Good evening,
Last week was the most fun I’ve had in awhile, despite being quiet by Art Basel Miami Beach standards.
This is not only because of COVID. Two changes in fair policy now limit the general public’s attendance: GA ticket prices have increased and the fair now concludes on Saturday rather than Sunday. Most Miami Basel Sundays you will find kids fingering sculptures while adults back into paintings (when taking photos). Predictably, sales slow and the majority of gallery staff have already returned home.
Why would the art fair be interested to limit public attendance? Because the galleries are the clients of the fair, not the guests. Any policies which will cultivate a more collector-friendly environment will be implemented.
That said, I’m excited to highlight four of my favorite artworks from the fair.
Theaster Gates at Gray (Chicago, New York)
I find myself compelled by this work in a similar way to moodier paintings I’ve encountered. It stirs me in the way the greatest art does, an amalgamation of intrigue, the four stages: curiosity, emotion, recognition, and patience.
To those not familiar with Gates’s artistic practice, his work extends far beyond the art world. For this particular work, he acquired the inventory of a closing hardware store in Chicago, reconstructing the portion of an aisle in “Circle.” A lot is going on here. Does Gates intend to present a relic? A readymade? Objects rearranged in an abstract composition resembling that of colorfield painting? In this plumbing-centric vignette, a close look will reveal to you the handwriting of former employees documenting, scratching out, and erasing past prices and inventory data.
Gates consistently re-centers the material relics of post-modernism around aesthetics and the human which those objects engaged. It is an act of curation, of minimalism, of documentation, and of creation. This work, I find to be a premier sample of his interest and ingenuity.
“How to Sell Hardware functions as a kind of reconciliation between my relationship to art and the truth of the public sphere,” Gates described. “This exhibition examines my insistence that the world is not separated between high objects and low objects, but rather, that the artist has the capacity to determine the designation of each.”
Sarah Lucas at Gladstone Gallery (New York, Los Angeles, Brussels)
Lucas’s figures of tights and stockings among other found objects first emerged in her work in 1997. She’s continued to riff on them since, toying with their surreal and abstract qualities and the connotations each may behold. Some are tender, others more jarring, but this one particularly reserved. Custom plinths only add to the drama of these works.
Upon entering Gladstone Gallery’s booth one must adventure beyond the entrance and around a corner before you are presented with this intriguing form. Lucas is a member of the school of YBAs (Young British Artists), those which emerged in the late 1980s from London undergraduate art programs. I’ve always had an affinity for this group’s candor and comfort with squeezing the crude for its aesthetic and performative potential.
Lucas, I’ve found, to have a particularly potent perspective on soliciting visceral reactions using found objects otherwise associated with the domestic.
Jeffrey Gibson at Sikkema Jenkins & Co (New York)
Gibson’s work is materially involved in a similar way to Gates’s. He sees art making as a political act, and utilizes materials which hold cultural meaning to his Native American (Choctaw, Cherokee) heritage. Interested in the history of Native American art in the traditional fine art canon, Gibson envisions a world where mid-century representation could have grown in tandem with the development of contemporary art. What would this art history look like? How would our world look different?
One of the tactics I most admire about Gibson’s practice is his consistent pursuit of collaboration to create meaning. He worked with artists of similar heritages, and has composed some of his work around the objects made by these contemporaries who lie outside of the institutional canon. As someone who has recently thought about the functionality of composability and protocols in art making, I think that Gibson has promoted a very progressive view of what a creative practice can look like.
In a conversation at a party last night, I was grateful to meet a new friend, Molly, enthusiastic and well-versed in “Outsider” art. We considered why this distinction might be a disservice to artists categorized as such, then laughed at the potential alternative; to be an “Insider” artist.
Gibson poetically converges these worlds. He’s developed an individual aesthetic voice and legacy since these earlier collaborations, but notions of composability I find to be very active in the 80-inch (203cm) EYE OF THE STORM LIKE A HURRICANE (2020). It’s a progressive way to create art, but also a progressive lens through which we can evaluate art history.
Arlene Shechet at Pace Gallery (New York, Palo Alto…)
Shechet is a master of her craft, one of the most materially and compositionally forthright sculptors making work today. She plays on contradiction: soft and hard, fragile and tough, tender and abrasive. She’s fearless in her studio: she’s destroyed bodies of work, and continually challenges her assumptions around right and wrong (in art making).
I first saw Shechet’s work on view at the Frick Museum in 2017, and was struck by the works’ texture (hard, soft, rough) and its presence alongside painters like JMW Turner.
This work on view, one of a few during Art Basel, I find to be a bold evisceration of what I knew about her aesthetics. She’s been working backwards, reductive in her materials and complexity, simplifying her forms.
Earlier, more chaotic, constructions layering materials and forms have been traded for more direction, showing her uncompromising interest in the abstract and the organic lent to develop a personal aesthetic.
Fairs can be messy and grossly commercial, but they’re a great way to be exposed to a mass of the art being made today. My favorites this year find materials to be imbued with historical and conceptual nuance, and emphasized poetry in art making itself.
As always, thanks for reading.
Yours,
Gabe