Art Basel 40, Basel, Switzerland, June 10-14th, 2009
You can drink champagne at all hours here, and sometimes it’s even free. Women in Veuve Clicquot shirts and brassy blonde highlights push iced carts of it around the fair; glass flutes hang precariously from a built-in metal rack. Their get-up is not unlike that of a popcorn vendor at a circus: they smile too much, shouting at the top of their lungs and running over the feet of old ladies. At the first cocktail party of the week, I overheard a man declare that he was moving to Switzerland. Fiscally, that is. “J’emmenage fiscalement!” he informed his friend.
Mentalklinik, Puff, 2009
I don’t know if the little white box advertised on late-night T.V. will really yield a neat pile of chopped vegetables on my kitchen counter; I probably never will. But I do know that the robot vacuum cleaners which promise to render your apartment spotless while you nap are a hoax—especially if your house has makeshift fountains shooting inexhaustible supplies of glitter all over the floor.
The flat, black, circular pods come dangerously close to the edge of the raised platform they navigate. It’s worrisome to consider what would happen if they fell, or were let loose outside the confines of the installation, but just when they appear on the edge of committing Hoovercide, they turn around and continue to feebly absorb the sparkly junk.
Pascal Marthine Tayou, Le Verso Versa du Vice Recto, 2000-2007
There’s an enormous wooly mammoth standing in the middle of the 1st exhibition hall, accompanied by its droppings, quite large. Both mammoth and droppings are made of shredded paper, supposedly recycled, supposedly a reaction to the administrative system.
I resisted a strong urge to throw my lit cigarette into the reams of ex-Xerox.
Farhad Moshiri, Large converted Persian rug for a one-bedroom apartment, 2007
Floor plans and culture don’t mix. There never seems to be an appropriate nook in the wall for a samovar; you may find yourself facing Mecca in an elevator shaft, oven, or toilet bowl. Farhad Moshiri’s brilliant expression of this sentiment comes in the form of a Persian rug chopped into Corcoran-friendly hopscotch. It really ties the room together.
Sudarshan Shetty, Untitled (from the “Leaving Home’ series), 2008
In the Middle Ages, the nature of a punishment was often linked in some way to the criminal’s offence. For example: adultery was punished with impalement or castration; blasphemers would have their tongues cut off; theft would result in the loss of a hand.
This installation—four walls lined with rows and rows of sunglasses—seems an appropriate equivalent for today’s paparazzi-bait and their narcissistic imitators. Standing inside the square is certainly disorienting—the rows of specs jerk mechanically from left to right, whirring—but the most painful part is not being able to try them on.
Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova, Haiku, 2007
What is the best medium for blonde jokes? Surely not neon mistranslations mounted on a white wall. These artists plugged some of their favorite jokes into Google’s Japanese translation software, and then translated them back into English. The result is indulgent, silly, flat; blonde, even.
Marianne Boesky Gallery
Photos by Jay Heikes evoke Bleach-era Nirvana esthetics, with denim, flannel, and yes, bleach; Barnaby Furnas paints The Pixies in pink; Adam Helms sketches made-up, masked men a la Slipknot with charcoal. Boesky’s Art Basel selection is stuck in the Nineties.
Rob Pruitt, Signature Series, 2009
A series of 78 brown linen rectangles bear the signatures of various celebrities scrawled in pen. A young woman points to one, and her older companion asks the price.
“200,000 Euros,” chirps the gallerist.
“For that one?” he inquires.
“No,” she replies, embarrassed. “For all of them.”
“But I don’t want all of them,” whines the woman. “I just want Jacques Chirac.”
The gallerist shrugs; the couple walks away.
Catherine Opie, Inauguration Day Series, 2009
Catherine Opie leaves nothing to the imagination. Her photographs of Inauguration Day – mostly black people, sitting in deck chairs outside the White House, wearing baseball caps and looking generally downtrodden, if a little hopeful—smack of liberal guilt. The brightness of the observers’ synthetic fleece blankets, the sharpness with which a Gore-Clinton cap is framed, the pity and condescension reflected in an old woman’s aluminum blanket are all void of intrigue or affection. There is a tenderness and honesty to be found in American monotony, especially on such a happy occasion, but Opie doesn’t find it.