Some would be inspired… (TIAF 2/4)

When facing down the offerings of over a hundred art galleries plus some dozen peripheral projects, questions of quality tend to fade into insignificance - the vast majority of work is certainly going to be technically skilled, but to stand out from this crowd, good just isn’t good enough.

Of course, it also helps to literally be placed outside the crowd, and this worked to the advantage of several of the sculptural installations being shown as part of TIAF’s ‘Open Spaces’ initiative (which my press kit proudly assures me is a new addition to this year’s fair). Leaving aside the fact that ‘Open Spaces’ proved a bit of a misnomer with the tight crowding of eight monumental projects in a space better suited to one or two under ideal exhibiting conditions - and this is clearly not that, so nevermind - some of the real highlights of TIAF were to be found in this market-neutral oasis. The indisputable champion of this project was Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea and Matt Donovan’s The Robotic Chair, which consistently drew captivated crowds to watch a simple wooden chair fall apart, then use its embedded computer sensors and motors to find its separated pieces and pull itself back together again.

It’s a process fully packed with referents and implications for the surrogate body, artificial intelligence and so forth, but ultimately the chair succeeds in disarming all those weighty concepts in favour of an utterly charming spectacle that retains all the triggers of those ideas. In the article on Dean I found in the free issue of Border Crossings I managed to scoop in exchange for my oh-so-valuable contact details, the president of Ars Electronica is quoted as saying ‘The chair makes us believe again in the power of magic.’ I’d wager it even makes us believe again in the power of art.

That belief comes at a point when faith in art is in deservedly low supply. Jerry Saltz polled his audience on this very point during his talk on Sunday and in so doing made transparent what we already know: art, as it exists now, does not have the power to change the world. Perhaps that’s asking a lot, but given art’s legacy of performing diverse societal functions, of being among the first things destroyed by conquering nations for fear of what art’s capacity for rebellion, today’s use of the medium rings alarmingly hollow. That Jerry was more than eager to condemn art’s function as mere commodity to an audience comprised largely of those presently maintaining its status as such was, while not exactly unexpected, certainly invigorating.

His call for increased activity in art criticism was also a key issue in Border Crossings’ ‘T at Three’ panel talk held on Saturday in the fair’s already-crowded Bistro Cafe, but it took Jerry’s own particular brand of stand-up comedy styled rhetoric to drive the point home. Quite literally, by the time he had taken to declaring ‘Blood-sport’ on various artists, complete with hand imitating bull’s horns while challenging the audience to give decent reasons for dis/liking Matthew Barney. He hit upon a good many familiar problems of the art world (up to and including the problematic use of the word ‘problematic’ in art reviews desperately trying to avoid sounding negative) perhaps to the point of being repetitive, or as some would have it, a zombie - but I feel compelled to argue that the repetition is valid when the problems bloody well won’t go away. Even if Jerry is up there being another of his own ‘flamboyant failures,’ we’re all gonna end up merely mediocre if we don’t start heeding that rallying call.

(Next Up: the ones who have already gone mad)

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