As I approach Regent’s Park I catch sight of architectural surfaces: stone and mirror appearing and disappearing between the formal flower beds of Queen Mary’s Gardens.
Tomas Saraceno’s ‘Untitled (Air Port City Modules)’ (2010) resembles an oversized desk toy, poised and object-like, reflecting the blades of grass on its mirrored fractals.
Gavin Turk’s giant eggs are theatrically placed nearby, implicating the work somewhere between the set of Jurassic Park and Le Courbusier’s long-lost maquette for a space station.
Turk’s bicycle shed opens for business, the candy stick Cadere frames flashing between blocks of green.
The Sculpture Park at Frieze Art Fair, this year curated by David Thorp, is a friendly and accessible entry point for the ugly market driven fair.
Sculpture Garden curated by David Thorp
Inside the fair London retained its art-world lustre and represented itself well on the international stage; strong stands were presented by Frith Street (featuring a lovely new work from Fiona Banner), Kate Macgarry raising the stakes for fair stand curation, and Sadie Coles HQ taking the Frieze Stand Prize.
Sarah Lucas’ interpretation of the classical figure ‘NUD Cycladic’ (2010) dominated Cole’s pitch.
Elaborating on her bunny works, bulging cotton-wool stuffed stockings loosely knotted and piled atop concrete plinths reduced the figure to a uni-limbed consumer ouroboros.
Formally the work is rooted in references to modernism, confirming the mock modernism trend at this year’s Frieze.
NUD CYCLADIC series, Sarah Lucas, 2010
'Formally the work is rooted in references to modernism, confirming the mock modernism trend at this year’s Frieze.'
The recipient of this year’s Cartier Award is Simon Fujiwara.
‘The Frozen City: a guide to the Roman ‘City of Art’ beneath the fair’ performs a self-reflexive double stab at the contemporary art world and the ethnographic practice of exhibition making and collecting.
The fossilized subjects of the ancient city represent a civilization based on surplus material wealth and apparently ‘advanced’ liberal politics.
The Romans act as a byword for moral corruption and Fujiwara seeks to remind us of modernism as a failed utopian project. As we look down at our ancestors we must compute: there is no progress.
'The Romans act as a byword for moral corruption and Fujiwara seeks to remind us of modernism as a failed utopian project.'
Detail of Frozen City, 2010, Simon Fujiwara
Much of my time is spent in Frieze Frame, the younger section of the fair, where the solo format makes for a more enjoyable visitor experience.
Here there are two frames in particular which demanded attention; AIDS- 3D at Gentili Apri and Laure Prouvost at MOT International.
With the opportunity of unrivalled exposure for young artists in Frame, Provoust has collated several years worth of her practice in an installation which purports to ‘invite the viewer to experience what it may be like to be inside one of her films’ [1]
'The Artist' is an assemblage which includes a number of films on monitors as well as sculptures, paintings and found objects hanging by strings, bonded to the wall with gaffa tape and placed on shelving units. The title and aesthetic of the work alluding to the modernist myth of the artist's studio.
The immersive and DIY nature of this presentation is more than an ironic jibe at the value of exposure at an international fair.
Laure Provoust, showing with MOT International as part of Frieze Frame, 2010
'The immersive and DIY nature of this presentation is more than an ironic jibe at the value of exposure at an international fair.'
The theatrical device of guiding the audience onto the artist’s stage-set dissolves the boundary between subject and object, returning me to Fujiiwara’s Roman City, in which ‘visitors and citizens exist in a perpetual state of performance in their daily lives’ [2].
AIDS-3D presented ‘World Community Grid Water Feature’ (2010), a room of ornamental fountains linked to World Community Grid software.
The software networks PCs to use latent energy for the good of humanitarian projects such as the ‘Clean Energy Project’ - transforming the fountain, an apparently surplus bourgeois indulgence, into an activist object.
Again, a blow to the utopian promise of modernism, suggesting over the hypnotic gurgling of the fountains that we’re in a state of self-deceptive languor if we think technology will save us.
©Helen Kaplinsky, October 2010
Notes
[1] Laure Prouvost, R25 Frame, Text by MOT International for Frieze 2010.
[2] The Frozen City MAP; A guide to the Roman ‘City of Art’ beneath the fair, The Cartier Award at Frieze Art Fair 2010, Simon Fujiwara.
