Peter Coffin Untitled (Tree Pants) 2006 Andrew Kreps Gallery
Frieze Art Fair Sculpture Park

Why do I do it? Why did I try and “do” both the Frieze and Zoo art fairs in one day? And while I had a bad cold too.

And what did I get out of it? The best I can say is that I saw some friends and some good pieces of work and I came to the conclusion that contemporary art is a bit of a mess at the moment (as a whole, individually and, apparently, conceptually).

Stupidly I left my camera at home, so I noted those pieces and galleries that interested me, with short descriptions to remind me of what they were, I tried to be careful when writing down the names of artists and their galleries, but some of my notes are unreadable now so I apologize for any mistakes. Here are those from Frieze, in the order that I saw them in:-

• greengrassi
• Heimo Zobernig at Meyer Kainer (Swarovsky round stones) (I was very interested in him while I was on my BA, so it was nice to reacquaint myself with his work)
• Henrik Olesen at Meyer Kainer (Warburgian panels)
• José Maria Siciliana at Chantal Crousel Eclipse, 2006 (Oil on beeswax)
• Marcel Broodthaers also at Chantal Crousel (One of my favorite artists)
• Richard Prince at Gladstone (very tall black frames with the photos near the top)
• Galleria Massimo de Carlo (I found their hand-written signs quite cute, but later realised that many people were doing) (nice website though)
• Amikam Toren at Anthony Reynolds Last Drawings (the unpicked wire from spiral bound books as a drawing material)
• Kai Kaiji The more I work the poorer I am
• Atelier van Lieshout Minimal steel with rod …
• Jacco Oliver at Victoria Miro (projection of animated paintings)
• Charles Sandison at Yvon Lambert (projection of rearranging words)
• Tomas Baumann (loop of rope)
• Jiri Kolanda (little boxes on wall)
• Jennifer and Kevin McColl Scary Things 1 (landscape model and small cameras picking words in the landscape to make (random?) sentences)
• Jean-Marc Bustamente Trophée II (metal panels with cut holes to reveal coloured plastic) (again someone I paid attention to on my BA)
• Nathaniel Rackone (corrugated panels opening and closing)
• Tobias Rehberger at Bärbel Grässlin Orlando
• Herbert Hinteregger Untitled 2006 (coloured sponges)
• Wade Guyton (reminded me of the large glass)
• Silke Schatz at Wilkinson St Gertrud, Köln 2006 (architectural/CAD line drawings)
• Martina Steckholzer 2pm, Gloria
• Geletin Hau (aerial photo of bunny made out of fabric (?) in landscape)
• Tomas Ruff JPEG G101 (heavily compressed photos) (an idea I had wanted to develop myself, see my early attempt on youtube, but it has more meaning when he does it)
• James Welling IPGI, IXTD, IVGB, IRDI (photos)
• Luisa Lamburi Untitled. Melnikov House 2005 (photos of the windows of the house)
• Gregor Schneider 4538km 2006 (architectural photo)
• Gregor Schneider Cube Berlin 2006 (photo)
• Yuko Shiraishi at Annely Juda Fine Art (glass boxes, why are you so fascinating?)
• Christina Iglesias (iron and cement sculpture leaning against wall)
• Eric Baudelaire Marée, Foundations (photos of half-finished constructions)
• Rosemarie Trockel at Sprüth Magers Lee (I wrote down Monika Sprüth, but that must be a mistake) (another favourite)
• Galerie Micheline Szwajcer

And from Zoo:

• Jan Bünnig at Nice & Fit Mirror Ball (a big ball of tree bark, with a chunky chain) (crazy!)

Now that might be read as a value judgement, i.e. Frieze = more of interest = better show, but it’s more about the ratio of galleries in Frieze versus Zoo.

Thoughts about Frieze

Generalizing massively, there seemed to be a concentration of works incorporating precious materials to the left as you went in (Zobernig for one) and cigarette smoke to the right (not works incorporating smoke, just the smoke). It was also busier to the right, but that may have been due to the comparative density of the stands – and there seemed to be a slope down from right to left? The air conditioning was pretty useless, thank goodness it wasn’t a sunny day otherwise it would have been even more of a sauna in there (my cold may have had some effect on my impression of the heat though – possibly it was also affecting my balance and hence the impression of the slope).

Thoughts on Zoo

Much smaller and more manageable, and more intimate as well, less pressurized. Zoo restricts itself to galleries that are under 5 years old, so neatly differentiates itself from Frieze. Plus it’s in the zoo, how cool is that? With your ticket you get access to wander round the animal enclosures. It would be too easy to make parallels between a zoo and the fair—although they would probably apply better to Frieze—so I won’t.

Zoo seems to have more of a concern with the actual art developments taking place that their galleries are showing. The fact that they have produced the book the new art for the event shows some sort of commitment to analyzing their content.

As a bonus, this year The Hut Project were commissioned to create a series of “guided art-tours” to take place during the fair, which they promptly subverted by presenting each tour as an artwork created collaboratively between The Hut Project and the artist taking the tour. Each tour costs the visitor £250 and you receive a certificate at the end as authentication. I was fortunate enough to be able to go for free as Ian Evans of The Hut Project is also on my course at Goldsmiths. I had the choice of a tour round the fair looking at the art or the zoo looking at the architecture taken by Rob Tufnell of Ancient and Modern.

It was late in the day and the zoo had just shut, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves. With the lack of people and dusk falling the animals all seemed to get much more active. We visited the Lubetkin Penguin Pool, which now holds the porcupines (?!), the tunnel under the road which used to have murals by someone I forget (although they have recently been painted over), the aquarium with with it’s water tanks built above it in the shape of a mountain for the goats, the Cedric Price Aviary, and the Lubetkin gorilla house, now housing the lemurs.

Lifeforms

The Ancestral Path by Amorphic Robot Works

6 October – 14 November 2006

Kinetica Museum

The artists within Kinetica’s inaugural show ‘Lifeforms’ contribute to the extension of the human into the mechanical, and the mechanical into the human by confirming the fallacy that humans are, or ever were, entirely divorced from our technological environment. Whether we bathe in the glow of the instruments, or are riveted by technology’s virtuosity, we should never forget that we are not machines, but that machines are us. To that extent they – and the art made with them – already constitute a living, moving, energetic form of life.

Robert Pepperell, Lifeforms leaflet

So this is what becomes of defunct markets, they find new uses as centers of culture and refinement.

The arcades of the Old Spitalfields Market have been transformed into more bars and faux-markets than you can shake a stick at, serving those who cannot drag themselves away from the area. And as the pièce de la résistance they now have culture served up in the form of the Kinetica Museum, presented as ‘the UK’s first museum dedicated to kinetic, electronic and experimental art.’

The museum is split over two large open plan floors. As part of the Museum’s inaugural show the ground floor is given over to a new performance piece by the group Amorphic Robot Works, featuring a group of ‘humanoid, hybrid and abstract’ assemblages of metal, rubber and electronics. Upstairs holds a collection of works by various artists using movement, light and sound.

Dante Leonelli, Neon Dome

The works varied from those that wore their technology on their sleeves, either hi-tech – Daniel Chadwick’s solar powered, Calder-like mobiles – or lo – Tim Lewis’s junkyard writing machines, to the more operationally discrete – Dante Leonelli’s neon and plastic domes and Hans Kotter’s strip of light.

To generalise, the range of works suggest how kinetic art has progressed from it’s canonisation as an art form in the ’60’s through to its present incarnation. The early works in the show, or the works by artists who originally came to prominence at that point display a characteristically minimal aesthetic, hiding the technologies involved behind clean exteriors and presenting an abstracted display of light or movement.

Among the contemporary artists in the show there seems to be a divide between those who look back to this tradition and those who consciously reject it. Tim Lewis, Chico Macmurtrie/Amorphic Robot Works show a distinct current of anthropomorphism as well as embracing the messiness of their raw materials, not shying away from revealing the workings of their constructions and certainly not tidying up the display to meet some standard of minimalism. On the other hand artists such as Daniel Chadwick, Chris Levine and Hans Kotter feature minimal or high-tech forms.

Chadwick creates Alexander Calder-like mobiles using solar panels to power tiny fans activating the movement of the piece, as well as sinuous lengths of twisting tube, again powered by solar panels on wings attached to the tubular sections, looking very like a model of a space-station. Kotter’s piece is made up of a strip of electroluminescent tape forming a pristine line of light dividing off one end of the gallery.

Dante Leonelli was my tutor at college and I worked with him on some of the neon dome pieces after I left so I have a particular attachment to them. The three pieces in this show looked stunning, there’s something about the sparklyness of the plastic, the sharp stretches of neon and the slow dimming and brightening of the light that really affects you if you can give it the time and attention. In the middle of a busy opening is not the best environment to appreciate them, but they still stood out for me.

Reminded me of a student show with it’s break down of defined junctures between some of the works, at least in the rooms holding the more object/amalgam-based pieces (not for the video works which by their nature require a separation and environmental exclusion zone). Perhaps less a break down as a pronounced ambiguity over the change from one work to the next. Not so much concern with the unique piece by the individual artist, moving towards an appreciation of the works together, as a whole, an installation of installations.

What interested me more was accompanying documentation, the catalogue and the anthology of related texts.