Martin Creed
Half the Air in a Given Space 2004
If the crowds seem a little sparse in Chelsea’s galleries this weekend it is because a huge chunk of the Art Set has jumped over to London for the second annual Frieze Art Fair at Regent’s Park.
Founded by the Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, publishers of the British contemporary art magazine frieze, the fair, which opened last night and continues through Monday, has about 150 of the world’s top galleries — with more than 30 from New York this year.
While the fair attracted more or less cutting edge galleries last year, major blue-chip galleries from New York and other major art capitals have joined the momentum including Marian Goodman, Barbara Gladstone, Sperone Westwater and Matthew Marks. Additionally, two other art fairs have sprung up this time — the Zoo Art Fair also at Regents’ Park and scope in the Meliá White House hotel nearby on Albany Street.
I couldn’t make it over this year but my spies tell me that London is just teeming with art types — especially at Claridge’s, the art hotel of choice. That is, as long as you are feeling flush. London is an expensive place to hang no matter where you’re staying but why not save more than a few pounds on taxi fares and have all your friends meet you at Claridge’s cozy bar or for a quick bite at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant. At least that is the art world’s version of logic.
Another big draw in London is Bruce Nauman’s installation that just opened at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Entitled Raw Materials, this influential American artist has chosen 22 texts sampled from various works of his to create an aural collage that fades in and out of earshot as visitors travel through the Museum’s cavernous entry. The museum’s website features an interactive version of the piece. If you’d like to see and hear it for yourself click here.
Nauman is the latest in a series of prominent artists including Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, and Olafur Eliasson who have created memorable installations at the museum which is housed in the former Bankside Powerstation and now the Tate’s center for art after 1900. The last time I was there I took the Museum’s Damian Hirst-designed Tate Boat that shuttles between the Museum’s two buildings on the Thames. It takes about 40 minutes and also makes a stop right in front of the Saatchi Gallery at County Hall.
The advertising magnate Charles Saatchi’s collection is most well known as the preeminent collection of contemporary British art. You may remember the to-do over the Brooklyn Museum’s presentation of the traveling Sensation exhibition of Saatchi’s collection in 1998 that got our then Mayor Giuliani in a dither over Chris Ofili’s dung-crusted Madonna. Saatchi was in the headlines last spring when the Momart art warehouse caught fire destroying dozens of works from the collection including Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Hell.
The gallery, which moved to bigger quarters a couple years ago in the former London County Hall building, is celebrating its 20th anniversary next year. To honor the occasion Saatchi is moving out his fellow country men and women artists for a show entitled The Triumph of Painting. It will focus on five of today’s hottest painters from continental Europe — Belgian Luc Tuymans, the South African-born Dutch artist Marlene Dumas, Scotsman Peter Doig, the late German born Austrian artist and cult figure Martin Kippenberger, and German Jörg Immendorf. The show opens in January 2005.
Back to Damian Hirst, the bad boy British artist is again in the news this week as the entire contents of his celebrated, but short-lived (1998-2003), Notting Hill restaurant Pharmacy is up for sale at Sotheby’s London auction room on Monday. Comprising over 140 lots, you can buy everything from Hirst–designed or inspired ashtrays and chandeliers, aspirin-shaped bar stools to actual Hirst artwork in a sale that is expected to bring in over 5 million dollars. The sale includes 10 of the artist’s signature butterfly paintings. It will be a real temperature test for the contemporary art market with so many of an individual artist’s work being auctioned at one time.
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Damian Hirst‘s Notting Hill restaurant, Pharmacy
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| Last Wednesday night, I went over to the architect Rafael Vinõly’s huge studio on Van Damm Street for The Design Trust for Public Space’s benefit auction and party. Decorator Kitty Hawks, along with Susie Slesin, art dealer Michael Steinberg, and the Design Trust’s executive director Deborah Marton, hosted the event that featured artworks and design objects donated by artists and designers. Several dozen lanterns designed by everyone from Isaac Mizrahi and Antony Todd to Isar Patkin and Ali Tayar/Natalia Echeverri were sold as well as artwork in various media by artists including Ross Bleckner, Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close, Joel Meyerowitz, William Wegman, Robert Therrien, Alexander Vethers. C & M Art’s Jennifer Vorbach auctioned off eight of the lots with her natural aplomb despite the cacophony of the very talkative crowd. Despite the din, the party managed to raise over $100,000.Founded by Andrea Woodner in 1995, the Design Trust is a support and advocacy group that seeks to enhance and promote innovation in our public spaces throughout the City’s five boroughs. A feasibility study they produced was instrumental in convincing the Bloomberg administration to preserve the High Line elevated train structure in Manhattan’s lower West Side from destruction.The High Line is now the centerpiece for the City’s plan for Hudson Yards. If you don’t know, there is a great plan to transform a 1.5 mile stretch of the elevated train tracks stretching between the Meatpacking district and the Javits Center on Manhattan’s lower West Side into a public park. |
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Clockwise from top left: The Design Trust’s silent auction at Raphael Vinõly‘s studio; Ali Tayar and Natalia Echeverri‘s Lantern; Andrea Woodner, Kitty Hawks, and Deborah Marton.
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| It’s a fantastic project and needs everyone’s support — go to http://www.thehighline.org to find out more. You can find out more about what’s going on in the city’s public spaces at: http://www.designtrust.org.I saw House & Garden’s Maer Roshan, New York Time Magazine’s Pilar Viladas, the New Yorker’s Elisabeth Biondi, ArtNews’ Robin Cembalest patrons Eric and Fiona Rudin, private dealer Julian Weismann, the Municipal Art Society’s Frank Sanchis, MoMA curators Terry Riley and Paola Antonelli, New York City Council’s Amanda Burden, Target Margin Theater artistic director David Herskovits, photographer Roxanne Lowit and novelist Jennifer Eagan among the packed throng.I also ran into Skip Mooney and Kevin Guyer as they were placing bids on several lots. Kevin mixed the music for the evening, and told me of the success he’s had with the costumes he designed for the sold-out New York Theater Workshop production of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. I also caught up with Whitney Museum curator Chrissie Isles who is currently working on the first major museum exhibition of James Lee Byers since 1970. Chrissie was a co-curator on the last Whitney Biennial. She did a fantastic show a couple years ago entitled Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977.Art party wizard Melissa Feldman’s MF Productions made the whole thing happen. She also has the upcoming benefit celebrations for DIA and the Studio Museum on her plate this season.Afterwards, I jumped into a cab with Jennifer Vorbach and banker Thong Nguyen and headed uptown to art collector George Robertson’s party celebrating Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry’s first solo show in New York at the Marvelli Gallery which opens today in Chelsea. Robertson’s art-filled loft in the middle of the Chelsea’s flower district was re-fitted for the occasion with a huge buffet on his long kitchen counter with chef Sami Rodriguez and his staff continuously providing new delicacies to the hungry group. International Center for Photography director Buzz Hartshorn and collectors Susan and Michael Hort were some of the luminaries present including gallery owner Marcello Marvelli. |
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Marcello Marvelli and Timothy Rhodes looking at pictures from the McCallum & Tarry exhibition
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The spread
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Artists Jackie Tarry, Bradley McCallum with son Otis, Marcello Marvelli, and Buzz Hartshorn
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Michael Hort, George Robertson, and Susan Hort
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Photographs by Chiu-Ti Jensen
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McCallum and Tarry are a husband and wife team. Their show, entitled Endurance, presents a series of life size color photographs and a video that together document a 25-hour endurance performance by 26 homeless Seattle teenagers.
The youths stood still on a Seattle public sidewalk, while looking directly into the camera for an hour. The video presents the time-lapsed performance to compress 26 hours into a two-hour recording, during which we see a full cycle of night following day, with pedestrians and cars passing at breakneck speed as the kids maintain stillness. The video effectively pairs swirling chaos with motionlessness. In the DVD soundtrack, the pictured youth explain – eloquently and often heartbreakingly – their experiences with drug dependency, their wretched childhoods and the street crimes they have endured.
I ran into art and charity impresario Simon Watson sitting with the New Museum curator Dan Cameron. Simon’s company Scenic is producing two big events in the next month — a Collage Party at Bergdorf Goodman and the next ARTWALK NY, to benefit Coalition for the Homeless (in its 10th year) that takes place here November 20th. That day, leading curators will take groups through artists’ studios throughout Manhattan. ABC Newsman Peter Jennings is once again the event chair which this year will honor artist Ed Ruscha and collector and patron Donald B. Marron.
Sotheby’s is hosting both the party and silent auction on November 20 and the gala dinner on the 22nd that features a live auction with Sotheby’s Jamie Niven as auctioneer. One of the prize lots of the live auction is a brand new Ed Ruscha painting entitled Hot and Cold that is estimated to sell for over $70,000. For more information call Scenic at: 212 608 5999. |
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The art of collage, which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented a century ago, is having a renaissance of sorts among some of today’s emerging artists including Scott Hug, Dearraindrop, Paul Butler and Adam Pendleton. For the last few years, the Collage Party conceived by artist Paul Butler and othergallery taken place throughout Canada, with artists making collages in a live setting and for sale.
The first US Collage Party will take place at Bergdorf Goodman, sponsored by Etro, on October 25th from 10 am to 6 pm in the Men’s Department and in the windows of the store at 58th Street and Fifth Avenue. They will be on view and for sale at Bergdorf’s through November 8 — 50% of all sales will benefit the New Museum here and the Power Plant in Toronto. Another party will take place in LA three weeks later linked to an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA). |
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Long before papier collé re-entered the landscape of contemporary art, Pavel Zoubok has been a champion of it both in its current incarnations and historically.
His show last month of Dodie Wexler’s collages was sublime. Pavel opened a new gallery this summer on 23rd in Chelsea and neighborhood is all the better for it. You have to check out John Evans’ As Days Go By at Zoubok (pictured right) which opened last night.
From 1964, Evans made collages every day until the year 2000. It’s a fabulous show that is dream for lovers of the process — meaning me. There is even a major new book to document the occasion. |
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