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outubro 22, 2010
Frieze 2010: ten highlights at this year's art fair por Florence Waters, Telegraph
Matéria de Florence Waters originalmente publicada no Telegraph em 14 de outubro de 2010
Performance, pornography, and pounds for sale: it’s the Frieze art fair.
Another year at Frieze, another mind-bogglingly expensive array of contemporary art. The world’s most prestigious private galleries have hand-picked their new big names, their visionaries, to parade under the noses of prospective buyers and gamblers. So what’s new, aside from the fact that year many of the shoppers are marching down the aisles with iPads under arms and Blackberries at fingers?
The Frieze app is a time-saver and a useful addition to the fair, but my favourite new trend at this year’s Frieze is not a technological one. It is that many strong artists appear less willing than ever to sell their wares.
Never before have artists been so dependent on the market. However, pomp, bombast and highly expensive finished sculpture (as per Hirst, Koons, Kapoor) seem to have been ditched in favour of a home-made aesthetic, a return to craft. There is also more performance art than ever. Marina Abramovic told me this week that she thinks performance has never been so important because you cannot sell it, and therefore it is not directly related to the market. It is an atmosphere of seeming integrity that pervades this year’s Frieze.
1. A performance work by Lourival Cuquinha, which was getting a lot of attention, summed this trend up nicely. Titled Jack Pound Financial Art Project (2010), the artist sold five and ten pound shares. He found 42 people to invest in his work, a flag made up of realistic fabric money stitched together by hand. The flag is being presented for auction at Frieze with the starting bid £14,000.
2. Also from Brazil, Maria Nepomuceno’s woven and beaded sculptures. Made out of climbing rope and simple found materials, they are bound tightly together into sculpture using ancient handcraft, Nepomuceno conjures up sumptuous, semi-erotic forms which spread across the floor or hang hammock-like. They must be seen in the flesh.
3. Taking the home-made to a new level is the performance artist Spartacus Chetwynd, who dresses in boiler suits (her own designs) and has lost all distinction between her real life and her performances. Her shows are like bizarre school plays acted terribly by family, friends and puppets. You won’t believe that seeing her shows can be a perspective-altering experience, until you have been to one yourself. She is performing as part of Frieze Projects in the main tent (P11) Thursday - Saturday at 3.30 and 4pm.
4. Look out for the work of the pioneering Slovakian performance artist Julius Koller, who died last year. The Tate yesterday acquired three of his sculptural pieces (Question Mark b. (Anti-Painting, Text-Painting), 1969, Universal Futurological Opening, 1978, and Conceptual, 1972) from this year’s Frieze fair, one of them made out of toilet paper roll and felt-tip pen.
5. This year’s Frieze art fair opens with a cheap - but nonetheless enjoyable - joke, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth allery. As you enter the enormous tent, one of the first stands you see is a scruffy bolster wood table that looks as though it belongs at an illegal car boot sale. On it is a smutty array of second-hand porno titles that appear to be for sale. The work is by Christoph Buchel called Consumed By Desire. Art galleries can be pretentious places, but they are not beyond parodying themselves.
6. For timeliness you can’t beat Rosângela Rennó’s striking hand-painted photographic portraits of bachelor miners – our new favourite heroes, follwing yesterday’s rescue. Cariri and Carrazeda is an installation of the faces of Portuguese miners who post their pictures on a website because they can’t find a woman.
7. David Hockney’s blown up computer paintings, done with Paintshop and printed out with inkjet are staggeringly detailed. They defy our expectations by being wonderfully personal, with Hockney’s unique hand and palette as recognisable in the computer form as they are in paint.
8. For a change, an overwhelming majority of photography on display this year is painterly, classic and beautiful. Look out for Bridget Smith’s Fisherman’s Hangout (2010) at Frith Street Gallery, Rodney Graham’s Lighthouse Keeper (1955/2010) at Lisson Gallery, and a series by Peter Fischli and David Weiss (1984-6) at the Matthew Marks Gallery.
9. Turkish Kutlug Ataman’s ‘Column’ (2008) is an eerie installation of 42 stacked television monitors, each with the face of a Turkish villager staring back at you. Artist and activist Ataman, who has a major show retrospective at Istanbul Modern this autumn, describes it as a monument to ordinary people.
10. Jumping on board London’s current free-falling cycle euphoria, Gavin Turk’s work in the Sculpture Park is 15 bicycles, which are being offered up to visitors to enjoy the inner circle of Regent’s Park from. The work has got the very New Wave title, Les Bikes de Bois Rond 2010, which makes the bikes sounds like a perfect seat to watch the rich and trendsetting of the world flock into and out of the park.