. Things happen for better and worse, sometimes in paradigmatic shifts like cell phones, the Internet, Goggle and YouTube, and sometimes in art and what swirls around it. Never before had there been such an art boom—more practicing artists, collectors, writers, museums both public and private—and general interest and glamour. If you can call anything associated with the art world attractive in that sense. Fitting that the only English language station on the hotel TV was CNBC as that is the new CNN and Bloomberg the new Artforum. But after ten years that had experienced more growth than in the previous 100 years in art market expansion we are on the verge of a setback and a possibly monumental one at that. Perhaps this is a good thing regarding art fairs, but these events appear to be the first sector in the increasingly global and bloated art world to correct. We have recently witnessed the demise of the Dusseldorf Contemporary fair, the Frankfurt fair, the Mallorca version of the Cologne fair (an anemically attended fair in a Spanish airport in the dead of summer—hello?) and others, and surely a few more will cease in the coming months. Moving the Cologne fair last from the heels of Frieze to the spring, directly clashing with the Brussels fair was also no stroke of genius.
And how has all this affected Cologne? Lest I forget to reference the coup, in all probability the first literal overthrow of an art fair director by popular press not seen since the pamphlets of Thomas Paine campaigned for American independence. However the cause in the Cologne mutiny was not quite so noble or pure. Bemoaning the tragic loss of status of Cologne a group of disaffected local galleriists signed a national newspaper advertisement calling for the resignation of the fair’s director along with a list of some other petty demands. I witnessed these antics from the eye of the selection committee, having been appointed to the position after being rejected or accepted then rejected from just about most every major fair. That these idiots contended by publicly stoning-to-death the outgoing director (all demands were summarily granted by the management of the fair owner) would restore the fair to its former glory is not only laughable but also meaningless in a wider context.
In the end, the ploy was seen as an act of pathetic, petulant children who couldn’t get their way through normal channels, publicly acting out in a world where no one really cares about or pays much heed to such insignificant issues. The problem began with the fact it’s been some years since Cologne has been perceived as the equivalent of the day sales of art fairs to Basel’s night sale. With upcoming spring auctions fast approaching, the long anticipated cracks in the market should finally begin to appear by way of the thick contemporary sales catalogues, much of them filled with works of mediocre quality. Such is the fate of Art Cologne in the present state of the world economy. With the proliferation of fairs in the recent past including the ascension of London, Miami, and even Berlin (stuffed with galleries starved of collectors) and now the inevitable winnowing in the fair marketplace, we could very well see the demise of Cologne, not so much in the near future as in now. And to think, it was the extraordinary public declaration calling for the head of Cologne’s director, an instance worse than typical art world pettiness, a public tarring and feathering no less, that put even the most calloused of the art world ill at ease, and that ultimately backfired. What was left was an aura around Art Cologne of a stinking pile of…
Ok, I am not wholly blameless in the downward trajectory of my own Cologne (mis)fortunes. Due to a rescheduling in my new director’s travel itinerary I was left without wall labels for individual works or visible identification of the artists hanging at the opening, and as a result of a lack of pre-planning we neglected to accurately gauge the booth configuration, failing to account for two inordinately sized exterior walls, which a neighbor so kindly offered to fill for me with their lovely photographs. In the world of art fairs its strictly a matter of horror vacui: the fear of empty spaces and white walls, as the little patches of fair real estate come at a high premium. Yet, you can’t pin it on my lack of aesthetic insight as my booth contained stalwarts of history books and art market favorites alike: Polke, Acconci, Artschwager, Peter Saul, Franz West and industrial designers like Tom Dixon. Admittedly a bit retrograde to the fair fare I normally exhibit, but what better time to do traditional.
The ad hoc plan hatched for the mammoth, naked outside walls adjacent to the pubic passageways was a guerilla installation by William Pope. L, the noted performance artist, that comprised potted house plants on shelves that were heavily, viscously covered in multi-coats of black and blue spray paint till it dripped off the leaves and oozed down the walls. It didn’t take long for the complaints to materialize. Though it didn’t particularly smell all that much in the immediate area of the transgression, when I subsequently went for a coffee I discovered the intra convention center wind pattern had pointed due west, with a wafting toxic cloud of ozone busting fumes—keep it from Al.
The Art Cologne staff acted swiftly and decisively: for hours on end, a three strong security team stood guard watching the paint dry on the leaves, who would not depart till they were utterly convinced the offending spray paint no longer posed a security threat to the barely there public at large, and as it was gloss finish, it was admittedly going to be a long vigilance. What a handy way to repel the few collectors trundling down the quiet aisles. In fact one of the guards ended up attempting to explicate the art to some visitors—I’d love to have been a German-speaking fly on the wall to have witnessed that conversation; to think, we were provided our very own docent, how utterly courteous. An instance of the enlightened discourse on this work, rather than how much is that wonderful art piece, was the comment: “I don’t like to be this plant”.
With fairs such as Cologne, there is an undeniable sense of community at these and other like-minded events that will admittedly be missed, along with the chance to travel to the multitude of destinations that now host them, but soon the surfeit of fairs will exist only in nostalgia. Sitting in the Art Cologne booth there was an eerie stillness, a feeling of listlessness in the air, like being part of a display in a vitrine at a museum of natural history. Though there were occasional big-ticket sales of Richter's and the like, at the same time I witnessed more than one disaffected participant that stated their intention not to return. Nevertheless the regional fairs remain strategic places to source material such as the 1973 Polke work on paper I picked up from his series of erotic drawings. But acquisitions in the face of a no business climate are a dangerous undertaking, like Russian roulette. What the Cologne gallery instigators woefully failed to recognize in their misguided newspaper petition to publicly discharge the director of the fair was that you cannot simply determine to restore the luster of a city or its importance in a global community that is constantly transforming and mutating. No declaration on the part of anyone, be it a politician, or even worse, a group of inconsequential galley owners can sway the march of time and the shifting balance of power. What the Cologne management was after was rather aptly characterized by the title of the 1973 Sidney Pollack film with Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford: The Way We Were.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Z.CAR BY ZAHA HADID (ROVE ZERO, Spring 2006, Premier issue of the car/design magazine)
Gentleman and Gentlewoman, Start Your Engines
Though the antiques market has crashed (post 9/11, 2001), and impressionist and old master paintings gone soft, modern and contemporary art and post war design are through the roof. Frothy even. From some cursory research, it appears collectible cars are the next segment poised for a dramatic upward shift. In a nutshell, million dollar sales are up astonishingly today, since the auto market experienced its own precipitous drop in the early 90s. From 16 in 2004 to 41 in 05 and already 21 in just the first quarter of 06, the increase in seven figure sales is nothing less meteoric and signals a fundamental shift in the landscape of car collecting. And its not only the hyper high ticket sales of concept prototypes and rare Ferrari’s galloping ahead, but also the average sales value has climbed from $37,813 in 2004 to $44,071 in 05, and pointedly, to $72,063 in the first quarter of this year. From Geneva to Arizona sales of vintage and collector cars alike are soaring and the breadth of the market, like the art market it is beginning to resemble, is international in scope, and in the throes of a major expansion.
Effectively, we are about to witness a near doubling of the market in two short years. Thus after a long channel of flat sales, cars seems to be aligning themselves with other sought after tangible assets such as real estate and commodities, all experiencing strong price inflation due to the lackluster performance of many other financial asset classes in the recent past. When hedge funds have arisen with art as their stock in trade, and financial indices charting not only art market segments but creating technical analysis of artists themselves, this could be the ground floor of an auto boom. Not to mention the flood of hedge fund’s funds fueling the present market rise.
When you think about it now, in terms of present value, what other business model exists where an individual walks into a room in which goods are for sale, plunks down a huge sum of money and leaves with 10 – 20% less in value when the threshold of the entrance is again crossed? For instance, a sizable portion of money expended for a Rolls Royce Phantom evaporates phantomlike without a trace, immediately upon purchase. Where do those proceeds end up? In the coffers of Volkswagen in all probability. But really, what that reflects as much as cynicism about the modern day auto market is the fervor with which successful and (seemingly) clever people pursue cars. There is a healthy amount of elasticity in the high-end car showrooms of the world. The allure of cars is widespread, deep rooted, and with the unfathomable wealth created in the past 10 years, the stage is set for a big rally!
Back to the present. GM lost a staggering $8.6 BILLION last year due to grossly swollen managerial layers producing mass market cars, with no notion of, or care for, what the consumer actually wanted: design and value. The behemoth, bleeding money with lackluster product of poor quality is being tamed by none other than an octogenarian entrepreneur who probably is the only one who can recall a day and age when GM made decent cars that people wanted to buy. With admittedly circuitous logic at its core, this can only bode well for the continued value and desirability of the classics. The designs of current cars are numbingly the same which appears the result of limited cross ownership of the major marques, more stringent safety regulations and bottom line aesthetics killing off any semblance of innovation. Not only do the classics appear as distinct and covetous by comparison, but they are also grandfathered in to evade the paternalistic regulatory climate that mandates the forms of vehicles to be packaged in a nearly uniform platform. Air bags, electronic safety systems, traction control, even seat belts? Not a chance. The classics, the prototypes, muscle cars of the 60s, therein resides the bastion of value in today’s marketplace—a well designed car, with seductive lines, and performance to match, that is distinct, rare and especially not engineered via marketing based focus groups in an out-of-touch Detroit.
Sipp lightly and at your own expense. That is that the radical expansion of the UK’s Self Invested Personal Pension (Sipp) plan to permit “tangible movable property” such as classic cars, fine wine and works of art to be invested in one’s personal pension fund, thus evading heavy taxation at point of purchase, has been scuttled. The chancellor reneged at the last minute after the adoption of the tax break in all probability fearful that the yellow journalists would seize on the notion of a high living businessman, toasting his art collection from his vintage Lamborghini at the expense of the Inland Revenue service, or more importantly, the Daily Mail readership. Tangible movable property does seem to leave a sordid residue. Nevertheless, it is doubtful this plugged loophole will impact materially on recent market trends.
For the market to continue its trajectory and really flourish, what is needed is more transparency in the trade akin to recent manifestations in the art world, via web sites, market oriented research and analysis and printed matter to disseminate the data and findings. With some forward thinking and innovation, GM could be out of the pits, and things could really turn the corner for the car world as a whole, but we are nowhere near the checkered flag just yet—hold on for the ride. Sorry, admittedly I should be pulled over for that.
Design Anorexia/What’s the Concept?
Meet the first green supercar, the striking concept is powered by a twin- turbo 400 horse power bioethanol v6 driving all four wheels. The result? A heady mix of 0-60 in 4.9 sec and no emissions. There are currently no plans to make it...
AUTOCAR, 29 MARCH 2006, VOL 247 No13/5883
The following is a paraphrase of a capsule excerpt on an experimental Saab concept car (yes, Saab) from one of the UK’s highest circulation and most closely read auto weeklies (yes, there is more than one). It’s great looking! It’s affordable! It’s quick as hell! It’s 300 miles to the gallon! And its revolutionary in its utter lack of emissions! So the choice is obvious: why bother?
Shouldn’t prototypes be put on the road by any means necessary? Like the old mantra from Burger King adverts in the 70s: “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special offers don’t upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way.” Why can’t we have our cars in the same bespoke fashion?
What passes for design today are like remakes of classic movies, when no better, newer, ideas present themselves: witness the Charger, Camaro, Miura, and GT 40. While Marc Newson’s 021C concept car for Ford admittedly resembled a boxed lunch to some extent, had it been produced, it probably would have sold bucket-loads. Why are these exercises just that, conceptual exercises with no intent to pursue further when assuredly there is a market for progressive design. How about architect, artist and designer derived automobiles? There was Buckminster Fullers’ Dymaxion 3 wheeler, Raymond Lowey’s designs for Studebaker, and Renzo Piano’s 1978 Fiat VSS prototype which utilized a steel tubular spaceframe with plastic body panels, issues still relevant to today’s auto industry. Threats to the everyday sameness of things are viewed as just that—threats. The Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, who largely practiced in the US in the early to mid 1900’s, went from designing storefronts, an ashtray, interiors, a gallery, to making art and building Jerusalem’s Dome of the Book. In times considered more conservative, the 50’ s to late 60’s, less conservative feats design-wise were accomplished. We live in an age of niche specialization where straying outside the norm is discounted, and everyone walks around in blinders. Cross-fertilization between related fields is beneficial to all, and like Karl Marx said, why can’t you be an economist in the morning and a fisherman in the afternoon?
Look out for Rove Cars, a company that will offer cars like I-Pod and Motorola snap on cases; change your mood, change your car color or body style. The concept is the concept: that every car is a veritable prototype for the road. Make cars like art: the painter Jasper Johns described his work as taking something, doing something to it, and then doing something else to it. We just about have the means and technological sophistication with milling processes and such to produce limited, limited volume cars like editions of sculpture.
In the real life world of the auto industry, if its too good to be true, it probably isn’t, its just that the manufactures have too much fear to unsettle the status quo (gas consumption, and lots of it). Like the new Saab, it’s so good its bad. By definition, most production cars are concepts diluted beyond recognition. Design nowadays is fungible; one man’s Jag is another’s (or the same guy’s) Aston. A good idea need not be followed by a negation, an excuse as to why something formidable will not be made.
Re: the Z. Car, after Zaha Hadid had designed a ski jump, a car factory and a parking lot, the idea of the car was not much of a leap. And rather then just present an idea of a new 3-wheeled car; why not take it to the street.
Kenny Schachter
Though the antiques market has crashed (post 9/11, 2001), and impressionist and old master paintings gone soft, modern and contemporary art and post war design are through the roof. Frothy even. From some cursory research, it appears collectible cars are the next segment poised for a dramatic upward shift. In a nutshell, million dollar sales are up astonishingly today, since the auto market experienced its own precipitous drop in the early 90s. From 16 in 2004 to 41 in 05 and already 21 in just the first quarter of 06, the increase in seven figure sales is nothing less meteoric and signals a fundamental shift in the landscape of car collecting. And its not only the hyper high ticket sales of concept prototypes and rare Ferrari’s galloping ahead, but also the average sales value has climbed from $37,813 in 2004 to $44,071 in 05, and pointedly, to $72,063 in the first quarter of this year. From Geneva to Arizona sales of vintage and collector cars alike are soaring and the breadth of the market, like the art market it is beginning to resemble, is international in scope, and in the throes of a major expansion.
Effectively, we are about to witness a near doubling of the market in two short years. Thus after a long channel of flat sales, cars seems to be aligning themselves with other sought after tangible assets such as real estate and commodities, all experiencing strong price inflation due to the lackluster performance of many other financial asset classes in the recent past. When hedge funds have arisen with art as their stock in trade, and financial indices charting not only art market segments but creating technical analysis of artists themselves, this could be the ground floor of an auto boom. Not to mention the flood of hedge fund’s funds fueling the present market rise.
When you think about it now, in terms of present value, what other business model exists where an individual walks into a room in which goods are for sale, plunks down a huge sum of money and leaves with 10 – 20% less in value when the threshold of the entrance is again crossed? For instance, a sizable portion of money expended for a Rolls Royce Phantom evaporates phantomlike without a trace, immediately upon purchase. Where do those proceeds end up? In the coffers of Volkswagen in all probability. But really, what that reflects as much as cynicism about the modern day auto market is the fervor with which successful and (seemingly) clever people pursue cars. There is a healthy amount of elasticity in the high-end car showrooms of the world. The allure of cars is widespread, deep rooted, and with the unfathomable wealth created in the past 10 years, the stage is set for a big rally!
Back to the present. GM lost a staggering $8.6 BILLION last year due to grossly swollen managerial layers producing mass market cars, with no notion of, or care for, what the consumer actually wanted: design and value. The behemoth, bleeding money with lackluster product of poor quality is being tamed by none other than an octogenarian entrepreneur who probably is the only one who can recall a day and age when GM made decent cars that people wanted to buy. With admittedly circuitous logic at its core, this can only bode well for the continued value and desirability of the classics. The designs of current cars are numbingly the same which appears the result of limited cross ownership of the major marques, more stringent safety regulations and bottom line aesthetics killing off any semblance of innovation. Not only do the classics appear as distinct and covetous by comparison, but they are also grandfathered in to evade the paternalistic regulatory climate that mandates the forms of vehicles to be packaged in a nearly uniform platform. Air bags, electronic safety systems, traction control, even seat belts? Not a chance. The classics, the prototypes, muscle cars of the 60s, therein resides the bastion of value in today’s marketplace—a well designed car, with seductive lines, and performance to match, that is distinct, rare and especially not engineered via marketing based focus groups in an out-of-touch Detroit.
Sipp lightly and at your own expense. That is that the radical expansion of the UK’s Self Invested Personal Pension (Sipp) plan to permit “tangible movable property” such as classic cars, fine wine and works of art to be invested in one’s personal pension fund, thus evading heavy taxation at point of purchase, has been scuttled. The chancellor reneged at the last minute after the adoption of the tax break in all probability fearful that the yellow journalists would seize on the notion of a high living businessman, toasting his art collection from his vintage Lamborghini at the expense of the Inland Revenue service, or more importantly, the Daily Mail readership. Tangible movable property does seem to leave a sordid residue. Nevertheless, it is doubtful this plugged loophole will impact materially on recent market trends.
For the market to continue its trajectory and really flourish, what is needed is more transparency in the trade akin to recent manifestations in the art world, via web sites, market oriented research and analysis and printed matter to disseminate the data and findings. With some forward thinking and innovation, GM could be out of the pits, and things could really turn the corner for the car world as a whole, but we are nowhere near the checkered flag just yet—hold on for the ride. Sorry, admittedly I should be pulled over for that.
Design Anorexia/What’s the Concept?
Meet the first green supercar, the striking concept is powered by a twin- turbo 400 horse power bioethanol v6 driving all four wheels. The result? A heady mix of 0-60 in 4.9 sec and no emissions. There are currently no plans to make it...
AUTOCAR, 29 MARCH 2006, VOL 247 No13/5883
The following is a paraphrase of a capsule excerpt on an experimental Saab concept car (yes, Saab) from one of the UK’s highest circulation and most closely read auto weeklies (yes, there is more than one). It’s great looking! It’s affordable! It’s quick as hell! It’s 300 miles to the gallon! And its revolutionary in its utter lack of emissions! So the choice is obvious: why bother?
Shouldn’t prototypes be put on the road by any means necessary? Like the old mantra from Burger King adverts in the 70s: “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special offers don’t upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way.” Why can’t we have our cars in the same bespoke fashion?
What passes for design today are like remakes of classic movies, when no better, newer, ideas present themselves: witness the Charger, Camaro, Miura, and GT 40. While Marc Newson’s 021C concept car for Ford admittedly resembled a boxed lunch to some extent, had it been produced, it probably would have sold bucket-loads. Why are these exercises just that, conceptual exercises with no intent to pursue further when assuredly there is a market for progressive design. How about architect, artist and designer derived automobiles? There was Buckminster Fullers’ Dymaxion 3 wheeler, Raymond Lowey’s designs for Studebaker, and Renzo Piano’s 1978 Fiat VSS prototype which utilized a steel tubular spaceframe with plastic body panels, issues still relevant to today’s auto industry. Threats to the everyday sameness of things are viewed as just that—threats. The Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, who largely practiced in the US in the early to mid 1900’s, went from designing storefronts, an ashtray, interiors, a gallery, to making art and building Jerusalem’s Dome of the Book. In times considered more conservative, the 50’ s to late 60’s, less conservative feats design-wise were accomplished. We live in an age of niche specialization where straying outside the norm is discounted, and everyone walks around in blinders. Cross-fertilization between related fields is beneficial to all, and like Karl Marx said, why can’t you be an economist in the morning and a fisherman in the afternoon?
Look out for Rove Cars, a company that will offer cars like I-Pod and Motorola snap on cases; change your mood, change your car color or body style. The concept is the concept: that every car is a veritable prototype for the road. Make cars like art: the painter Jasper Johns described his work as taking something, doing something to it, and then doing something else to it. We just about have the means and technological sophistication with milling processes and such to produce limited, limited volume cars like editions of sculpture.
In the real life world of the auto industry, if its too good to be true, it probably isn’t, its just that the manufactures have too much fear to unsettle the status quo (gas consumption, and lots of it). Like the new Saab, it’s so good its bad. By definition, most production cars are concepts diluted beyond recognition. Design nowadays is fungible; one man’s Jag is another’s (or the same guy’s) Aston. A good idea need not be followed by a negation, an excuse as to why something formidable will not be made.
Re: the Z. Car, after Zaha Hadid had designed a ski jump, a car factory and a parking lot, the idea of the car was not much of a leap. And rather then just present an idea of a new 3-wheeled car; why not take it to the street.
Kenny Schachter
Friday, December 16, 2005
DIARY INSTALLMENT (ART REVIEW MAGAZINE, December 2005)
It’s well over a year since we moved to London and I still haven’t attained the peripheral vision necessary to navigate the width-restricting elevated curbs on the Hammersmith Bridge on the school run every morning. Even my tiny Mini cannot cope with the hurdles encountered on a daily basis as I career from side to side, or worse, from side to side and back again. Either way it doesn’t bode well for long-term tyre usage, nice rims or my current adventures.
Speaking of obstacles, during my house search in 2003 I phoned the Frieze people to say hello after making their acquaintance during a curated show in the mid-1990s, to inform them of my impending move to the UK, the nature of my projects and my hope in attending the fair as more than a viewer. The response was, rather ominously, ‘Even if you are rejected, we can list your opening.’
There’s nothing like a self-fulfilling prophecy to weigh down the odds. Two years on and I only gained admittance to the opening by nicking (it’s been over a year, and Madonna speaks like that) the invitation out of the mail addressed to the former tenant of my house.
It’s the capriciousness of the process that frustrates most – well, frustrates me, anyway. I suppose my chances were not helped by comments made on these pages in a prior diary instalment about the fickleness of the organisers when drawing up the invitation list for last year’s opening night party. Galleries are chosen for inclusion in the international fairs by a small handful of galleries that judge one event after another, and amount to a cluster of worms under a rock. Imagine the cliques, snickering after denying admittance to gallery after gallery. Having been on a selection committee or two for various exhibitions, I have indulged in such tastelessness myself, truth be told.
I’ve opened a gallery space on Britannia Street while the planning application for the Zaha Hadid building for Hoxton Square continues. On the opening night there was much support from my neighbours, Gagosian Gallery, in the form of attendance by the international staff and even flowers. I felt like Sally Fields when she gave her acceptance speech after winning an Oscar in 1985 – they like me!, although a few openings later the idea of my posting kids in front of their entrance to direct gallery-goers to my nascent space across the street started to wear thin.
Then came Basel Miami 04. I was asked by the fair to come up with an architectural concept with Vito Acconci, with whom I have collaborated in the past, to create an intervention that would result in a kind of tunnel, within a passageway that had never before been used. Acconci’s contribution was to reconfigure the booth designs that we had worked on for the Armory in New York and a previous Basel Miami.
The result was a series of interlocking igloo shapes formed out of PVC tubes – a superstructure upon which to install art. The final element of the structure extended out in such a manner as to block nearly 85 percent of the passageway from one side of the fair to the other. Word quickly spread among dealers during the installation that I was intentionally trying to disrupt the event, while in reality I was on the phone with the studio to explain why we needed to open the aperture more, so as not to disrupt ingress or egress. Self-sabotaging I am not.
You see the makings of a pattern. I was informed this year that I would not be invited back for the 2005 edition of Art Basel Miami. When I asked why, after such a wondrous contribution from Vito last year and when there is so little to distinguish the goings-on from one booth to another, I was told my art wasn’t up to snuff. Call it the strong arm of the Miami Beach Art Police. When I pressed on, pointing out the quality of the renowned artists I exhibited, such as Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton, Ed Ruscha, Vito etc, I was told that Acconci’s design was not what was envisioned from computer renderings prior to its implementation.
Me, I could understand them not liking, but my art? Or Vito’s booth? The show will go on without me, and the only thing I will miss more than the practically effortless sales are the parties.
I find another building in King’s Cross, two blocks from my gallery, as my lease runs out in two and a half years. This is one of the rare times I venture out due to my pathological fear of getting lost coupled with my horrendous sense of direction. Even my sat nav system can’t seem to get it right. In any event, wish I had remained home as I end up finding a breed worse then real estate agents. After we have come to an agreement of terms to purchase the former union clubhouse, I experience a modern-day phenomenon unique to the bloated property market here – I am gazumped! That’s when you shake on a deal, call your lawyers, only to have the rug pulled out by profiteering landowners – or worse, a French collector.
I guess as a way of dealing with these daily art-world frustrations, I have become more involved with cars – collecting them and travelling to circuits in the UK and elsewhere in Europe to drive all out. Before my trips to the track I am queasy at the thought that things won’t turn out well, a sensation only overcome by driving at breakneck speed. I have even successfully campaigned for my competition licence at Brands Hatch; though equipped with the personalised helmet and fireproof coveralls, I don’t think I could actually stomach an event. I’m also working on a car/design magazine that will launch in the spring and have commissioned Hadid to design a car that we will build into a functioning prototype.
And then there was The Armory. Despite three years of participation, but now weary of the selection process, I looked into the make-up of the committee and all was instantly clear: despite having a special relationship with two of the founding members of the fair, I would be, and ultimately was, dropped. Between the members and me there was: 1. An affair 15 years ago that didn’t end well; 2. A dispute from a transaction after being charged 50 percent of the purchase price for shipping; 3. A near fistfight at a boozed-up event at Basel last year; 4. The best friend of the preceding three.
Then there was this email sent by a NYC gallery which is working with many of the emerging artists I used to represent: ‘I thought I might get your thoughts on how to get the Armory show committee to let us into their fair. Currently we are on a waiting list. Several galleries already in the fair are looking to showcase our artists … Many on the committee will be at the Frieze Fair. I’ve written them. Maybe you know these people and can put a word in for us… We could use the $.’
While travelling to one of the many fairs I actually did participate in over the past year, my wife and kids rented bikes in Battersea Park on a Sunday afternoon. When my 5-year-old got ahead a bit he was abruptly and violently pushed from his bike by a 9-year-old girl and robbed of it. For a week he was badly shaken. Now we’ve been mugged as a family – welcome to Britain. London is like New York in the 1970s when politics was only a glimmer in Giuliani’s eyes. Most everyone I know here has been robbed, at least once.
But my kids always seem to extract the last laugh in the rough and tumble world here. In a Rondinone installation at Frieze that consisted of a snow machine raining white paper flakes in a perfect mound on the floor, one of my little monsters approached and proceeded to lie prone atop the pile like a dying cowboy in a spaghetti western. By coincidence, it was a gallery that served on two out of three of the selection committees referred to above.
Speaking of obstacles, during my house search in 2003 I phoned the Frieze people to say hello after making their acquaintance during a curated show in the mid-1990s, to inform them of my impending move to the UK, the nature of my projects and my hope in attending the fair as more than a viewer. The response was, rather ominously, ‘Even if you are rejected, we can list your opening.’
There’s nothing like a self-fulfilling prophecy to weigh down the odds. Two years on and I only gained admittance to the opening by nicking (it’s been over a year, and Madonna speaks like that) the invitation out of the mail addressed to the former tenant of my house.
It’s the capriciousness of the process that frustrates most – well, frustrates me, anyway. I suppose my chances were not helped by comments made on these pages in a prior diary instalment about the fickleness of the organisers when drawing up the invitation list for last year’s opening night party. Galleries are chosen for inclusion in the international fairs by a small handful of galleries that judge one event after another, and amount to a cluster of worms under a rock. Imagine the cliques, snickering after denying admittance to gallery after gallery. Having been on a selection committee or two for various exhibitions, I have indulged in such tastelessness myself, truth be told.
I’ve opened a gallery space on Britannia Street while the planning application for the Zaha Hadid building for Hoxton Square continues. On the opening night there was much support from my neighbours, Gagosian Gallery, in the form of attendance by the international staff and even flowers. I felt like Sally Fields when she gave her acceptance speech after winning an Oscar in 1985 – they like me!, although a few openings later the idea of my posting kids in front of their entrance to direct gallery-goers to my nascent space across the street started to wear thin.
Then came Basel Miami 04. I was asked by the fair to come up with an architectural concept with Vito Acconci, with whom I have collaborated in the past, to create an intervention that would result in a kind of tunnel, within a passageway that had never before been used. Acconci’s contribution was to reconfigure the booth designs that we had worked on for the Armory in New York and a previous Basel Miami.
The result was a series of interlocking igloo shapes formed out of PVC tubes – a superstructure upon which to install art. The final element of the structure extended out in such a manner as to block nearly 85 percent of the passageway from one side of the fair to the other. Word quickly spread among dealers during the installation that I was intentionally trying to disrupt the event, while in reality I was on the phone with the studio to explain why we needed to open the aperture more, so as not to disrupt ingress or egress. Self-sabotaging I am not.
You see the makings of a pattern. I was informed this year that I would not be invited back for the 2005 edition of Art Basel Miami. When I asked why, after such a wondrous contribution from Vito last year and when there is so little to distinguish the goings-on from one booth to another, I was told my art wasn’t up to snuff. Call it the strong arm of the Miami Beach Art Police. When I pressed on, pointing out the quality of the renowned artists I exhibited, such as Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton, Ed Ruscha, Vito etc, I was told that Acconci’s design was not what was envisioned from computer renderings prior to its implementation.
Me, I could understand them not liking, but my art? Or Vito’s booth? The show will go on without me, and the only thing I will miss more than the practically effortless sales are the parties.
I find another building in King’s Cross, two blocks from my gallery, as my lease runs out in two and a half years. This is one of the rare times I venture out due to my pathological fear of getting lost coupled with my horrendous sense of direction. Even my sat nav system can’t seem to get it right. In any event, wish I had remained home as I end up finding a breed worse then real estate agents. After we have come to an agreement of terms to purchase the former union clubhouse, I experience a modern-day phenomenon unique to the bloated property market here – I am gazumped! That’s when you shake on a deal, call your lawyers, only to have the rug pulled out by profiteering landowners – or worse, a French collector.
I guess as a way of dealing with these daily art-world frustrations, I have become more involved with cars – collecting them and travelling to circuits in the UK and elsewhere in Europe to drive all out. Before my trips to the track I am queasy at the thought that things won’t turn out well, a sensation only overcome by driving at breakneck speed. I have even successfully campaigned for my competition licence at Brands Hatch; though equipped with the personalised helmet and fireproof coveralls, I don’t think I could actually stomach an event. I’m also working on a car/design magazine that will launch in the spring and have commissioned Hadid to design a car that we will build into a functioning prototype.
And then there was The Armory. Despite three years of participation, but now weary of the selection process, I looked into the make-up of the committee and all was instantly clear: despite having a special relationship with two of the founding members of the fair, I would be, and ultimately was, dropped. Between the members and me there was: 1. An affair 15 years ago that didn’t end well; 2. A dispute from a transaction after being charged 50 percent of the purchase price for shipping; 3. A near fistfight at a boozed-up event at Basel last year; 4. The best friend of the preceding three.
Then there was this email sent by a NYC gallery which is working with many of the emerging artists I used to represent: ‘I thought I might get your thoughts on how to get the Armory show committee to let us into their fair. Currently we are on a waiting list. Several galleries already in the fair are looking to showcase our artists … Many on the committee will be at the Frieze Fair. I’ve written them. Maybe you know these people and can put a word in for us… We could use the $.’
While travelling to one of the many fairs I actually did participate in over the past year, my wife and kids rented bikes in Battersea Park on a Sunday afternoon. When my 5-year-old got ahead a bit he was abruptly and violently pushed from his bike by a 9-year-old girl and robbed of it. For a week he was badly shaken. Now we’ve been mugged as a family – welcome to Britain. London is like New York in the 1970s when politics was only a glimmer in Giuliani’s eyes. Most everyone I know here has been robbed, at least once.
But my kids always seem to extract the last laugh in the rough and tumble world here. In a Rondinone installation at Frieze that consisted of a snow machine raining white paper flakes in a perfect mound on the floor, one of my little monsters approached and proceeded to lie prone atop the pile like a dying cowboy in a spaghetti western. By coincidence, it was a gallery that served on two out of three of the selection committees referred to above.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
FRIEZE DISEASE, OR THE BURSTING OF THE BALLOON (ARTinvestor Magazine, Fall 2005)
When will the reassessment come, the day of reckoning, for a time when demand not only influences art but instigates it, determines the form? Isn’t the repetitive nature of some art production in endless series just another name for creating more of the same stuff? Does it stop becoming “art” as conventionally conceived to this point? Will there be accountability from a time when a de Kooning pencil drawing is worth less than a Hirst spot print in an edition of 1000? The Chapman brothers’ chuckle that their embellishments to Goya prints retail for more than the originals, as if that’s something to boast about rather than lament. Welcome to the world of contemporary art. Maybe the Frieze disease will end when rising interest rates throw a wrench into the runway inflation of contemporary art prices. That’s when the fairs will loose their stranglehold on who does and does not get to participate in the international art dealing game. Cliques of self-congratulatory dealers, patting themselves on the back at denying participation of those not deemed cool enough or worthy enough to play. A cesspool of intertwined worms under a rock.
Don’t get me wrong, I too am admittedly complicit in the enterprise, yet another opportunistic virus, taking advantage of the run up in prices of the select artists (like everyone else) coveted by the present market.
Sign of the times: In a recent fair I observed a private dealer friend, invited with room and board to one fair after another like a gambler to Atlantic City, buy down one isle and sell down the next, time and again. In the same fair! Talk about inefficiencies in markets and the vagueness of what passes for hard information in the art world.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe. I learned firsthand art-world-style that sometimes a pipe really isn’t a pipe purchasing a contemporary photograph by a white-hot artist, signed and dated, from a “collector” at last year’s Armory Fair in New York. This occurred when I made a subsequent sale of the work and the purchaser called the well-known, old school New York Chelsea gallerist who then shot down the sale, denying the authenticity of the print. Her reasoning was that it was not what it appeared to be on its face, from a desirable series by the artist, and was worth substantially less than the agreed upon sales price. These comments were communicated to my client in the face of emails from the very gallery to a prior purchaser to the contrary. This happened with 3 further attempts to sell the work and I was only able to attain a proper certificate from the gallery after hiring a lawyer to draw up a complaint for defamation and interference of a contract. Does this happen anywhere other than in the art world?
I have no issues with the fact more people are looking at, making and buying art than at any other time prior in history. This is a good, wonderful, healthy phenomenon and the fairs in the best of worlds act as non-threatening, welcoming environments in which to experience and appreciate art. Perhaps the fairs are even contributing to the ultimate obsolescence of galleries themselves. However, when connoisseurship and aesthetics are sacrificed in the name of fashion and speculation, you end up with a dangerous minefield. Collectors flipping art without sometimes even a rudimentary viewing should be a bright red flag that danger lurks on horizon.
Don’t get me wrong, I too am admittedly complicit in the enterprise, yet another opportunistic virus, taking advantage of the run up in prices of the select artists (like everyone else) coveted by the present market.
Sign of the times: In a recent fair I observed a private dealer friend, invited with room and board to one fair after another like a gambler to Atlantic City, buy down one isle and sell down the next, time and again. In the same fair! Talk about inefficiencies in markets and the vagueness of what passes for hard information in the art world.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe. I learned firsthand art-world-style that sometimes a pipe really isn’t a pipe purchasing a contemporary photograph by a white-hot artist, signed and dated, from a “collector” at last year’s Armory Fair in New York. This occurred when I made a subsequent sale of the work and the purchaser called the well-known, old school New York Chelsea gallerist who then shot down the sale, denying the authenticity of the print. Her reasoning was that it was not what it appeared to be on its face, from a desirable series by the artist, and was worth substantially less than the agreed upon sales price. These comments were communicated to my client in the face of emails from the very gallery to a prior purchaser to the contrary. This happened with 3 further attempts to sell the work and I was only able to attain a proper certificate from the gallery after hiring a lawyer to draw up a complaint for defamation and interference of a contract. Does this happen anywhere other than in the art world?
I have no issues with the fact more people are looking at, making and buying art than at any other time prior in history. This is a good, wonderful, healthy phenomenon and the fairs in the best of worlds act as non-threatening, welcoming environments in which to experience and appreciate art. Perhaps the fairs are even contributing to the ultimate obsolescence of galleries themselves. However, when connoisseurship and aesthetics are sacrificed in the name of fashion and speculation, you end up with a dangerous minefield. Collectors flipping art without sometimes even a rudimentary viewing should be a bright red flag that danger lurks on horizon.
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