Frieze Art Fair 2011: Highlights (Part II)

Following our earlier coverage of London’s Frieze Art Fair, AM made a return visit before it closed last weekend to spend a few more hours considering the curation and presentation of exhibitor booths along with the individual works on display.

See more commentary and additional photos of what caught our eye after the jump. By way of advance notice, in more traditional working environments, a couple of images (especially in the gallery section) would probably be deemed NSFW. So don’t blame us if a colleague catches a glimpse of your screen and you suddenly go down in their estimation. That mask of respectability was bound to slip at some point in any event.

At the Galerie Peter Kilchmann booth, we became enamoured with a 2004 video called Railings by Francis Alÿs. It had the understated charm characteristic of his filmed pieces and shows him walking down residential streets with a drum stick, rhythmically tapping railings and building columns as he passes by. AM couldn’t find the specific clip online but the artist has done a few different Railings videos, such as this one from his website.

Francis Alÿs is for us an art rock star. We see continuity and affinity between his work and many of the poetic interactions with public space by younger artists we’re also enthusiastic about, like Brad Downey and Sweden’s Akay.

In a series of at least four separate actions called The Leak — the first of which was realised in São Paulo in 1995 — Alÿs would puncture a can of paint and then carry it long distances, allowing a continuous line of paint to trail behind him. One of these, filmed in Paris in 2003, can be viewed here. Although we don’t know whether it’s the case, such actions may well have had an influence on subsequent comparable interventions by other artists, notwithstanding differences of concept or intent. Those that come to mind include MOMO tagging the width of Manhattan in 2006, and the 2004 street piece in London’s Notting Hill and Goldborne Road areas by Banksy (described in his Cut It Out book as ”Britain’s longest painting — allegedly”) featuring a kitten entangled in orange yarn at one end of the paint line, and a girl connecting an orange-corded electrical plug into a socket at the other end.

Despite being very familiar with the work of Andreas Gursky, we needed more than one look and separate confirmation from a helpful gallerist at Sprüth Magers before realising the above image was an aerial-view photograph (or a c-print of stitched photos, if being precise). To our shame, we had never previously heard of The World: a man-made archipelago constructed in the shape of a world map off the coast of Dubai. In our defence, it’s been a little while since we’ve been in the market to purchase a private island. And if today we had to choose a side of the social and cultural divide, we’d probably align ourselves with this chap.

With All Watched Over by Machines of Infinite Loving Grace at the Wilkinson booth, Mark Alexander created a reduced-scale copy on canvas of the first two panels of Hieronymus Bosch‘s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Despite its as-yet-complete third panel, the work was reported to have quickly sold to the Olbricht Collection.

Any fans of the band Dead Can Dance reading this post? If so, you’ll also be familiar with a detail of the Bosch painting — showing two nudes within a transparent sphere — which was used for the cover of the album, Aion.

AM has been on a Do Ho Suh cheerleading session recently. We were therefore thrilled to spot Cause & Effect, a chandelier-like sculpture by the artist at Lehmann Maupin’s booth. It gave us an excuse to keep wearing our skimpy skirts and continue practicing those human pyramid formations. Check out the close-up shot to see the acrylic interlocking figurines sitting on the shoulders of one another.

Now that Frieze Art Fair 2011 is over, AM is looking forward to Frieze New York’s inaugural fair in Randall’s Island Park, Manhattan in May 2012, i.e. two months after Armory Week in March. With Pulse New York having announced it will also take place in early May, we’ll continue to observe with interest to see what impact these and other developments have for The Armory Show — first in securing the participation of key exhibitors who may not feel the need to be in more than one New York art fair per year, and second in terms of visitor attendance and overall sales. Stay tuned.

Text and photographs by Patrick Nguyen.