Art Overload
A Recap of the Art Fairs that Ate Miami

By the MiamiARTzine.com Team

There were two kinds of art lovers the beginning of December: Those who wanted to be to be at Miami and Miami Beach’s art fairs, and those who were.

For one glorious week, the cities of fun and sun were transformed into an art lover’s paradise, a fantasy land in which any kind of art was available.  For a small price, one could view a tremendous range of art from all over the world; for a substantially higher price, one could take a piece of art home.

Perhaps you made it a point to attend every event possible during that whirlwind of a week.  Perhaps you made it to a few carefully selected venues.  Perhaps you didn’t make it at all.  MiamiARTzine.com was out in full force, with our intrepid writers and photographers covering more events than one would think humanly possible.  Below you’ll find perspectives on three different art fairs by three different writers, along with a sprinkling of images from the week that was.  For tons more images from Art Basel, Art Miami, and many of the gallery events and satellite shows, visit the photo galleries in this issue.  Check it out and relive the magic.

Art Basel: Dense but Dazzling

By Leslie Pariseau

At noon the line was already snaking out the door and down the sidewalk.  Bespectacled intellectuals oscillated between languages. Fanny pack toting tourists gawked at the gallery directory. Chic mother-daughter pairs wielded credit cards and Cartier gift bags. And I weaved through it all, attempting to make it in.

As a former art history student, I tend toward a certain meandering path when observing objects. I like to take my time studying details, reflecting upon context and measuring up the eye of the curator. That said, my limit stands at two hours, lest the visual pleasure shatter into dissonance.

From the first peek into the Convention Center’s double doors, Art Basel was a cacophony of stimuli.  Every imaginable shape, texture and color assaults the viewer—and from every imaginable angle.  A literal maze of temporary white space containers, Basel is an amalgamation of the world’s top 200 galleries exploding within one raucous room.

I was looking forward to seeing Art Supernova—a 20-gallery collaboration, and a new edition to Basel’s lineup.  I zigzagged through the main event following the Supernova placards, but upon arrival, wasn’t sure where the exhibition began and where the main galleries ended. The same went for Art Nova. Maybe I missed the target, but luckily I ran into Snitzer Gallery and Perrotin along the way.

Always rooting for the home team, I stopped by to check out the spaces and observed a swift business being completed at Perrotin’s animae-esque collection.  Snizter’s always cleanly-curated gallery space displayed a large and gritty piece by Michael Vasquez, while the Art Kabinett space featured a one-man show of Jose Bedia’s multi-media installation.  Every gallery beyond and in between dazzled with impeccable attention to detail, strange and beautiful works, and a prim assistant reporting sales via i-phones.

Basel is an Event. It’s incredible to see the world’s most prestigious galleries bringing in today’s edgiest contemporary work. It’s the perfect time to catch up on my long overdue art world gossip and observe the characters it draws out.  It showcases Miami Beach as an in-the-know art hotspot, and brings together groups of people who may never cross paths otherwise. But it is equally as frustrating to elbow through crowds of wallet-bearing art-shoppers just to catch a breath in front of a Rothko I could see in any number of museums.  But never mind, I’m sure I’ll brave the crowd next year to do the same.  So continues my love-hate relationship with Art Basel.

Art Miami: A Little Something for the Living Room,
Perhaps?

By Penn Bullock

We pulled up to Art Miami, in the Wynwood Art District, on a Saturday. Considering this was a world-historic art fair taking place under a 100,000 square-foot tent honeycombed by 99 galleries, parking was very easy. We found a spot about three blocks away on a vacant street. Getting a press pass was just as breezy. Then, into the tent, where our party fanned out among the endless exhibits. The gallery spaces were mazy, floor-to-ceiling cubicles, their white walls resplendent not with a family photo and tacked-up company memos, but work after work of the most recherché contemporary art.

Near the entrance to Art Miami, a painting on the wall of the Chelsea Gallery caught my eye. Shaped like a Yield sign, it portrayed an art fair where the canvasses are blank and the visitors have no shadows. At the bottom was a tiny self-portrait of the artist, Kate Kretz, in front of a canvas. The painting was called Requiem… For Wassily and the Ineffable, and Kretz says it’s a representation of the “lurid green haze of commerce.” By the time I saw it, on the second-to-last-day of Art Miami, it had already sold for $50,000 dollars.

The people there that day were not like the caricatured dilettantes in the painting. They were well-heeled whites; a few sported wine glasses and bourgeois black-rim glasses. But most of them dressed casually for the event and milled about just as casually. Though Art Miami served, first and foremost, as a marketplace, no evidence of bazaar activities surfaced. Indeed, it was hard to believe that many of the people there were in the midst of making the most expensive purchases in the world.

There was no lurid green haze to speak of, but there was a build-up of heat under the tent. Sweating, we weaved our way through the galleries, soaking in innumerable masterpieces. A set of Diane Arbus photos exemplified the power of the camera: The odd, anonymous people she pictured in the 1970s moved across time and protruded from the surface of the photographs, demanding to be known. Each one sold for more than a car. Two other pieces fascinated me: an unbelievable photograph by Burk Veele of a Prada store in Marfa, Texas, surrounded by desert, the inside lit in lurid green; and a painting by Rackstraw Downes of a brick-red, public apartment complex in New Jersey just before its demolishment in 1993.

Near the end of our visit, we walked through the Xin Dong Cheng Gallery, a Chinese import blessedly free of lead. A giant painting by artist Wu Mingzhong was literally strident: a woman—seen from the thighs down, wearing a neon-red dress and translucent heels—crosses the painting with Tiananmen Square looming distantly in the background under a monochrome gray sky. Never, I thought, has the rise of China in the 21^st century been so fearsomely rendered. Adjacent to it were two other gems: a beheaded, porcelain statuette of a Red Guard, which had sold for $8,000; and a dazzling lacquer painting by the Lou Brothers, a Maoist propaganda poster updated for the corporate age with psychedelic Coca-Cola logos and cherubic babies riding soda bottles. I thought it would look fabulous on my living room wall, but it cost $25,000. I didn’t buy it.

Photo Miami:  Snap Judgments

By Simone Van Erkelens

This year during Art Basel, Photo Miami, one of the most anticipated contemporary photo fairs, lived up to its conception.

I half expected to see photography and nothing else. However, the exhibition space consisted of photography superimposed with new media, old-fashioned paint, moving text and pictures, and sound. As the head of the selection committee suggested, it was all and nothing at the same time.

Immediately, upon entering the fair, there were large photographs of contemporary furniture arranged in neat orderly settings. A living room that no one has lived in. A bed made up perfectly—no creases in the white down comforter, and no head imprint in the pillows. Everything in its place, and then someone came along and dashed paint across the orderly photographs. Thankfully so, because staring at the procession of photos would have become increasingly boring had not someone not strewn mint green pain across the glossy print. I found myself attempting to look under and around the brushstrokes just to see how boring it really was underneath. It then made me wonder why I even cared.

Alex Prager often chooses women as subjects of his photography. The photo of a group of women gathered in a confrontational circle on the beach invited questions of who did what. But the photo of a dark-haired young woman walking away from something caused me to stand a little longer where I was. The woman is obviously leaving behind something very important, as her blank stare implies, she ignores the suitcase she is dragging behind her. The suitcase had come open and several teddy bears and dolls spill out onto a perfectly manicured lawn. Where is she going, or rather, where is she coming from in which all that is required is a good many stuffed animals?

As I walked further into the fair, at each installation there existed new reasons for new thought. Reaching into my bag for my bright pink, soft leather notebook, and my Uniball Exact pen, my hands mechanically pressed pen to paper, but my eyes could not be pulled from the images in front of me. With some pieces, I easily entered into them and had trouble finding my way back out. One such installation was Norbert Brunner's work. On a large screen is displayed a video of a man and woman's face, who speak alternately in a computerized monotone, their faces covering the entirety of the screen. Of what they spoke I could not be sure. Underneath the screen, a rather large, roughly eight foot long inflatable structure with thousands of "dots" inside are reminiscent of packing "peanuts" in various colors.

Brunner appeared and touched his fingers to the plastic piece in which the air enters and/or leaves the piece. He spoke of his work in intense and excitable tones. As an artist who creates art for public art spaces, he described his fascination with his "communication pieces" and the selection of a transparent plastic bubble for material as representation of his longing to create a bridge between the public and the museum. An opaque bubble, that leaves nothing to chance and displays everything as is. After leaving Brunner's unforgettable installations, I accidentally slipped behind an unsuspecting wall that held on the other side, Hector Madera Gonzalez' Optical Borderline: Housing Development project. A hot pink neon sculpture at its core, the installation consisted of an evocative wall drawing based on old iron grill works dated in the 1950s.