Frieze 09: Small fires around town, by Rebecca Geldard

23 October 2009

Ruscha, Baldessari, Kiefer, Hirst, Kapoor, Metzger... the majority of London galleries and museums have given art's 'big boys' the job of garnering viewer and buyer attention (street side) during Frieze 09. Naturally, it's not the only chapter to the story, just as Frieze is less an art fair these days than catalyst of cultural fires around the capital. The talk everywhere is actually of how (designedly) serious the curatorial focus appears during this recession period. While one doesn't need to be omnipresent to catch a professional whiff of this, it might be argued that the apparent lack of big, bad and tongue-in-cheek-trashy works that came to characterise the boom period enables a wealth of less didactic practices to surface. In the haze of creative heat currently rising out of the city there are many pertinent projects contributing to the tension and, contrary to first expectations, a lot of them by women.

Sophie Calle, Image from the Gotham Handbook, 1998.

It's not until arriving at the Whitechapel and negotiating Sophie Calle's retrospective that it occurs to me how the arbitrary urban walk might offer a suitable model for discovering what it is a Frieze or a Basel, in the widest sense, have to offer -- as opposed to banging up and down the cube farm of the fairs themselves as if trying to crack the New York City grid system. Unlike Calle in the Bronx, I do not rely on the directives of others to get around the week (although the random encounter does feature -- next year, perhaps?), but trip lightly through the main event and many others that coincide now filling the spaces where the satellite fairs used to be. One can no longer think of the Zoo Art Fair in satellite terms, it’s a vital young gallery counterpointing to Frieze, this year in a new location in Shoreditch.

This time last week I was gearing up for the London art season with a turn of the Saatchi New Sensations exhibition - 20 new graduates picked from an open submission process by a panel of art professionals (this year: Hayward director Ralph Rugoff, critic Louisa Buck, gallerist Alison Jacques and artist Gavin Turk). Like most art encounters of the past few days, the mood here differs wildly to that of 2007, the first year of the competition. Gone is the champagne, the stars-on-the-rise posturing of the first Truman Brewery warehouse spectacular. In its place one finds a quiet, allowed-to-be-studenty sensibility perfectly accented by the school-house beauty of A Foundation's London space and an exhibition by London-based New Yorker Whitney McVeigh in the rafters.

Laura Culham, Untitled (Dirty Cloth), Silk Embroidery, 2009

Laura Culham's silk-embroidery stained cloth seems to convey some of the excitement and anxiety circulating the competition and the graduate position – the fortuitous glimpse down at the floor, which located a dirty rag and a good idea. There is a defiant lack of resolution to Camilla Holder's Prunella-Clough-meets-Phoebe-Unwin painterly approach that prompts both relief and a desire to see more. This low-key display is a welcome reminder of a time when the rise from art school graduate to Venice Biennale representative wasn't quite so meteoric.

A couple of nights later I am standing across the road from Alison Jacques' space -- craning to catch a glimpse through the crowd of the legendary Patti Smith as she prepares to perform at an exhibition of photos and collages by her late friend Robert Mapplethorpe. As soon as she starts to speak, charmingly, self-effusively, on his endless support for her music, the limitations of her guitar playing and the work of “Rambo” (Rimbaud) and late friend and poet Jim Carroll, any thoughts about what a fantastic pr pageant this is are relegated to the cerebral bin. The sensitive display of some of Mapplethorpe's best are made all the more so by his muse's revelations, but totally and (one would guess with his blessing) magnificently trumped by the reverential a cappella-hum of the crowd and the legend singing 'Because the Night'.

Patti Smith event
Robert Mapplethorpe
‘A Season in Hell’
Alison Jacques Gallery
14 October – 21 November 2009

Robert Mapplethorpe
Hand In Fire, 1985
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permissi

And onto Frieze, expertly tented and (only physically) dented. For these days, it's a given the fair will be a pretty slick operation – nicely temporal, yet functional a the same time. Gallerists still prowl their booths as if caged, journalists and curators still twitch with the effects of interfacing and the responsibility of tweeting the right treats to an art-hungry fan base – the inside has never been so outwardly accessible – but all things considered, the atmosphere is pretty relaxed. The art world, it would seem, has got better used to living with the threat of professional subsidence.

The special projects commissioned this year, deal, for the most part, humorously with the notion of economic exchange and are perfectly positioned among the gallery action. I particularly like Stephanie Syjuco's white elephant stall of Frieze-exhibited art-work knock-offs (made on site during a series of “parasitic workshops”). Monika Sosnowka's absent architectural intervention (a scale model of the Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw “Stalin's syringe” gifted to the Polish people by the Soviet Union in the 1950s) is perhaps the only obvious betrayal of anxiety in the wings. Sosnowska decided that the Jesmonite-coated plywood structure, once dropped into place as if fallen galactic debris, simply wasn't convincing. But how does one interpret the organisers decision to 'exhibit' the site as physically altered by the absent work: a get-out-of-jail-card expression of artistic integrity or a brave acknowledgment that some art works are better left as ideas?

Lucy Skaer, Leviathan Edge, 2009.

Artist: Lucy Skaer
Turner Prize 2009
Tate Britain
6 October 2009 - 3 January 2010

Thames and Hudson 2009 including Leviathan Edge 2009 On loan courtesy of the Trustees of the National Museums of Scotland Photo credit: Sam Drake and Gabrielle Johnson, Tate Photography

I join the VIP trail to the Turner Prize at Tate Britain .This year's selection and curation of artists (Roger Hiorns, Lucy Skaer, Enrico David, and Richard Wright) who variably question the symbolism and materiality of objects, motifs and modes of production, is enough to restore one's faith in the competition. There isn't a piece of work here that doesn't promote a desire to peer at and handle matter, or probe the fragile ideological layers separating things and they ways they are made, marketed and received. I think Hiorns will clinch it, with his marvellous Blu-Loo-coloured, crystal encrusted council-flat project (he is largely represented here by the ashy remains of an atomised jet engine, beautifully arranged across the floor), but remain committed to my memory of Skaer's impossibly fragile but defiantly physical evocation of cultural value systems at Chisenhale last year.

Lucy Skaer, Black Alphabet, 2008.

Artist: Lucy Skaer
Turner Prize 2009 Tate Britain
6 October 2009 - 3 January 2010

Thames and Hudson 2009 including Black Alphabet 2008
Courtesy the artist and doggerfisher, Edinburgh Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London Photo credit: Sam Drake and Gabrielle Johnson, Tate Photography

I choose not to join the coach trip to South London Gallery and instead head to the Whitechapel. It's been years since I have come face to face with a Calle. Her film and photographic works, for all they convey about society and identity, speak to me of certain paradoxes facing the maker: the sense of the artist as unwitting narrative facet of their own creative process; the feeling of being simultaneously lost and emboldened by the experience of embarking into new ideological or material territory.

Sophie Calle, Image from the Gotham Handbook, 1998.

It's a brave move, to show the epic 'Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself)' here in a stark white box having already unveiled it to the public in the luscious surroundings of Venice (2007). For this Biennale commission Calle asked 107 women to interpret a break-up letter she once received. There is little in the way of architectural details or atmosphere to cement the many text and moving-image components of the work and as a result is imbued with the formality of a sociological study. It's an extraordinary work overshadowed a little, perhaps, despite its size, by the film upstairs of Calle's mother in the last days of her life. This deeply troubling work makes me think of fellow French artist-film-maker Chantal Akerman's show at Camden last year, (which included an emotionally tense documentary scenario between Akerman and her mother) and the difficulty of making art out of life as it is being lived.

This rich and affecting retrospective, far from highlighting the superficiality of the art fair week, engages one with process of negotiating it – as a peculiar but surprisingly rewarding series of public and private journeys.