Tent community: Jack Bankowsky on art fair art

Art fairs may not be new, but these days they are certainly more: more frequent, more crowded, more lucrative. With Miami and London joining Basel and New York as obligatory circuit stops, with artists decrying the constant pressure from dealers for fresh work, and with dealers bemoaning the drain on quality stock (never mind the toll of constant caravanning on the flagship operations back home), bristling under the big top has become an art-world way of life. Last season, indefatigable Chelsea cheerleader Jerry Saltz professed to sitting out the Miami and Frieze fairs "because these events make me feel existentially adrift." A bit, in this particular case, like the head Heather boycotting her prom because the whole thing gives her a bad feeling, but, suspicions of disingenuousness aside, one knows what he means.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Maybe artists are simply made of sterner stuff than newspaper critics. I can't say for sure, but while our sidelined scribe was nursing his battered sensibilities, artists--artists of a certain sort, anyway--were not only making the scene, they were literally commandeering the booths. I'll stop short of heralding the great age of "Art Fair Art" (a toxic proposition, by most lights), but if you braved any of the recent fairs, you've guessed where this is going.

At Art Basel this past summer, Rirkrit Tiravanija, a new-comer to the new genre (if not to its contextualist spirit), bricked up the entrance to the otherwise-empty booth of Berlin dealer Neugerriemschneider, inscribing one cobble with a flourish of noncompliance: NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS. Adapted for Basel from a 2001 gallery exhibition, Tiravanija's theatrical work stoppage was but one of a fresh crop of responses to the concentrated context of the fair. Eight months earlier, at the second installment of London's Frieze Art Fair, the Wrong Gallery (that near-simulacral organization whose home base consists of two glass doors in Chelsea and very little else) joined forces with Noritoshi Hirakawa to serve up an even more cold-blooded take on the art fair's ecology: In plain view of the exposition's dining concession, a hired model, hefty tome in hand, sat guard beside a recently minted bowel movement, ready to field questions regarding the dietary habits that yielded her mercifully tidy production. Call it the severe strain of Art Fair Art. I'm starting, after all, with the sensational over the substantial, but the double point I mean to make holds generally: While such maneuvers have nothing to do with the manageably marketable object, neither can Art Fair Artists be said to be squeamish when it comes to the touchy codependency of art and commerce, or the PR game they play like a hand of cards.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Artists, of course, have a way of pressuring the protocols that constrain--and sustain--their vocation, and so, at a moment when the art fair has achieved an unprecedented centrality in the marketing of contemporary art, it is not so surprising to find the "talent" nipping at the hand that feeds it. In this respect, Art Fair Art owes a good deal to a century of contextual experiment--from the readymade right through to the dematerial feints of Conceptualism and its offshoots in the present (namely institutional critique). Yet if in the context of this studious lineage Art Fair Art comes on a bit like a bull in a china shop, it is because the dominant gene in its artistic DNA comes courtesy of more mercurial parentage: I am talking, of course, about that great enabler/disabler of art today, Andy Warhol, but also about such dark-horse publicity whores as Yves Klein and Salvador Dali. From AFA forerunner works like Guillame Bilj's 1994 booth-as-lighting-fixture-emporium to John Armleder's long-running, self-manned mini-stall at Art Basel, Art Fair Art has always been at least as enthralled with the shop window as it is skeptical of its tyranny. This, before my reader gives up on me, is the place for an apology: No shortage of lame art (and worse criticism) has been propped up on the overburdened pillars of the Warholian academy. The sublime Warholian sellout is easy to grasp but tougher to master (just ask Mark Kostabi!). The fact of the matter is that while it's an after-Andy truism that the art system (of which the fair is simply the moment's rawest, rudest manifestation) can be "performed"--as opposed to passively exploited (e.g., "regular" art) or actively analyzed (e.g., "institutional critique")--there are inspired "performances" and there are rote and merely one-dimensional ones.

Compare, for instance, Tiravanija's too-tidy tour de force with the mad and massive sleeper Anthony Burdin staged in Michele Maccarone's booth at Frieze last year. To Tiravanija's credit, there is something pure and brave (and expensive!) about closing up shop or, at any rate, turning an entire booth over to one elegant act of refusal. Yet to the Burdin camp, the stunt could only have appeared a slicker rehash of the L.A. artist's earlier effort. Shut down by fair authorities when the volume of Burdin's master mixing proved unpalatable to neighboring merchants, Maccarone's padlocked pen served as a bunkered base for the "recording artist" throughout the exposition's duration, a coil of razor wire strung atop the enclosure's temporary walls in a fuck-you flourish. Both refusals count, of course, as much as coy come-ons as rebuffs. But where Tiravanija's more absolute (but ultimately more familiar) move left his customers to circulate and schmooze--or simply move on--Burdin's "Keep Out!" clubhouse was a ruse to make us want in. And inside is where he redeemed the AFA genre from the hovering charge of superficiality. If Burdin's parrying with the collecting class--and the art-fair public more generally--stands apart, it is because his attention-grabbing ploy remained first and foremost a portal onto a broader culture (he would say "industry"--recording industry) in which his investment is anything but glib.