- Venue
- Frieze
- Location
- London
The Frieze Art Fair is not about art so much as about selling stuff.
Stuff is what the art mostly looks like at this fair – a jumble of multi-colored, multi-textured stuff, that hangs on or drips from walls, lies about in lumps, sits in or on boxes and does its best to catch attention by clashing with the neighbours.
Hard to believe that anyone with £5000.00 or more to spare would choose this way to buy a work of art. The buyers, and we guess who they are from the orange suntan, stylish clothes, and lack of Frieze Art Badge (those must be the dealers) were perhaps fewer in number than in previous years. Let all poor artists hope that the Credit Crunch will regulate the acquistive urges of these glittering city folk and turn them into true art lovers, prepared in future to spend time and intellectual effort in the pure pursuit of Art. For Arts sake.
To return to the Fair. Do not expect to see painting here. Most things in frames will try and jump out of them in a rather tired conceptual manner. 3D work prevails, but it would not generally be termed sculpture. Cleverness is important, but not particularly clever, and rarely illuminating. Photography, perhaps intrinsically contemporary, succeeded best when exploiting this natural advantage. Some works found novel ways to detach themselves from the hectic background – Cindy Sherman had put on the slap and gone into overdrive, every portrait a scarily recognisable self-portrait.
Brit Art is there of course. Works by other well known artists- the contemporary canon- could be found quietly sitting it out in an under appreciated sort of way. Over a doorway Richard Wentworth’s ‘Late 20th Century Flag 1993’ – 6 multi-colored glasses on a shelf, exuded a quiet self confidence. Sculptures by Anish Kapoor had a hard time claiming their space: almost impossible to look properly at the lovely transparent cube of ‘Laboratory for a New Model of the Universe’ .
National culture may be relevant: the spanish speaking galleries lively, fresh and involved, the germanic and french rather indigestible. The english language galleries covered the widest spectrum of work.
Beauty was to be found wrapped around sweets – perhaps they were chocolates- a gorgeous mass of shiny paper in ultramarine blues, the sweets piled on the floor of an unusually generous space that fostered the magic of colour and texture.
Tenderness and delicacy were also there and such a relief to come accross. The Mathew Marks Gallery showed a porcelain work by Charles Ray, ‘Hand Holding Egg’ , a plump child’s hand holding an empty egg with a hole in the shell, the small hollow sculpture on a white plinth the only object in the large white room.
So much to see. Too much.
