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Will the party soon be over for the Frieze crowd?
Ben Lewis17 Oct 2008
As usual, Frieze is a mesmerising, multi-coloured, infinitely varied, by turns infuriating and inspiring, ultimately exhausting panoply nay, jumble of contemporary art. For the first hour that you walk round it, Frieze looks like a Powerpoint prophecy of the future. By the third hour, you feel you're in the art world's Camden Market (tie-dye section).
Marble sculptures by little-known Mexican minimalists stand opposite the baroque vitrines of American video artists; politically engaged Cuban conceptualists trail red carpets past mosaics of gold jewellery, fluorescent junk and pencil shavings. In the air the sound of thunder and lightning an artwork of course mingles with the squawks of parrots who have, so they say, been taught to bark.
Amid the global economic meltdown, this Frieze also has an air of significance after 10 years of the contemporary art boom, this is likely to be the art world's last big blow-out.
No one has calculated exactly how many works of art there are at Frieze, but the 151 galleries have on average about eight works each, so a reasonable guesstimate would be 1,208.
Who would attempt to sift through all these works of art and compile a chart of the 10 best and 10 worst?
10 OF THE BEST...
O Zhang
The World is Yours but Also Ours (CRG Gallery)
£3,000-£6,000
This simple but significant series of photos by a young Chinese artist satirises the new clichés of Chinese capitalism, and beyond that of global Capitalism, suggesting they are as full of phoney pleasures and forced smiles as Communism. The photographs, all taken in China, feature young people surrounded by slogans. A girl smiles at the camera with a T-shirt with the brightly coloured motto “Everything is s***”. In another a Chinese boy wears a pirated T‑shirt with the misspelt “Adidsa”. Behind him is an Olympic mascot and underneath, in Chinese, the artist has written “The Olympic Spirit”. O Zhang studied in London at Central St Martins, but now lives in LA.
Grayson Perry
Map of Nowhere, 2008 (Victoria Miro)
£16,000
Perry's prints are as good as his pots. This one brings together key concepts of the world today and arranges them around what is simultaneously the artists's body and a map of the globe. Inspired by medieval maps and mystical diagrams, there are churches for Microsoft, Tesco and Starbucks. A shanty town on stilts is labelled “Free Market Economy”.
Attila Csorgo
Untitled, 2000 (Galerija Gregor Podnar)
Price undisclosed
Csorgo, an obscure Hungarian artist who produces intricate machines, has created the most complicated contraption in the fair. A baffling combination of small wooden levers, nylon string, and odd weights made from screws move gently to create geometric forms of triangles and polyhedrons. It's minimalism meets Heath Robinson.
Gabriel Kuri
Untitled, 2008 (Sadie Coles)
£18,000
A graduate of Goldsmiths, Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri is a master of the popular conceptual art ploy of using oddly contrasting materials to create gentle emotional effects. Here, rectangles of marble with curved edges, which are probably offcuts from a tombstone-cutter, are balanced vertically on the wall, like a piece of modernist design.
George Condo
The Internal Rape of Rodrigo, 2008
(Simon Lee)
£160,000
It's only a small exaggeration to say that George Condo is a Francis Bacon in waiting. For three decades the artist has produced fabulously painted twisted cartoon-like portraits of characters with sharp teeth and bulging eyes, which convey the hysterical laughter of the traumatised. He's my favourite painter at under a million.
Olaf Breuning
Smoke Bombs, 2008 (Metro Pictures, NYC)
£8,600, edition of five
This brilliantly funny Swiss artist is the Groucho Marx of conceptual art. In this new work he has used planks and stepladders to build a temporary rig for a set of coloured smoke canisters. It's a slapstick gag about abstract colour painting and, price-wise, it's a bargain.
Sarah Jones
Colony (Studio) (I), 2008 (Maureen Paley)
£6,000
The London-based photographer makes a welcome departure from flowers, of which we have surely had enough in contemporary art, and takes a photograph of the after-image left by the removal of an object from a wall — judging by the title, a picture. Austerely beautiful.
Claire Barclay
Bit Part, 2008 (Doggerfisher, Edinburgh)
Price undisclosed
The Glaswegian artist's immaculate installation is almost certainly destined for a museum. A grey-painted construction with shelves and drawers that hovers somewhere between a wardrobe and a bed supports a cloth hanging of sexy pink and red shapes. Underneath it there's a mirror. It's like a post-Bacon figure re-imagined as a piece of furniture.
Carter
Untitled (Hotel Gallery)
£44,000
This east London gallery specialises in showing difficult and sensitive art. New York painter Carter makes “self-portraits” in which his image never becomes clear. In this large work he distributes blobs of paint (previously prepared on glass), outlines of his face, ears and other bits and pieces and the odd inexplicable word over a blown-up photograph of a Fifties interior.
Shirazeh Houshiary and Pip Horne
Undoing the Knot (Lisson Gallery)
Price undisclosed
Minimalism has been given a new breath of life in recent years by artists from developing countries who have monumentalised local ornament and patterns to create politically charged abstract sculptures. In this elegant 6.5m outdoor sculpture, the Iranian-born but London-based artist Houshiary uses Arabian, surely religious, decorative motifs in a twisted cone.
AND 10 OF THE WORST
Juergen Teller
Maria Carla, 2008
(Lehmann Maupin)
“A five figure sum”
Oh, here's a cute supermodel without her kit on! After 4,000 years of Western civilisation, I would have thought that we could all agree on the difference between soft porn and art.
Piotr Uklanski
Untitled (Laxmi), 2008
(Gagosian)
c£290,000
Here is an abstract painting made from piles and piles of pencil shavings from one of the most over-hyped artists of the last half‑decade. It's a good idea but not a half‑a-million bucks idea.
Gavin Turk
Cloud Piss Painting, 2008
(Galeria Krinzinger Vienna)
£52,000
Turk “continues” Warhol's “oxidation” paintings, in which the artist urinated on copper paint. During the boom years that are now ending, the art world has got a little confused about what constitutes an interesting work of art. The biggest error? Imagining that copying another artist's work is a conceptual statement.
Terence Koh
“It's a small world after all”
(Perez Projects)
Price undisclosed
Self-styled celebrity artist Koh is the enfant terrible of the New York art world and divides critics. Here, the artist makes a small chair out of casts of his own ears, in his signature white coat of paint. Apparently it's a Buddhist thing – the ears are symbol of being open to the world
Richard Prince
Untitled (Cowboy), 1980-84 Barbara (Gladstone)
£600,000+
There is no better symbol of the distorted values of the contemporary art boom than the prices now paid for framed photographs of the cowboys from Marlboro cigarette adverts by the American artist Richard Prince. They say these are symbols of nostalgia for American power. I say: go watch a Western.
Subodh Gupta
Mind Shut Down, 2008
(Hauser & Wirth, Sculpture Park)
c£200,000-£300,00
Gupta is India's most expensive contemporary artist. His trademark materials — doesn't every contemporary artist have to them nowadays? — are Indian cooking utensils, from which the artist makes displays on shelves, free-standing “sculptures” and now skulls. Wonder where he got the skull idea from?
Aristarkh Chernyshev and Alexei Shulgin
“Nowpod”, 2008
(XL Gallery Moscow)
£17,000
This could almost have been in the other list. Two Russian artists have made a giant warped iPod, with a warped screen that can play all your own videos and podcasts, but with an artistic distortion. It works with any iPod nano — just bring along your own, ask to plug it into this machine and watch your media files become art.
Liam Gillick
Amped Distraction, 2008
(Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp)
Price undisclosed
Actually I love any art with stripes but I don't think I should. These thin vertical three-dimensional lacquered ones narrowly beat Udo Rondinone's thick horizontal ones at Almine Rech into this chart. As usual, with the British artist Liam Gillick, the idea is to engage with the basic vocabulary of corporate modernist design.
Agnieska Kurant
Ready Unmade
(Frieze Project)
Price undisclosed
Here is an aviary full of tropical plants and three large parrots, who were trained to bark. The art world seems to think it can take anything from the real world, plonk it into a gallery environment, and then make something deeply meaningful. Most of the time, these things looked better in the real world, and parrots are no exception. It might have worked, if I'd heard the parrots utter a convincing bark.
Wilfriedo Prieto
Ascended Line 2008
(Frieze Project)
Price undisclosed
Prieto's neat conceptual installations usually involve some kind of attack on power. This time around a long red carpet leads from the entrance of the fair, round various galleries and then out of the marquee and up a flagpole — the flag of celebrity. This might have been a critique of the glitz of the art world, if it hadn't been totally neutralised by an award from a French luxury goods manufacturer. What hypocrisy! Another art world error: you can't have your cake and eat it, even if you are an artist criticising an art fair.
Reader views (1)
Yes Camden market tie die, patchouli oil and sad silver toe rings comes to mind.
- Lat, london u.k, 18/10/2008 13:00
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