Art Basel: Art Statements

I'll start first with the less consumer driven areas. Art Statements and Art Unlimited are sections of the fair that are reserved for projects of more emergent artists and well-known artists whose work is only appropriate for site specific and museum settings. In my opinion this area (Hall 1) was like a sampler platter of large scale and conceptual work. The work presented is not salable. It can be commissioned by an arts board, public institution or non-profit but no one will have this in their home or small private gallery.

Art Statements

There are 10 artists juried into the Art Statements area. They each have a gallery representing their work and do a project proposal as their submission. Each is given a decent space to work with and construct their vision. I'll discuss a few of the diverse pieces. An aspect that I found true in many of the projects is their assumption of Dadaism. The movement nearly 100 years ago rendered any object art as long as it was called art. It questioned what distinguishes art from everyday objects. When Marcel DuChamp put his readymade urinal signed R. Mutt in a show and called it Fountain, the art world was changed forever (much to the chagrin of his contemporaries). From that point forward artists have been relying on the connotations of materials to do a lot of talking. It's clear to me that a significant amount of time, thought, energy, love, research and tenacity is behind all of these works.

Daniel Jackson/American artist/represented by PSM, Berlin

This installation entitled Accumulation of Dark Matter is a self portrait of himself as the "stock character and real-life stereotype of the tortured artist, the bohemian, translated from it's romantic idea into the contemporary reality of the artist's own biography" The self portrait sculpture is a tape-covered mannequin slumped down on an art-moving crate; the figure entitled The Thousand Yard Stare is "doomed to an eternity of art handling and commercial failure" as indicated by the tools of the trade surrounding him. He wears an armature holding a curved mirror that distorts his appearance. He is frozen in the process of destroying a pile of records that lie in a pile of rubbish below his hands (a reference to a previous self portrait where he depicts a homeless man with an enormous record collection)There is an installation of mirrored pieces leaning against the wall reflecting the figure. I get a really disturbing feeling from the level of torment and self-depreciating nature of this work. I think it holds many people's truth.

Kathryn Andrews/American/represented by David Kordansky Gallery, LA

According to the artist's statement (or gallery's description) Kathryn "focuses on the phenomenological experience of materiality, and its potential for creating systems, or economies of representational relationships". I won't go on from there in quotations from the two page document but I will give you my impression in plain english. My first thought was WTF…this is creepy. Then I couldn't leave and I stood there staring at the strange juxtaposition of rented clown costume and shiny-to-the-point-of-dangerous crib like structures. The crib-cages are made of the same polished metal that the chair and bat are and that confirmed my feeling of violent punishment. When paired with the screen printed bows on mirrors and wall sized posters of candles that couldn't be extinguished I started to think this girl had a messed up childhood. Clearly the materials were chosen for the evocative nature that they carry. I'm sorry someone ruined her birthday when she was five. This isn't the first impeccably disguised trainwreck that I've seen wrapped up in some academic psychobabble riding on the shoulders of art history's greats, and it won't be the last.

Uri Aran/Israeli/represented by Mother's Tank Station,Dublin
Uri's installation consisting of several tables full of arranged objects, photos, and a television showing a hand held iPhone recording of a youtube video of a great master playing the best known and truest rendition of a song that was never finished. I should mention that Uri was holding various object in front of the camera as he recorded. Later I found out that he was transcribing parts of the song to be symbolically attached to these objects. I was drawn into the booth due to the feeling that there was something systematic about the heaps of junk. Also, there were nets of small subway tiles in piles and I just finished my kitchen backsplash so I was curious. The Gallerist gave me a lengthy explanation of the artist's intent and led me through the installation in detail. To tell you the truth I didn't absorb a lot of it because I was so amazed that someone had gone through the process of creating a coding system of internal dialogue that had a map, photos, and instructions for it's installation. I got the inkling of divine inspiration or madness, really. It's one of the two. Creating something that has infinite depth and disguising it as randomness is either painful or genius. Either way, the gallery followed his instructions making sure that his ones and twos were paired correctly and for each dark, he had a light.





Petrit Halilaj/Kosovo/represented by Chert, Berlin

This piece is about being displaced from your homeland. For the project the artist had this chunk of earth removed from Kosovo, shipped to Basel and installed. If that doesn't speak about the tenacity of identity, longing and life as a refugee I don't know what would speak louder.