The Miami Cilantro – Basel Twist: Notes from the Not-So- Underground
Lee Klein
witness an overly smug Jeffrey Deitch wandering out of the Delano – as if the
glamour of the surround could make his personality more attractive.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Then, as soon as Deitch departs, Jeff
Koons wanders in. In Miami,
intimacy beckons only to fade once again.
The eighties resurface and
nosedive.
*
Waiting for
excitement to catch on.
Waiting for the big public relations splurge to never end.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Prearranging history, Bush’s fake turkey melds into a Taschen Muhammad
Ali book event: Ali, Will Smith, Robert Lipstye, P Diddy, Ken Norton, Angelo
Dundee, and Etta James are there at the Miami Beach convention center, the same
place where in 1964, Ali as
Cassius Clay once ko’d Sonny Liston to become the heavyweight champion of the
world. Ken Norton and Angelo
Dundee verbally joust. The head Taschen seems to be calling
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Koons the greatest artist
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> now alive. Soon afterwards, the consumerist dadaist installs
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> an inflatable Dolphin toy on top of a
tire with a copy of the Taschen book in between (I couldn’t see if it was the
$3 or the $75,000 version) in the boxing ring {erected in tribute to Ali’s
earth shattering victory long ago; in turn, the artistic act enacted in
recognition of the multiple Koons has created as part of the big book this
event celebrates}.
*
The wait has
ko’d much of the crowd so when Etta James sings At Last
style=’font-family:Verdana;color:black’>, her hit of long ago, much of the
audience sighs exactly. Here’s
Bruce Weber, Cynthia Broan, Harry Stendahl, Stefan Stux.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Earlier in the day somebody says that
George Hamilton has just entered the fair. I want to get up and leave my
pressroom seat but don’t.
*
Over at the Scope art
fair (on whose circuit this writer has practically become a perennial), at a
hotel called the "Townhouse," Sozinski and Donahue —known in tandem
as "the Proposition"(should have called themselves the deposition)—
were exhibiting the work of Osama Bin Martinez (oh, and I do mean Alfredo).
Here is yet another case where an artist (or anybody we can get to stand in for
one) is sacrificed for our collective art world amusement and extends out into
the realm of Page Six. One needs
only to research Sidney Janis to realize one man stretched this scheme out all
the way out from Le Douanaier Henri Rousseau to Jean Michel Basquiat (the
latter of whom Martinez has been in the slammer for supposedly forging, as of
late).
*
Back at Miami
Basel there’s just a huge array of art. One of the biggest crowd reactions
seems to be to Evan Penny’s sculptural portraits at the Toronto gallery
Artcore’s booth. Here "hyper-realist" portrait sculptures of faces
fully fleshed out at every angle
(sort of in the manner of the effect via which one can observe the
features of a person standing on a corner from a maximum amount of vantages as
one turns if the pedestrian is stationary while sitting atop a double decker
sightseeing bus on the island of Manhattan) held forth.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> These works seem to follow in a Ron
Mueck vein yet the faces are blurred as if in a Gerhard Richter painting meant
to simulate a photograph.
*
At the NDAA
fair just off Lincoln Road my attention is drawn to the Suite 106 Chris
Scollars Bjorn Again
installation. Here it turns out to
be welcome back to the seventies, the age of Bjorn Borg and Farah Fawcett
Majors, with posters and the blonde male artist playing Borg in a video while
wearing a skirt. I point out to
the very nice dealer Marisa Newman that in the Farah poster the word sex is
spelled out in the actress’s long blonde tresses. The work is very Matthew
Barney in the way it charts the very unexpected paths of hormones
artistically. I then venture to
say that Patrick MacMullan who’s on his eighties kick would probably be interested
in this exhibition (and indeed the omnipresent photographer spent a half hour
there).
*
Before he
arrives at Miami Basel this writer spends the first night of his trip, during
the winter season’s first blizzard in Newark airport, face down in a table by
the food court’s Famiglia pizzeria, explaining his writings to a couple of
school board members from New Brunswick, New Jersey. So when this writer finally arrives in Miami it follows that
he does not get as full a view as he would have had he had been there from the
first.
*
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Some chance observations, which are
captured in my mind I bring back packed into my mental luggage. I realize
finally that Pia Fries’ work is imitating silk screens and pictures of flowers
rather than having a directly digital transference back-conversational
tone. I found the seeming marriage
of Bruce Nauman lighting effects with porcelain donkeys in Jason Rhodes’ new
work bizarre. I really enjoyed the
multi-panel version of Bill Viola’s of "Going Forth by Day," where
people walking in the woods are separated into a video triptych wherein when
one person disappears in one panel for a spell before emerging in the next.
*
Back at the
scope room of the Paul Rodgers gallery I’m glad to see Leemour Pelli’s
changeover from her Pepto-Bismol pink to a new white and black dichotomy {a
transformation which does her works well, one might say}. Then back at the NDAA
there’s Sharon Core’s photograph of the elements in the pictorial order of a
Wayne Thiebaud painting restaged.
Great fun, I think.
