________________________________________joanne@joannemattera.com www.joannemattera.com
200 Seventh Avenue #1030, New York, NY 10011 Cell: 917. 921. 0044 Phone/fax: 212. 691. 5500
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December 15, 2005
© Joanne Mattera, 2005
Never mind that the crowd came three weeks before the winter solstice, this was Spring Break for artists and collectors. I saw much of Manhattan in Miami. (And there were so many art people from so many places, I’m sure the same experience was being repeated for folks from Chicago or Akron or, for that matter, Montevideo). You couldn’t walk 10 feet without running into, and chatting with, or end up going to dinner with, someone you knew. The atmosphere was festive, but make no mistake: It was all about the benjamins. The dealers were there to sell, sell, sell, and the collectors to buy, buy, buy. The reporters, curators, critics and artists were there to connect their various dots. Except for the booth-bound dealers who appeared to get paler by the day, everyone else seemed to be having a good time.
I took it all in, moving at a pace that could be called pokey—a welcome change for me—and I actually went to the beach one morning and rented a chaise longue at the Delano. I was staying at the considerably more downscale Cadet on the next block inland, but hey, for $20, I had my own little patch for luxury for a few hours.
But scratching that lovely Miami surface, I found other things. By about Saturday, there was a palpable undercurrent throughout the fairs of either elation (as in, “One more painting to go and I will have sold out my booth!”) or desperation (as in, “Omigod, will I sell anything at all?” ). The newspaper articles stoked the psychic flames with reports of who was selling what and for how much. Even normally reserved dealers were resonating at a pretty fierce extrasensory decible level.
There were also some very clear mismatches—for instance, Boston’s wonderful OH+T Gallery was just too much of a class act for the cheesy Frisbee venue—and there was one heartbreaker: at the Scope fair, Gallery 55 from Shanghai posted this note on its closed door (I’m paraphrasing): “Can’t participate. DHL lost our entire shipment of paintings.”
In its fourth year, Art Basel Miami at the Convention Center, and its satellite in Collins Park, Art Positions a.k.a the Containers, were the big draw, but the independent satellites—Aqua Art, Frisbee, NADA, Pulse and Scope—got plenty of attention, as did the three big private collections that opened their doors to the busloads: Rubell (www.rubellfamilycollection.com); Margulies (www.margulieswarehouse.com); and
Cisneros Fontanals (www.cifo.org/index.php ), all in the Wynwood district of Miami proper. There was more—the year-round Miami galleries and museums—but you’ll have to get someone else to tell you about them because I didn’t see them. Next year.
By the way, the next time someone throws that “art is useless” comment at you, you might counter that, esthetic enrichment aside, art is good for the economy. Some 36,000 people attended the fairs (“Record attendance,” according to the Miami Herald, December 6, 2005), which means that thousands of people paid for hotel rooms, ate, tippled, tipped and traveled.
This is the Big Mama of the four-day event: 195 booths spread out over the Miami Convention Center’s acres of indoor space. The second-level Skywalk corridor, which links various parts of the gargantuan venue, offered a bird’s eye view of the vast expanse in the main hall. I couldn’t find any mention of actual square footage—the Miami Convention Center site says it’s “four city blocks”—but it was many, many football fields worth of floorspace. There’s a point here, which is that every square inch was filled with booths, which were laden with art, in a hall that was packed with people, many (most?) of whom were loaded with dollars, euros, and pesos. I visited the hall on Thursday afternoon, December 1, and again on Sunday the 4th. Some of what was in the booths had changed, so art was moving. Even when it hadn’t moved off the wall, money had still changed hands. Though you didn’t see red dots anywhere, the response I heard most often to “How much is this?” or “Is this available?” was “It’s been sold.”
And what about the art? A lot of it appeared to be secondary-market work. Albers, Basquiat, De Kooning, Lichtenstein, Malevich, Martin, Mitchell, Motherwell, early Stella, Twombley and the like. Sell one of those babies if you’re a dealer, and the booth, your staff, the hotel bill, and all the exhibition expenses are paid. Five times over. (Booths ran about $50,000 for the week; some paintings in the seven figures. Do the math.)
The event is a smorgasbord of themes and trends anchored by those secondary-market paintings. If you visit the New York galleries regularly, you have a good sense of what was there. Special features were meant to give texture and variety to the event. “Art Kabinett” shows, set within a gallery’s larger booth, were curated mini exhibitions; an “Art Nova” section highlighted “emerging galleries” showing the work of “emerging artists”—or as the Art Basel press material put it, “150 of the hottest, most in-demand artists in the young art scene.” Yikes, and I thought we were over that when we left high school.
Here’s a direct link to Art Basel Miami so that you can see the entire list of exhibitors and get a better sense of the layout: http://www.artbaselmiamibeach.com/ca/cc/ss/?lang=eng
Now I can focus on what interested me:
. Mary Heilman’s abstractions at Zurich’s Hauser and Wirth booth. Heilman, one of my favorite painters, curated her own show. The paintings were geometric with grid references, undulating lines and brilliant colors. And let’s hear it for 65-year-old women getting attention for their work. See more at http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/work.php?worktype=selected&artist_id=32
. North-South/East-West: Geometric Abstraction in Europe, the US and Latin America, a booth within a booth (one of the “Art Kabinett” installations) at the Mary Anne Martin/Rachel Adler Booth. This curatorial effort was splendid, a museum-quality show with painting and sculpture primarily from the mid-20th century, including Joseph Albers, Gego, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin, proving that geography is no barrier to geometry. www.mamfa.com
. The brilliant, smallish geometric abstractions of Myron Stout at Joan Washburn’s booth. www.artnet.com/jwashburn.html
. At Nachst St. Stephan booth, Imi Knoebel’s supersize paintings of pure color on thin sheets of plywood—geometric abstraction, color field painting and relief sculpture all rolled (flattened, actually) into one. There was much to like from this Viennese dealer: Polly Apfelbaum and Jessica Stockholder among them. www.schwarzwaelder.at
. Another interesting painting on thin plywood was Luiz Zerbini’s contemporary constructivist work in micaceous pink and silvery green from Sao Paolo’s Fortes Vilaca gallery. www.fortesvilaca.com.br
. Casa Triangulo, a Sao Paolo gallery, featured geometric patterning in Lucia Koch’s photographs of Portuguese tiles, and Felipe Barbosa’s mad crazy formalism of a patterned hanging pieced together from hexagonal sections of soccer balls. (The Portuguese-speaking booths seem to have shown more geometric abstraction than anyone else.) www.casatriangulo.com
. Giorgio Morandi’s Zen-like still lifes at Milan’s Galleria Tega, small windows of calm in a thrumming arena.
. Candida Hofer’s monumental photographs of monumental empty spaces at various booths, including Rio’s Galeria OMR. Hofer was everywhere at the fair. Tons of photography everywhere, too. Tons of everything, actually. www.galeriaomr.com
. Nancy Rubin’s big torn-paper sculptures at Paul Kasmin’s booth. You know the ones: raucous explosions of graphite covered paper. www.paulkasmingallery.com
. Cheim & Read, one of my favorite booths, with Jonathan Lasker’s squiggly, weav-y abstractions; Louise Fishman’s loose grids; and material-y sculptures by Lynda Benglis and Louise Bourgeois. www.cheimread.com
. Louise Bourgeois, in all her phases over the years, from prints to wooden constructions to stuffed cotton totems, was a welcome site throughout the fair.
Overwhelmed? You don’t know the half of it. Though I set out with a map and a plan, I was soon lost in a maze of booths and found myself doubling back, tripling back, to some sections while missing other areas altogether. The place place is so vast you needed a GPS to get around. Not having one, I chose the opposite course and offered myself up to the gestalt—as in go with the flow.
In this state of pleasant disorientation, I happened upon an installation of a tiny glass shop. A worktable was reflected in the mirror at the back of the space, a broom propped against the mirror. But something wasn’t right. The words Vidrios and Mirrors that were written on the front window were not reflected backward in the mirror on the back wall. I walked into the little space—and feeling a bit like Lucy in that episode with Harpo—put my hand to the mirror. There was no other me. There was no mirror. What up, yo? I walked through this non-mirror into a back room that was a constructed reflection of the space in front. By this time a crowd had gathered to watch the bewildered person in the “shop,” then entered to experience the same bewilderment for themselves. The installation was the work of Leandro Erlich at the Benzacar Gallery. You can see pictures at this Buenos Aires gallery’s website, www.ruthbenzacar.com .
And wouldn’t you know it, as I walked out of the installation, I found myself at the entry doors to the fair. I’m not sure I could have planned that little navigational maneuver if I’d tried.
As for the outdoor Art Positions, 20 shipping containers repurposed as galleries and plunked down into Collins Park a couple of blocks away from the Convention Center, I can tell you that I loved the idea of them much more than I liked what was in them.
Finally, here’s a little thought for artists who have faced rejection from dealers: Six hundred dealers, many of them blue-chippers, applied for a booth, but only one-third of them got in.
Links:
. A selection of press reports on Google ( www.google.com ). Write “Art Basel Miami Beach” in the search box.
. Much was made on the huge and spectacular sales made at this event. Some of the best reporting in this area was done by Carly Berwick from the New York Sun. Here are two links to stories on December 5 and 1, respectively:
. http://www.nysun.com/article/23957?page_no=2
. http://www.nysun.com/article/23807
. Overall coverage: Artnet www.artnet.com
I’m listing them in the order that makes sense. If I listed them in the order I liked, it would be Pulse, Aqua Art, Scope, NADA and Frisbee.
Pulse www.pulse-art.com
If you’re familiar with the Affordable Art Fair that takes place the last weekend of October in New York, you might recognize Pulse as the the bodybuilder version: trimmed of the fat (60 U.S. and international dealers versus the AAF’s 150+) but bulked up via curatorial focus.
The fair was aptly named. It generated plenty of blood-quickening interest in fairgoers. “Did you go to Pulse yet?” was the question I heard most, followed by some version of, “Did you love it?” followed by some version of “Loved it.” The energy inside the air-conditioned tent was throbbing. (So was the makeshift plywood floor, but once you got your sea legs, you mostly forgot about it.)
. At the booth of the San Francisco dealer Patricia Sweetow there were the fabulous, goopy grids of Bernhard Härtter—the apparent love child of Agnes Martin and a zealous plasterer. Check them out at www.patriciasweetowgallery.com
. A 104 x 70” field of reedy freehand horizontal stripes by painter Gary Lang dominated the tiny booth of Nathan Laramendy, an Ojai dealer. See more at www.larramendygallery.com
. At Margaret Thatcher, awash in color and geometry, there was the work from her usual roster, including Robert Sagerman and Marcus Linnenbrink. See more at www.thatcherprojects.com
. Marcia Wood’s booth (disclosure: she represents me in Atlanta) included the serene abstracted landscapes—emphasis on abstracted—by Frances Barth; the small geometric abstractions by a consummate colorist, Larry Bemm; and the encrusted color fields of Rainer Gross. See more at www.marciawoodgallery.com
. The lively, brilliantly hued geometric collages of Lance Letscher and the tranquil but richly layered horizontal stripes of painter Johnnie Winona Ross at Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque. See more at www.levygallery.com.
In New York, see Letcher at Howard Scott Gallery (www.howardscottgallery.com ) and Ross at Stephen Haller (www.stephenhallergallery.com )
. Speaking of collages, Pavel Zoubok is a New York Gallery that specializes in them. Much good work in this booth, including the hair-and-flower petal mandalas of Donna Sharratt. They sound weird but they’re beautiful. See more at www.pavelzoubok.com
This is the satellite show that started the satellite frenzy three years ago when collectors descended, making it the hot new venue. This year, not so much. I don’t know about sales, but word of mouth was that it was not as pulsing as its neighbor under the tent.
Four hundred applicants from 18 countries vied for 83 slots at the hangarlike Ice Palace Film Studio. If Pulse was the AAF on steroids, NADA felt like Big Mama on a severly calorie-restricted diet. I loved the hammocks that lined the allee leading to the entrance, but I didn’t respond to much of what was inside. I put out $20 for the catalog, so I’m better able to tell you what I did like:
. Pete Fagundo’s modest geometries on paper at Shane Campbell. www.shanecampbell.net
. Brian Will’s material-intensive geometries, composed of stuff like oil and dental floss on wood, fingernail polish on linoleum, and oil or encaustic on panel; and Monique Van Genderin’s lyrical geometries at the LA gallery, The Happy Lion. www.thehappylion.com
. Kim Fisher’s color-rich minimalist geometries on stretched canvas at Chelsea’s John Connelly Presents. The edges of the canvas remain untucked and the painting continues onto them. I’m not wild about that detail, but I do like what’s on the stretched canvas. www.johnconnellypresents.com
. Much from the Brooklyn-soon-to-be-Chelsea-based Schroeder Romero, including Jaq Chartier’s stain paintings on panel, and Janice Caswell’s dimensional maplike meanderings. www.schroederromero.com
Aqua Art www.aquaartmiami.com
This two-story, motel-like venue on Collins Avenue, around the corner from the Convention Center, had the best feature: a courtyard. After the total lack of natural light at the Convention Center, Scope’s claustrophobic little rooms (more of which shortly) and Pulse’s bouncy plywood floor, this venue offered the welcome elements of sunlight, terra firma and fresh air. The crowds were big, and the buzz was favorable.
Jac Chartier, the previously mentioned painter and one of the organizers of the show, was clutching a fistful of business cards when I spoke with her on Friday evening. “Dealers have been giving me their cards all day, asking me to consider them for next year,” she said. (Now there’s a turnabout.) She and her partners have no plans to move it from the Aqua Hotel, so it can grow only as big as the number of rooms will allow.
. Vanessa Jackson’s spare linear/curvilinear abstractions at Keith
Talent in the
. Margie Livingston’s paintings of deconstructed grids floating in and against a celestial backdrop at Seattle’s artist-run Soil Gallery. www.soilart.org ; http://margie.net/
. More of Jaq Chartier’s stained “tests” at Platform Gallery: http://www.platformgallery.com/artist_pages/Chartier/Chartier.html . Chartier had terrific presence as an exhibiting artist (Schroeder Romero, Platform, Elizabeth Leach) as well as as an organizer, with her husband Dirk Park, of this event. Chartier is a model of what artists can do for themselves and other artists. Kudos.
. Exhibiting galleries at Aqua Art whose programs I like:
. PDX Contemporary, Portland: www.pdxcontemporaryart.com
. Gallery Joe, Philadelphia: www.galleryjoe.com
. Gregory Lind, San Francisco: www.gregorylindgallery.com
Scope www.scope-art.com
Here’s what I liked:
. Darra Keeton’s small organic, plant-inspired abstractions on paper at Houston’s Rudolph Projects/Artscan Gallery. www.rudolphprojects.com
.Lisa Sigal’s geometric paper and tape drawings at Chelsea’s Frederieke Taylor Gallery. www.frederieketaylorgallery.com
. David Ryan’s curvy geometries painted in acrylic on shaped MDF at Washington D.C.’s Numark Galle ry. www.numarkgallery.com
. Linda Mieko Allen’s fluid geometries in mixed media on panel, and Richard Purdy’s small meticulously organized grids in encaustic at SoHo’s Nancy Hoffman Gallery. www.nancyhoffmangallery.com
. Robert Straight’s vertiginous, askew grids in celebratory hues at Philly’s Schmidt Dean Galle ry. www.schmidtdean.com
. At Bernard Toale, Ambreen Butt’s large gouache-on-paper paintings of contemporary women, jaw-droppingly rendered in the style of Indian/Pakistani miniatures. Butt is a Muslim woman born in Lahore and living in Boston, apparently working at the esthetic and psychic twain of both cultures. www.bernardtoalegallery.com
Frisbee www.frisbeeisfun.com
Don’t call it an art fair. The organizers call this event, which took place at the Cavalier Hotel on Ocean Drive, “a nomadic curatorial project” with artists’ projects and themed installations. I went, looked around, and was about to nomad on out when I saw the sign for OH+T Gallery, a Boston gallery with a sophisticated program (www.ohtgallery.com ). It made the trip worthwhile.
I saw two out of three—Rubell and Margulies—the latter a warehouse full of mostly photography, video, sculpture and installations. When your art dies and goes to heaven, you hope it will be someplace like this. Check out these collections yourself:
. Rubell (www.rubellfamilycollection.com)
. Margulies (www.margulieswarehouse.com )
. Cisneros Fontanals (www.cifo.org/index.php)
Let’s do this again next year.
Joanne