- Venue
- Frieze
- Location
- London
I heard a story about a friend of a friend – you might know how it goes… an American couple are holidaying on the East Anglian coast, they decided to take a walk, but don’t really know where they are going. After a while they see a sign: “Unstable 2 miles” it says, fine they think – lets walk to Unstable, two miles seems like an OK distance. You might be able to guess the rest of the story, after having mistaken the word Unstable for the name of a neighbouring village rather than a report on the condition of the cliffs, our American friends blindly set off across dangerous terrain, finding themselves puzzled and amused by the shouts and waves they received from the residents on the shore below.
The word stable is perhaps more open to interpretation that its negative partner unstable. Yesterday I searched for Ceal Floyer’s commission for the Frieze Art Fair. You always have to search with Floyer’s work and part of its delight comes in the finding. The piece was located within one of the fair’s café areas, the enormity of the Frieze tent meant that this area incorporated a number of the park’s trees, giving the place a mildly surreal inside-out quality. Here amongst the tree-leaves and tea leaves, all I had to go on was the title: Stable. My instinct, I discovered was leading me to cast around for some sort of home for horses, having just walked past Agnieszka Kurant’s cage of trained parrots, I thought perhaps I was in for another livestock experience. However I’m pleased to say that my little pony did not come to Frieze this year. Instead I eventually found the most effecting piece in the fair, and one which I would argue forms an intriguing optic through which to view Frieze itself. In this piece Floyer has ensured the stability or otherwise of all the tables in the café by placing cream coloured beer-mat-like bits of cardboard under all of the legs of all of the tables. This minor intervention speaks of propping something up, creating a temporary support system and a co-dependency – if one of the beer-mats is dislodged the table will wobble. It is a staged improvisation which nods to a familiar yet fragile gesture against ever present forces of instability.
Much of the press coverage of the fair so far has centred on perceived cautiousness of collectors at this years event, yet most are careful to emphasize that sales are being made, with one writer predicting that this could be “the art world’s last big blow out” (1). So no cause for alarm just yet then, the folded beer-mat wedged under the world’s economies continues to stay in place, just long enough for this year’s parade of contemporary art collectors to take that walk around Frieze – ignoring the shouts from below.
(1) Will The Party Soon Be Over for the Frieze Crowd?, Ben Lewis, Evening Standard, Friday 17 October, 2008.
