Curator, artist and critic Alex Chappel gives Spoonfed his take on Frieze Art Fair 2010.
I have an amusing game you can play at huge art fairs. In fact it should be a competition. You start the clock, go round the whole fair (171 galleries in this case, not to mention the satellite performances, sculpture park, film screenings etc.) without stopping. It’s quite a fun game and can ironically prevent exhaustion. Whilst whizzing round, note anything of interest on the map. I did it in 20 minutes this time (allowing for stoppage time when I bumped into Tom, Spoonfed's Arts Editor). Breather in the press room, comfy chair, glass of water and catch up on a few calls. Then you go back in – honing in on only the galleries you marked with an Xon the map. It’s a wonderfully relaxing technique – I had about fifteen to twenty Xs and going back only to what I thought was interesting / intriguing / important at first glance was a breeze.
It also gives you a rounded view of what’s going on, without missing anything out. So what is going on this year? Well, there’s the usual throng of “look at me” large-scale and/or dayglo pieces, along with the stuff we really don’t want to see at a supposedly forward-looking art fair, because we’ve seen it before and will see it again. Why on earth any gallery wants to put us through more of Damien Hirst’s spot or spin paintings, or Tracy Emin’s neon signs, I do not know.
That aside, and perhaps contradicting myself, there's a lot of amusing art, and I like amusing art. I’ve always said that comedy displays a kind of genius; that there’s a thin line between Peep Show and high-brow art; that I would call any decent comedian an artist; and also that any decent artist should be good at comedy. We’re not talking belly-laughs here; we’re talking about what art and comedy do so well: in one line, one sentence, one sculpture or one painting, so much can be said about our condition, our times, and ourselves, as the ones doing the laughing. Where it turns sour is where the artist is laughing at us, at our insatiable desire for Fabergé eggs.
Kinetic sculptures are the things that amuse me most. One work, for example, consists of a sweeping brush on a motor going round and round and sweeping the same bit of floor at every turn. It's the kind of WTF folly which can leave you bemused and entranced for hours. Windscreen wipers attached to a gallery wall complete with sound (of windscreen wipers) is the kind of thing in which its simplicity belies it’s pervasiveness. A similar construction at Victoria Miro gives us a rotating contraption that turns into a beautiful rose and next a swastika. A mirrored sculpture which every few turns becomes complete and neat is also playing on our basic human notions of parallax.
On the subject of parallax comes an amazing little film, called Seven Points, in which we are plunged into a tracking shot of a street, beautifully photoshopped and arranged in seven layers, each one at its own speed. On reading the credits we notice another point about seven points, that each layer was photographed in a different city. The work asks us whether we would have guessed that – the homogeneity of the high street isn’t just something to berate, but it’s in us too. We are homogeneous – and we are the problem.
The star of the show, I make no apologies in saying, is David Shrigley at Stephen Friedman Gallery. This is one room where you could happily spend hours without even getting tired. The usual cartoons are there, fair enough, to make us really belly laugh, but also some of Shrigley’s sculptures – as bizarre, simple and obtuse as his drawings. A particular fave of mine is “world” and yes it’s just a massive white imperfect ball.
All in all, Frieze this year was better than usual, thanks to galleries resisting the temptation (as always) to flog, and instead vie with one another for good curation. Thank heavens for that!
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Frieze Art Fair 2010 in Regent's Park, London. Photo by Linda Nylind for Frieze. 17/10/2010
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