Crowds pack the containers at Collins Park during Art Basel Miami Beach.

You want a surreal Art Basel moment? There was an endless supply of should-I-laugh-or-cry? scenes during last month’s art bacchanalia, as a horde of free-spending collectors, giddy dealers, flirty gallerinas and what seemed like every publicist inhabiting the island of Manhattan all descended on Miami for a week of partying, marketing and—oh, yes—browsing the aisles at no less than 24 art fairs.

For eye-rolling starters, there was actor Tobey Maguire dropping $15,000 on one of Kaz Oshiro’s spot-on replicas of a battered Toyota truck tailgate. Had Maguire wandered out of Art Miami’s Rosamund Felsen Gallery booth and into any of the auto-salvage lots that dot the surrounding Wynwood neighborhood, he could’ve snagged an actual Toyota tailgate for one-hundredth of that price. But of course, the genuine article wouldn’t have had Oshiro’s imprimatur on it.

A few blocks away, at Eric Doeringer’s GEISAI booth (an adjunct to the Pulse fair), artistic appropriation was taken to its logical conclusion: Doeringer offered miniature $250 “bootlegs” of the contemporary field’s reigning art stars. And whether you deem them pointed social commentary or simply crass knockoffs, owning his handiwork is the only opportunity most of us will ever get to hang a painting by John Currin or Elizabeth Peyton in our living rooms. But Doeringer’s implicit market mocking didn’t stop hopeful speculators. When I happened by, two older gentlemen, seemingly straight out of Seinfeld’s Del Boca Vista complex, were arguing loudly over which bootleg was likely to most appreciate in value: an ersatz Marilyn Minter or a faux Damien Hirst. A tiny Kehinde Wiley intrigued, but drew a blank over its creator.

“Just buy it!” snapped the first alter kocker to his confused pal.

“Who is it?”

“Just buy it!”

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“Just buy it!”

That night at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, Sotheby’s auction-house executives were busy doing some enticing of their own, hoping to land a few new clients—if not via the blue-chip Chinese paintings on display in the hotel’s lobby, then with some stellar cooking from Parisian chef Pierre Gagnaire, flown in for the occasion. Still, even dinner guest Dennis Hopper—a man who doesn’t rattle quickly—seemed a bit shaken after a day making the rounds of the various fairs. Years before 1969’s Easy Rider transformed him into a countercultural icon, Hopper had been a struggling photographer. And he couldn’t help but reflect on the sea change in the art world since the early ’60s. “When I start looking at what other people are getting for their photographs now,” Hopper sighed, “there’s really no justice in the world.”

 
  Dennis and Victoria Hopper at the Mandarin Oriental, Miami.
True. But an artist could always try to tip those judicial scales themselves. Witness Swiss artist Christoph Büchel’s piece at the Maccarone gallery booth inside the main Art Basel fair, where Büchel amped up the controversy surrounding his aborted installation for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). That earlier work, Training Ground for Democracy, was originally intended as a sprawling political attack that would invoke both Florida’s chaotic 2000 election as well as the current carnage in Iraq. In the process, MASS MoCA, a small but ambitious regional museum, would be transformed into a bona-fide art-world player. Or so its trustees hoped—a gambit to which the honchos at the Miami Art Museum were no doubt paying close attention.

Instead, it all ended bitterly in court. MASS MoCA claimed Büchel had not only blown twice his $160,000 budget before walking off of the project, but he’d also quite possibly gone mad. For his part, Büchel called MASS MoCA’s staff “jerks” who were subverting his ideas. And when they attempted to open his incomplete installation to the public, he sued.

Thanks to the court-mandated discovery process, Büchel obtained reams of internal MASS MoCA e-mails, and this framed correspondence makes up the bulk of his MASS MoCA (Training Ground for Confidentiality) at Maccarone, along with the theme song from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ominously playing on a boombox. The asking price for this array-of-paperwork-cum-installation? $200,000—though that does include the boombox. “We’re trying to place it in a museum,” helpfully explained a gallery assistant without a hint of irony.

Yet if one took the time to actually read the e-mails Büchel had uncovered, the portrait that emerged was anything but complimentary to his image as the truly aggrieved party. “The artist continues to be impossible. The art continues to be powerful,” wrote MASS MoCA director Joseph Thompson to a museum patron in one e-mail. As Thompson continued to type, you could almost hear his teeth gnashing:

I’ve refused to blow up a Boeing 727 fuselage (because we are out of space, time and money). I’ve refused his demands to eliminate certain provisions for handicapped accessibility (he argues that because 20 percent of the show will not be accessible by wheelchair, then wheelchairs need not be accommodated through the balance of the exhibition since the experience is already partial). I’ve refused his wish to relocate cinder-block walls...and a dozen other things....So like the Iraq story itself, the show has become a black hole, with no good exit. Perhaps that’s the über-metaphor he’s driving at—though a deep-seated bipolarity is more likely the driving force here.

An artist who’s impossible, insensitive and likely insane. Making powerful art. And having piles of money thrown at him. That was Art Basel 2007 in a subpoenaed nutshell.

 
  One of Kyle Trowbridge’s tea-stained cherubic kids.
Like the Sundance Film Festival in Park City and the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Art Basel has become as much about hitting the flurry of surrounding events as attending the main attraction. Just trying to take it all in can be exhausting, even physically impossible. “I went to open my gallery one morning, and an 18-wheeler truck was blocking my front door,” marveled Kevin Bruk at the Basel traffic onslaught that kept many collectors from making it over to his Wynwood space—or in this case, literally getting inside.

Fortunately, Miami’s homegrown talent is no longer shy about strutting its aesthetic stuff. And as demonstrated by the caliber of the Wynwood gallery shows that opened in December, as long as folks can actually get through the front door, there’s little danger of local artists being overshadowed by Basel’s imports.

The Dorsch Gallery’s “Breaking the Waves” spotlighted Brook Dorsch’s current roster, demonstrating why he’s running one of the strongest programs in town. Kyle Trowbridge offered up beautifully drawn scenes of cherubic kids, lovingly splattered with tea, and coupled with bitterly ironic quips. Moving, often disturbing, yet also mordantly funny, they’re Trowbridge’s finest work to date.

On the painting front, Dorsch laid out more gorgeous urban nightscapes from John Sanchez, full of deserted downtown streets and equally empty downtown condos. An intensely hypnotic self-portrait from ex-Miamian Franklin Einspruch also impressed. Not least, Brandon Opalka’s The Great Republic covered an entire 131-foot-long exterior wall of the gallery with a mélange of carefully arrayed Day-Glo swaths, bisected by zebra-like stripes. It was wondrous to just lose yourself in.

 
Brandon Opalka’s Day-Glo-infused The Great Republic on the Dorsch Gallery’s wall.  
Back inside, Robin Griffiths’ Born in the 1800s and After Working as a Boat Lift for Most of the 1900s Some Dade County Pine Finally Gets to Sway Again (Pine Dance) was exactly what its title detailed. Four six-foot logs were harvested from a Palm Island boat lift, screwed into a steel beam just so, and after a good solid shove, sent rhythmically shimmying through the magic of torque and applied physics. It was hard to tell what was more delightful: the sculpture itself or the sight of grown men being reduced to giggling, wide-eyed children in its presence. “I’ve hoarded these logs for 20 years for just the right occasion that would do them justice,” Griffiths explained of the now extinct Dade pine, a timber whose unique suppleness was clearly evident. “This is my homage to a piece of wood that forever has been lost. I was trying to give the pine a day off and let it dance!”

 
  Billie Grace Lynn’s White Elephant.
Over at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Billie Grace Lynn stole the show with her life-size White Elephant. Constructed out of nylon and held aloft in its pachyderm shape by fans quietly whirring within, Lynn’s sculpture managed to be both intellectually satisfying and viscerally comforting—despite its precarious state of existence. Or maybe precisely because of it. Like its ancient real-world forebears that stomped across Asia, an accompanying tapestry explains that White Elephant serves as “an apt metaphor for our contemporary condition: too expensive to sustain, too precious to surrender.”

The Spinello Gallery, a more recent entrant into the Wynwood mix, continued to wow with a group show featuring standout work from photographer Federico Nessi—another Miamian who appears to be taking inspiration from the Ryan McGinley school of intimate self-documentation, luminously recording all the pretty young things who pass through his life.

But if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em—at least when it comes to selling art during Basel: Over at his Scope fair booth, gallery owner Anthony Spinello featured two of Nessi’s full-size sensuous portraits. They more than held their own against anything else Scope had to offer.

 

 

 
  One of photographer Jessica Craig-Martin’s instant Art Basel offerings.
 
  Stefan Sagmeister’s table-of-cocktails installation, with Jessica Craig-Martin’s photographs on the wall behind it.
 
  An aerial view of Sagmeister’s orange-tinted gin cocktails comprising Low Expectations.
Call her the anti-Patrick McMullan: New York photographer Jessica Craig-Martin can often be found snapping away at the same boldfaced names and air-kissing fashionistas as her high-society-chronicling colleague. But no one’s going to confuse her work with McMullan’s. In fact, Craig-Martin often leaves her subjects’ faces out of the frame entirely, preferring to hone in on signifiers of wealth and status, from an arm dripping with jewelry to a pug puppy carried around like a designer handbag.

For its December 7th Art Basel fete toasting textual artist Stefan Sagmeister, Miami Beach’s Wolfsonian-FIU museum convinced Craig-Martin to journey south and track the local fray—and to produce an “instant” exhibition documenting the evening as it unfolded. Craig-Martin shot digitally, and through the magic of two huge printers in an adjacent room, soon filled a wall with photos of the partygoers as they mingled, schmoozed and knocked back the 2,500 orange-tinted gin cocktails that geometrically formed Sagmeister’s own artwork. Yes, all 2,500 were drained.

“As the drinks disappeared, the photographs emerged, with one exhibition replacing the other,” explains Wolfsonian-FIU director Cathy Leff. And was it her decision to feature Craig-Martin’s party pics peeling back the Beach’s glam surface for a less flattering view? “I like that she’s most known for her images of the follies of the rich and famous. We wanted a photographer whose commentary we’re interested in—and she certainly has an edge and a point of view.”

In a testament to the art world’s masochism, half of the 28 different 24-inch-by-30-inch prints Craig-Martin shot that night were sold on the spot, with the proceeds going to the Wolfsonian. The remaining 14 prints are on sale at the museum gift shop—and at $1,000 each are priced at a fraction of what her work commands via her Manhattan gallery. Hello, collectors! “Well, I’m not going to stand on the sidewalk in front of the museum waving a big ‘For Sale’ sign,” Leff laughs. “I’d rather have fans of her work be surprised when they come into our gift shop.”

—Brett Sokol



 



© 2007 Ocean Drive Media Group