The vacuity of the Art Fair

Double fond © The Fair Gallery

For Frieze 2007, The Fair Gallery invited Aurelie Voltz to curate its stand : refusing the imposed model of commercial art environment, she turned the space into a domestic room, a jigsaw set-up inspired by the symbolics of Bachelard's Poetics of space with different artists' works interlaced around the themes of memory and intimacy.
Its title" Double fond " seemed to twist the conventional gallery's aim giving the art objects a second life. From time to time, a mother came on the stand to teach her young child to walk, a non normative, nearly invisible performance by Roman Ondak that positioned Double fond outside of the material realm.


Enigma 2 © Reena Spaulings

For Frieze 2009, Reena Spauling Gallery showcases Claire Fontaine's famous neons : their absence leaving space for a billing note.

Claire Fontaine reduces the contemporary art scene inspirations to dinner parties' conversations, a motto that borrows from Guy Debord's anticapitalist ideas and from the Situationists' fake exhibitions, a concept successfully transcended in Reena Spaulings' minimalists canvases, Enigmas 3 & 4 : Table cloth for Atforum dinner, Art Basel Miami.
Since Reena Spaulings duplicated the original concept in numerous copies, it proved financially successful - the anti-consumerist, anti-bourgeois objective also reaching a place counter-productive to what is initially claimed.

The great white hope © Marisa Argentato & Pasquale Pennacchio © T293

T293, a gallery which stand is intriguingly seductive in its minimalist choice is also part of Frieze 2009. 
T293 is designed like an empty shop by artists Marisa Argento and Pasquale Pennacchio, mounted like a platform of shelves and dressed with neo-conceptual neons. There is no work on display, the artists are represented by their catalogues : like Claire Fontaine and her detournements that challenge the notions of authorship.

The aim of the gallery is to redefine ways of exhibiting and viewing art, squeezing the viewers' imagination since the context announces an unseen content. 
One can think of the vacuity of the art fair, of the collecting of objects devoid of their essence once serving the sole purpose of being sold, their absence-presence on the booth questioning their newly gained status. 

Special thanks to T293 gallery

12 square metres and toilet

The toilet © Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

I owe my discovery of Ilya Kabakov's The toilet to a postcard. As I didn't see his replica of a russian public toilet in the flesh, it took time to understand what I was looking at : a table dressed with plates and glasses, some chairs, in fact a domestic interior with strange architectural sense - tiny windows, unusual partition walls and lime scale on their top. At first one makes sense of what is recognisable, the sense of familiar holding attention, until the nauseous lime scale echoed a sense of dirt, things old and rotten, things that have no place at home.
When the sense of smell took over the visual sense - taste of urine-smelling food -, images of homelessness, survivalism, keeping normality in degrading environments emerged.
For the visitors of the Documenta, the revelation had gone the other way round : after queuing in front of a rough toilet, they found a homely place without smell or filthy graffiti but paintings on the walls, sofa, children playpen and the rests of a dinner. 
I can't tell what prevails from the experience : the thought that the familiar may carries dark secret, a new sense of home from finding domesticity in the least expected place.
Kabakov's staged interiors transcend his position as a russian artist living in the West, he describes them as total installations and their effect, one of engulfment : they hold us with their sense of familiar and tell more than we thought about our intimate world.





















12 Square Meters © Zhang Huan © The Asia Society

Promiscuity and collectivism, the plea of totalitarian regimes, when the boundaries between public and private spaces remain blurred, recall a performance by Zhang Huan. 
An iconic image by photographer Rong Rong shows him naked and covered with flies as he sits on a smelly latrine : after hours of keeping the pose, turning into a peaceful enduring monk, he enters a pond, cleanses and disappears.
Five years after Tienanmen, Zhang Huan breaks away from two censorship rules : nudity and politics, reflecting on the rise of forced infanticides and abortions. 
Ten years later, the chinese writer Chi Li describes similar conditions in the Wuhan : constant queuing in transports and at work, sharing and fighting at communal rooms, lack of privacy and  one-child policy.