Miami Vice
Raul Zamudio
The second edition of Art Basel/Miami will
surely bring, like any other exhibition behemoth, both the interesting as well
as the dismal in contemporary art. Apart from the established galleries that
more or less retain a business-as-usual modus operandi, what is worth looking
forward to is the fair’s section called Artists’ Statements. This endeavor
is more gratifying than the usual blue chip, yet shopping mall quality of the
galleries, whose bustle for commercial success becomes the bottom line. While
this in of itself is the grease that keeps that art wheels turning, it is the
Artists Statements that point those greased wheels in uncharted direction, albeit
sometimes becoming a bumpy ride that is not altogether unenjoyable. Some of the
highlights that one should look for is the Texas–based Chris Sauter.
Sauter’s work can be characterized
as operating within the intersections of the fetish and the quotidian as well
as nature and culture and art and biology. Yet as idiosyncratic as this strategy
may appear, his foci in these registers are anchored in social and political
issues that have a strong philosophical undertone. In one of his memorable works
titled “Engaging the Minotuar,” Sauter takes a Texas icon, bull-riding,
and tweaks it with psychological and mythological allusions. The work consists
of a rough-shod living room constructed from what appears to be detritus and
discard that is actually material taken from his parents’ home. Bleachers
are constructed to resemble a viewing area and projected on the walls are three-different
views of bull-riding. While one could no doubt associate this installation with
Matthew Barney Cremaster Cycle, particularly when Barney as Gary Gilmore is executed
in a rodeo ring in the Bonneville salt flats, the construction of a portion of
his installation from his parents home ups the oedipal dimension; layering the
already psychological twist to Freud as will as the psychoanalyst’s mining
of Greek tragedy and so forth to comment on the constitution of human subjectivity
and its desires, etc. I also find the wry commentary on the sadism of bull-riding
endearing. Ian Kiaer is another artist I am interest in seeing.
His work, like Sauter, is referring to
the psychological register of architecture. His Endless House Project (Salisbury
Walk / Geese), is partially based on Friedric Kiesler’s concept of the “endless
house.” According Kiaer, Kiesler developed his theory via a one family unit
house that could be accommodated in a variety of ways to offer an ideal environment
for concretizing his utopian, yet socially aware theories about the intersections
of being/thinking/habitation.
In this work, Kiaer reconfigures the housing
zone where he lives in relation to its physical, social, and historical context:
Waterlow Park. Both the 19th Century park and current housing area mirror their
historical eras’ concepts of social welfare. The housing is vernacular and
reflects modernism’s penchant for producing low cost habitation that offers
high standards to the largest number of residents. Kiaer states that “Waterlow
Park was donated by Sydney Waterlow in 1889, who was himself chairman of the
improved dwellings company. Issues around social space are also the concerns
of Ruth Root.
Rott’s works on paper reside somewhere
between flat, modernist abstractions and naïve renderings that evoke Phillip
Guston as well as a form of high-brow anti-academicism. While these conjunctions
have that feel of having been done before and its nostalgia maybe a question
of ahistoricity on the part of the artist, her works on paper nonetheless feel
fresh. Other artists worth seeing this year in the Artists Statements are Laura
Vinci and Rebecca Warren, although the latter is a little derivative of Franz
West, early Fontana, and Sylvia Wald (see my essay on Wald and sculpture in the
2002 June-August issue of NYARTS).
