You are at the Frieze art fair. You know that it's as much a social spectacle as it is a survey of the state-of, and that it's poorly hung and sofa-centric (though the addition of artist names and price labels would have helped), but there are people from the real world here, which is a good thing. The fair goes on forever so your method must be to keep feet and eyes moving. Your feet track straight along the passages, like Chodzko's timber wolf; your eyes dart left and right into the spaces, sliding over surfaces quickly. They glance, barely registering the content, slipping onwards like an EPG on scan, inert-primed, waiting for a bump in the pattern, a knot in the fabric, prick and bruise the eye. Sufficient texture in the image will be required - more than that of the background mean - something to arrest and hold the eye's movement. Sandpaper for the eye. Or something to trigger eye-memory of things you've seen, seen and liked, or things that look like the things you already make.
You see:
the Frieze map hand-oriented a hundred different ways.
Again, Peter Peri at Counter.
David Thorpe at Maureen Paley/Interim.
Clare Woods at Modern Art, gloss painting getting tired.
Christoph Wedding at Aurel Schreiber.
Avish Khebrehzadeh at Galleria SALES Roma, projecting animation onto drawing.
Hiraki Sawa's planes at James Cohan NY.
Aaron Spengler at LFL NY.
Do-Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin NY, looking less regal than at the Biennale.
Kevin Zucker at ?, a ship at sail on a Gillickian sea.
Ed Ruscha at Gagosian. Ok.
Nigel Cooke at Andrea Rosen, intertwingled successfully with school of Bosch.
James Jessop, in the flesh.
And then, red-eyed, you're done.
Comments