The madness of the market (TIAF 3/4)

‘So what’s going on here, my loves?’

Jerry Saltz cooed this to his rapt audience at the Sunday talk mentioned in yesterday’s post, and despite going on to assess our present art fair circumstances as ‘pretty effed up’ he received naught but sycophantic chuckles in return. But let’s face it, sychophantic chuckles are the only appropriate response to that sort of rhetoric anyway.

Perhaps the most emblematic work to describe this odd state of affairs was An Te Liu’s contribution to Canadian Art’s ‘News at Five’ series of rotating exhibitions. The idea behind Richard Rhodes’ curated projects here was to showcase a new emerging artist each of the first three days of the fair (who counts the Monday anyway), with An Te Liu presenting his digital scroll print Ether on the Saturday following Chris Kline’s drab paintings-about-painting. I wish I could offer an assessment of Sunday’s artist, Andrew Reyes, but someone had clearly dropped the ball over the weekend as by the time I was compelled to leave the fair at 3pm to attend Jerry’s talk, the only signs of rotation happening in the ‘News at Five’ space was an exhibition of slightly disgruntled installation folks leaning against a crate. And that’s just plain embarrassing for everyone concerned.

But returning to Ether: despite its lacklustre execution (print quality and hanging both left much to be desired) it did make for compelling viewing. Hovering above a shifting panorama of terrestrial landscape are these crisp, self-sufficient architectural labyrinths, equally evocative of minimalist sculpture and sci-fi satellite-outposts. Their actual reference is to the various Chinese shopping malls found around the GTA; for my part, I found their echo of the art fair’s own convoluted mapping of gallery booths far more significant, especially given the way these tidy white shapes float detached and indifferent to the earth below.

Hou Hanru, in Saturday’s talk on the Istanbul Biennial, seems to have accepted this separation of art and life even while consciously curating towards eliminating that gap. His choice of public sites in Istanbul as well as his method of installing works in a manner sympathetic to those spaces (or so it seemed in his rapid-fire presentation of this massive undertaking) certainly looks like an honest attempt to burst art’s self-contained bubble, but I still flinched slightly at Hanru’s likely-accidental statement about ‘bring[ing] the Biennial to the normal people.’ I confess this makes me a stickler for language’s many possible pitfalls, but let’s face it: categories like ‘normal’ and whatever it is Hanru identifies ‘us’ as being only heighten the alienation at work here.

And given how utterly accessible much of the work on show in TIAF actually was, it seems an unnecessary conceit. Granting of course that occasions such as these are nowhere near as challenging to viewers as the vast majority of contemporary art, I did encounter a good many people who admitted to having no particular connection to the art world yet still came out to see just what was going on here. And their response was overwhelmingly positive. So let’s give the ‘normal’ folk some credit here, yes?

A good case in point might be Friday’s talk by Louise Dery on David Altmejd’s work at this year’s Venice Biennale. ‘The Index’ has all the elements of a spectacularly open work of art, and while this might just be my fangirl-like admiration for Altmejd coming through (he has the distinction of being the only visual artist discussed at length in my 2005 MFA dissertation paper), I can scarcely imagine anyone disliking what Altmejd did with the Canadian Pavilion. Sadly, the majority of Dery’s talk consisted of a rambling diatribe on budgets, shipping crates, lack of storage, and all those other headaches which make for compelling storytelling among artists over a couple pints but set the seminar room crowd thinning out pretty damn fast. I tried my polite damnedest to hold out but finally slipped out after an hour and a half once it become clear that even the rebuttal session wouldn’t yield anything more substantial than idle gossip on who came out for the various private views in Venice. Way to slam that door on the ‘normals’, Louise.

(Next: Learning how to run away)

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