International Arts

Once Subversive, Frieze Opens in a Changing London

By SCOTT REYBURNOCT. 9, 2015

                       

   

Damien Hirst’s 2008-9 shark-in-formaldehyde  piece, ‘‘Heaven,’’ in an exhibition at the Mayfair dealer Ordovas. Credit Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2015.

LONDON — Over the past 13 years Frieze has grown into one of the biggest weeks in the art market calendar. The sprawling scale of the event, centered on a five-day fair here, in Regent’s Park, that opens to the public Wednesday, reflects how dramatically London, and its commercial relationship with art, has changed.
The etymology dates to 1988, when a Goldsmiths College student named Damien Hirst organized an exhibition called “Freeze” in the disused offices of the London Port Authority in SE16, a run-down area close to the Thames. That pop-up show of works by 16 young artists including Mr. Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume was visited by influential curators and collectors.
The rest, as we know, is art history.

Today, Frieze Week is a must-attend fixture for many. It combines a destination fair (or two, since the more historical Frieze Masters joined the mix since 2012) with high-end auctions (nine this week, estimated to raise at least $276 million), museum exhibitions and gallery shows.
While Frieze has thrived, SE16, like so many areas of London, has been transformed by luxury redevelopment, much of it bought by overseas investors. The realtor Foxtons is offering a new two-bedroom apartment in the original “Freeze” district for 975,000 pounds, or about $1.5 million.
The fair, which this year features 164 galleries from 27 countries, caters to the same international crowd that attends the previews of Art Basel and the Venice Biennale. Prices for artworks typically range from about $10,000 to $1 million.
“ ‘Frieze’ is no longer a fair where the feeling is young and cutting-edge,” Abigail Asher, a partner in the New York art advisory firm Guggenheim Asher Associates, said in a telephone interview. “The people who descend on London for Frieze Week are looking for more established artists.”
Mr. Hirst’s meteoric rise culminated in September 2008 with the two-day auction of his artworks at Sotheby’s that earned £111.5 million, or roughly $166 million in today’s dollars. Mr. Hirst is no longer the force he was in the market. Instead he has reverted to his role as curator by opening his private museum in south London. But memories of the glory days will be sparked this week by the presence of his 2008-9 shark-in-formaldehyde piece, “Heaven,” in an exhibition at the Mayfair dealer Ordovas.
One of 11 made, and the only left in private hands — which happen to be Mr. Hirst’s — it carries a price that will be disclosed only to wealthy collectors.
Unlike the week of Art Basel in Switzerland or in Miami Beach, London’s Frieze Week lacks a supporting network of well-regarded satellite fairs that showcase emerging galleries and artists (although the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House does give some regional perspective).
The Sunday fair, near Regent’s Park, is the one non-“Frieze”-branded event that attracts serious collectors in search of undiscovered talent. The London gallery Seventeen is one of 25 from 11 countries exhibiting in its sixth edition. An east London gallery specializing in video art, Seventeen will be showing the 2015 video “Untitled (Pressing On),” priced at about $3,000 to $4,500, by the British artist Jimmy Merris, who was born in 1983.

“It’s more experimental,” said David Hoyland, director of Seventeen, in a telephone interview. “I can take risks. I can set the tone for a solo show, and it doesn’t matter if I don’t sell anything.”
Mr. Hoyland, along with many other gallery directors, is concerned about the effect London’s spiraling property prices is having on the artistic life of the city. “Rents have tripled in east London,” Mr. Hoyland said. “You just can’t find cheap spaces anymore. The bottom of the art world pyramid is being eroded.” He added that Mr. Merris can no longer afford to live in London and has moved to Wales.
Similar sentiments were expressed by Michael Elmgreen, the London half of the artist team Elmgreen & Dragset, who are exhibiting new works at Victoria Miro Mayfair. “I don’t think there’s such a strong art scene in London anymore,” Mr. Elmgreen said in an interview. “It’s a theater without actors. The artists aren’t there, but the institutions give amazing shows for the tourists.”
Mr. Elmgreen said he was moving back to Berlin, where his collaborator, Ingar Dragset, lives. The duo’s “Self-Portraits,” at Victoria Miro, copy the museum wall labels of works by artists like David Hockney and Martin Kippenberger and expand them into independent works of art, priced at as much as $61,000.
In Albemarle Street, the Turin dealership Mazzoleni is holding a retrospective of 23 works by the Arte Povera artist Alberto Burri, the subject of a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. These include a trademark 1968 “Rosso Plastica” composition, priced at more than $5.5 million.
Nearby, the Mayfair branch of the New York dealership David Zwirner is holding its first London show of new works by the Colombian artist Oscar Murillo, born in 1986 and living in London. Mr. Murillo was one of several emerging artists targeted by speculators in 2014. Zwirner’s “binary function” show, held in an elegant Georgian townhouse and with prices as high as $280,000 for new paintings, will confirm that he is now an established artist.
And then there is the loan show of Cy Twombly works from the Cy Twombly Foundation that inaugurates Gagosian’s 18,000-square-foot gallery at Grosvenor Hill in Mayfair, and the first London show of paintings by the Los Angeles artist Jonas Wood, born in 1977, held in Gagosian’s equally imposing space on Britannia Street, near King’s Cross.
With the auction prices of many once-fashionable young abstract painters now in decline, Mr. Wood has become the figurative painter of the moment. A monumental 2008 work, “Untitled (M.V. Landscape),” depicting houses at Martha’s Vineyard, is estimated to sell for £250,000 to £350,000 (or about $371,960 to $520,743) at Christie’s on Friday.
Can the market absorb so much material? Last year, 1,638 properties priced at more than $5 million were sold in London, more than any other city, according to a report published this month by the realtors Knight Frank.
There’s plenty of money in London that could be spent on art. There’s a lot less for the people who want to make it.

   

‘‘Rosso Plastica,’’ 1968, by Alberto Burri. Credit Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini, Collezione Burri, Città di Castello, via Mazzoleni London Torino

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/arts/international/once-subversive-frieze-opens-in-a-changing-london.html?emc=edit_th_20151012&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=66671639

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Film

The Act of Seeing

Published on 05 October 2015

words Jolyon Webber

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Times Square, New York, is not what it used to be, and thankfully there are still a few people who are determined not to let you forget it. From the late 50s to the late 80s the area around 42nd Street, “The Deuce” as it was nicknamed, was every degenerate’s portal into a world of unadulterated bliss.
The Act of Seeing, a new book centred on film posters from that era, by director Nicolas Winding Refn (with journalist Alan Jones), is helping to keep this fantastically scuzzy part of social history alive. If you want to know where a culture’s head was at during any given time, cleave open its cranium to scavenge for collected pop-culture detritus and you’ll get a good estimation of its psychic harmony. Looking at the grindhouse films and their artwork that populated the Times Square cinemas over that 30-year period, New York, and by proxy America, was evidently an even more messed-up place than the history books or Disneyland let on. But then again, we’ve always known that the apple pie cooling on the windowsill was laced with LSD. No nation that has proffered such a blend of Evangelicalism, rampant war-waging, homespun yokelism and aggressive capitalism as essentially mainstream cultural yardsticks could be expected to offer anything less than the most rancid sicko’s glorious wet-dream as cultural ephemera.
And for the most part, it’s all perfectly detailed in The Act of Seeing. When the Danish filmmaker moved to the States as an eight-year-old in 1978, The Deuce was off limits and the cultural significance of the grindhouse theatres was on the wane. According to Nicolas though, the area became almost mythological to him as a boy, and it’s not hard to note the influence that this genre has had, osmosis-like, on his own body of work, and on many other directors working today.

"You take something that’s considered trash, represent it in a certain way, and suddenly it’s considered high art."

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Hunger: Did you have a pre-existing interest in these films before you acquired the collection, or was it something completely new to you?

Nicolas Winding Refn: Well, I’ve always had an interest in the themes of films such as these and I like their obscure historical nature. I collect a lot of things about Times Square, generally, and I started taking a strong interest in a filmmaker called Andy Milligan, a very singular kind of filmmaker, whose films were pretty much only ever screened in Times Square cinemas during the 60s and 70s. I started to collect the negatives from his movies, and during that process I got in touch with Jimmy McDonough, who wrote a book about Andy [called The Ghastly One: The Sex-gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan], and I bought a lot of material from him. Jimmy acquired the one-sheets [the common display format], by taking them off walls, out of dirty glass front-of-house frames or finding them lying around in the dusty basements of old Times Square cinemas. He said, “I’ve got all these posters as well. Do you want to buy them?” I said, “Absolutely.” By that time I’d bought everything from him, including all his original Sleazoid Express magazines [the house journal of the grindhouse scene, founded by Bill Landis], for which he wrote. Bill and Jimmy were the two great exploitation writers of the early 80s and they took East 42nd Street very seriously. I collected as much as I could and on top of that I got about 1,000 posters. When they all arrived my wife was like, “What the fuck?!” I hadn’t even heard of many of the movies.

I read that you have a very large collection of vinyl too. It sounds like you have quite a serious impulse to collect things.

I love the game of collecting. I love unearthing things. I used to collect VHS back when that was exciting. I come from the video age, so that was fun. Then everything became accessible and it wasn’t fun. I guess when I find things that I become obsessed with I overdo it. It’s like Eton mess: you can’t get enough of it when you’re eating it, but after a while you’re like, “What the fuck am I doing?!”

In your introduction to the book you wrote: “It’s keenly interesting to me how the perception of these films has changed — that what was once considered trash and worthless has become historical and treasured.” Do you think our ability to be interested in what was once trash and worthless has been diminished now that the internet acts as a digital receptacle for almost everything that’s been written, recorded or filmed?

The absurdity of it is what we might see as the Warhol effect — that you take something that’s considered trash, represent it in a certain way, and suddenly it’s considered high art. There’s something beautifully strange in the fact that, up until now, everything has been subject to some kind of documentation in terms of pop-culture. Whether it’s music, film, books or photography, it has been documented. Now, because of the digital revolution and all the creative energy that flows out of it, it’s almost impossible to document everything because there’s so much of it. We come from a time, you and I, when there was definition. Something could be defined, it could be stored and it could be preserved. Now there’s so much happening that that’s becoming impossible. I wanted to document a certain period in movie memorabilia and a certain way of publicising movies that, when they came out, were regarded as trash. Maybe they weren’t, but it’s all about representation and how it’s preserved after all these years. I like reimagining something and mutating it to get another kind of enjoyment out of it.

"I wanted the reader to never know what was coming next, similar to what it might be like as a viewer watching those movies: you never knew what you would see, but there was the promise of something extreme."

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These posters seem to be at once shocking, extreme, kitsch, and maybe even a little quaint by some of today’s standards. Has reviewing these posters made you consider taste and how modern taste has evolved in the last half century?

Well, you could never get away with some of the titles now. They’re so outrageous. It’s interesting to see what you could get away with then. On the other hand, there are some that are very tame and silly. But what’s great about them is that they’re so in your face. These are all one-sheet posters, not pamphlets, you know? The ones I like most are the ones so crudely put together you don’t even know if there’s a title or not, or if it’s for a play or an exhibition. There’s one called, Darling, Are You Bored With Men? Who even thought of that?

You said that you arranged these posters editorially in a similar way to how you arrange your films. Could you expand on that?

It took some time to get the right order and decide what each one would be paired with on the opposite page. For me, it had to be that as you turned the page, new extreme images would [hit] you; they would be very disconnected and very individual, but at the same time there would be a recurring theme. I didn’t want the book to become predictable. I wanted the reader to never know what was coming next, similar to what it might be like as a viewer watching those movies: you never knew what you would see, but there was the promise of something extreme. It took me about a year to really nail down the right order.

The title, The Act of Seeing, suggests a passivity that these titles and posters might contradict. They don’t ask you just to see but to engage.

Absolutely, and what’s odd about them is that they could never live up to what they promised, so the act of seeing is actually the act of imagination. Imagining what you might see is often more exciting than what you do see. Keep them wanting more by never giving them enough.

You’ve been looking back at something with a sense of posterity; do you ever act creatively with one eye on posterity and one on the present?

I tend to be very interested in immediacy or what’s just around the corner. I think that creativity is aided by technology, so it’s always about looking ahead. I’m very interested in the future. It’s important to know the past in order to destroy it, in order to create the future.

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The Act of Seeing is published by FAB Press October 7.
Taken from Hunger issue 9, on sale now and available here. For your local stockist, check here.

http://www.hungertv.com/feature/the-act-of-seeing/

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Livros?... que maluca!!

Kendall Jenner gasta 1140 euros em livraria parisiense

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Kendall Jenner está neste momento em França, país no qual está decorrer a semana da moda em Paris.

No entanto quando não está a desfilar, a modelo gosta de aproveitar os seus tempos livres a conhecer a cidade e claro, a fazer compras. Mas engane-se quem pense que Kendall apenas se interessa por roupa ou acessórios.

A modelo foi vista numa das mais conhecidas livrarias parisienses esta segunda feira. E obviamente não saiu de lá com as mãos 'a abanar'.

Entusiasmada, Kendall acabou por levar vários livros. Entre as escolhas destaca-se uma publicação gigante de capa vermelha e ainda um livro sobre a Dior, que custava 150 euros.

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