Hot Frieze in London

An estimated 42,000 visitors queued up for hours at the entrance to Regent's Park to visit a huge tent housing the second annual Frieze Art Fair, the hottest ticket in town Oct. 15-18. Braving chill, drenching rains and a $20 entrance fee, they viewed works by some 2,000 artists at 150 booths. Dealers expressed satisfaction with the fair's sales, totaling nearly $48 million, an $11-million increase over last year.

Founded and run by the publishers of Frieze magazine, the fair registered their influence in a focus on artists rather than raw commerce--though this focus itself was arguably a marketing device. For example, the catalogue (or "yearbook," as Frieze chose to call it) was arranged alphabetically by artist, not gallery; if your interest was piqued by someone new, you had a nicely written blurb at hand, including an abbreviated exhibition record and a list of the booths showing that person's work. As was the case last year, Frieze commissioned special projects, 10 altogether, selected this time by British curator and critic Polly Staple. The loudest was Do you want an audience?, in which Annika Eriksson staged raucous amateur performances by people answering ads placed in local papers in the weeks preceding the fair. Several projects were off-site: Pae White, for example, painted a fleet of Rovers in colorful fades representing sunsets from around the world; the cars ferried VIPs around the park.

Among Frieze's stand-out works were a number of installations--several by Jason Rhoades included plenty of neon; Urs Fischer erected an outscale yellow door at the entrance to the booth of Sadie Coles; and a taxidermied cat unnervingly rested within a sheltering hut of Alpo dog-food cans in David Hammons's This and That (2001) at Salon 94 (which also showed recent Kool-Aid paintings by the artist). German painting abounded, with Eigen + Art of Berlin and Leipzig showing large, luxurious and reportedly fast-selling works by Nee Rauch, David Schnell and Tim Eitel. Meanwhile, small, sensuous canvases by Bremen-based Norbert Schwontkowski had all but sold out at Produzentengalerie, Hamburg, by the second day of the fair. Works on paper were frequently exhibited in large series. Jake and Dinos Chapman's recent etching portfolio My Giant Coloring Book, for instance, featuring nightmarish renditions of coloring-book images, took up one wall at London print publisher Paragon Press, while a hand-tinted variant colonized another wall at White Cube. The notable sculptures included, at Amsterdam's Galerie Fons Welters, a large ceramic and bronze piece in the form of a Mongolian monastery, by Jennifer Tee, Holland's representative at the current Sao Paulo Bienal.

Among the best-attended satellite events were the Scope Art Fair for emerging dealers (held at the Melia White House hotel, near the park) and a new arrival, the Zoo Fair, in which 25 upstart London galleries offered chaotic presentations of young artists at the London Zoo. Major museum exhibitions on view in the city included surveys of John Bock at the ICA, Glenn Brown at Serpentine and Paul Noble at Whitechapel, while Artangel's latest effort, The Family Schneider by Gregor Schneider, was accessible by appointment only in two houses on London's East End. All these artists were to be found at the Frieze fair as well, where galleries cashed in on their high visibility.

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