Sitting in our briefing opposite No.1 Regent’s Park, the Coldharbour Crew contemplated popping in to have a peak at one of London’s most sensationalist installations of the moment – Jota Castro’s Sweet Mama are You Happy With My Sweet Love, a giant bed in the shape of a cross where browsers were invited to partake in orgiastic revelry. ‘You go in, they give you a condom and apparently it’s a free for all’ said Aretha, our gallery director… Blimey!
After discussing the etiquette of artful orgies – could we pop in and just take a peak or would that be akin to covering up on a nudist beach? What exactly was the purpose of the exhibition… an exploration of progress to sexual freedom or perhaps a nod to the fact that we are essentially still English prudes? And that brought us to the most pressing of questions… was anyone actually in there, taking part and if so who were they? On the opening night you had to be a VIP to get in, imagine that…
As Baxter put it anyway ‘It isn’t really art, is it?’. Immediately after this she was papped for a street-style feature, so we forgave her (although, wanting to take some credit here, she was wearing my hat).
Looking around at the faces already worn by the strain of the autumnal party season, we decide to forego the Saturday morning sex show (I mean exhibition) and head straight to our actual destination, the annual Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park –
Frieze is the biggest and most important art fair of the year and it is HUGE, enormous, absolutely massive and very, very exciting. It showcases 173 of the world’s most influential and innovative contemporary art galleries and this year presented work by over 1000 artists. Like I said, it’s very big indeed. Frieze also hosts talks by artists, philosophers, curators and generally interesting people, music events, has a cinema screening new commissions and a sculpture park outside of the tented arena that is free to the public and shows new work in the quintessentially English gardens of Regents Park. This year, in keeping with the times Frieze had its own iphone app to help punters navigate its vastness – the app pointed you to your nearest café – most helpful indeed!
The first thing that struck me about this year’s Frieze was the return to more traditional forms. There was more painting than in recent years and less video installation or zany sculpture. Of course that is a rather sweeping generalisation as proven by one of the first pieces we saw:
Art and fashion are of course irrevocably entwined and so, as fashion collections have harked back to the heritage look and fashionable life & style purveyors to the more traditional china, chintz, bunting and cupcakes – so the art world has returned to more established forms. Many critics have linked these movements to the economic crisis that we are going through and a re-exploration of family values and home economy in contrast to the glitz and frivolity of the 90’s. However, even if this is the case the ‘economic crisis’ I speak of had somehow evaded Frieze in terms of art sales, which were incredibly strong this year. Good news for the art world and a sign perhaps of people ploughing money into actual physical and beautiful assets rather than the anonymous and now slightly sinister world of stocks and shares (I hope so, anyway).
Every year at the winner of the Cartier Award is commissioned to create a sight-specific work for Frieze. This year’s winner was British/Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara – based in Berlin and Mexico City his previous works have encompassed performance/lecture, fictional writings and installation. For Frieze 2010 Fujiwara created Frozen; an installation based on the fictive premise that an ancient lost city had been discovered beneath the site of the fair. Throughout Frieze, glassed over areas of flooring allowed you to peer down into what looked like areas of an architects dig with exposed artefacts poking out of the earth and an explanation of the objects on museum-style signage.
As well as a rather tongue-in-cheek take on the art world, one dig showed remnants of a Carnivore Café an ancient take on the gallery café where diners tastes had become so decadent that human meat was considered a luxury to die for. Also, The Dead Artist which pondered on the death of a young and successful artist surrounded by coins and self-portraits, had he been murdered by a rival or was it suicide because of the strain that success and a steadily enlarged ego had brought? Fujiwara was also making allusions to the ancient and intrinsic need to create, preserve, sanctify and fetishise art objects. The end of the era of the Frozen City is caused by the emergence of a new regime with a heightened moral code that destroyed the bawdy, materialistic and gender-equal state. Sound familiar?
Another area that interested us greatly was a new initiative by Frieze, ‘Frieze Frame’, that showcased the most exciting new and upcoming international galleries. There was some really interesting work here including a film strikingly projected onto a large mirror and then back onto a blank screen – a form none of us had seen used before – by Mark Aerial Walker from a young gallery, Rodeo, in Istanbul. Most excitingly of course was the fact that, fingers-crossed – this time next year Coldharbour Gallery would be right here, exhibiting rather than viewing!
A few hours in and the Coldhabour crew were parched and hungry so we headed to one of the many watering holes at the fair, Hix had a pop-up restaurant for the event, and we found to our delight that Spartacus Chetwynd’s cat was lazed right beside our café of choice, full of bean bags for us to rest upon and recharge. Chetwynd, rather the artist of the moment, had also been commissioned to create work especially for Frieze and her, A Tax Haven Run by Women (In the Style of a Luna Park Game Show) a pointed nod people’s decisions to live in tax-haven’s, was an installation consisting of 12-legged cat-bus that people could sit in throughout the fair and then, during periodic 40 minute performances, two gaudily be-robed and painted teams would compete to ride the bus which would transport them to a tax-haven.
We spoke to Spartacus on one of the matters most pressing to the Coldharbour ladies… The Tesco lasagne sandwich, forget tax-havens missus, tell us where you stand on it. Her answer ‘starch on starch is just a no-go’.
And so sayeth the woman of the moment and so also did our little legs beg us to take them home, our heads over-flowing with all the fantastic sights of the day, some pictured here for you by our prodigious photographer Amina Nolan.
Written by Carey Leotard
Coldharbour Studios 