Art Basel Miami Beach – Day 2

By Dina Deitsch

Miami – Day Two
While Abi was militantly covering the collections and Main Fair – Art Basel – I found myself on a slightly stranger and later schedule, meandering through Art Basel and then in Collins Park late Wednesday night, fighting the rush of human traffic attending the Bass Museum’s Erwin Wurm opening (whose video Am I a House? Is featured in deCordova’s Temporary Structures – up until Dec 31).

But from the beginning. At Art Basel, a few notable installations were the solo projects. Sarah Oppenheimer (another Temporary Structures artist) created a new wall installation of metal and glass that seemed to bend space, literally. As Abi mentioned, Matt Saunders (2012 Biennial) has a near-solo presentation at Harris Lieberman where he is debuting large-scale photographic prints that riff off lost cultural producers – Weimar-era actress Asta Neilson and the writer Robert Musil, famous for his epic, unfinished novel, The Man without Qualities. Saunders merges film and photography with painting, allowing the weave of his original canvas to come through and treating his photosensitive chemicals as gesture painting. Another solo highlight was Chicago-based Theaster Gates at Kavi Gupta at Art Positions. Gates has turned his house-based artistic practices of hosting and renovating into remarkable effective sculpture – using the materials of houses that he has revived in areas of Chicago and St. Louis. His Glass Pavilion is a smart take on the Modernist classics and features a roof of glass art history slides donated by the University of Chicago, Gates’ daytime employer. His notions of reuse and history come through in this warm and thoughtful installation.

Gates lead me out to Collins Park where Art Basel put on Art Public – a selection of mid-sized outdoor sculpture in the stretch of green behind the Bass Museum. Highlights included Gates’ eerie grouping of white pedestals that were in fact plaster encased stacks of dishes from said reused properties which were later animated by a performance. Rachel Feinstein’s white baroque swirl created a great counterpoint to those minimal forms. Bruce Conner films animated the outside of the museum with fantastic abstract, filmic collages. Chakaia Booker (deCordova, In and Out, summer 2010) showed her Holla, a swirl of cut tires that resembles a prehistoric bird of sorts, which stood out nicely against Damien Hirst’s large biology dissection and a very active George Rickey (it’s windy down here in Miami!).

Inside the Bass was Erwin Wurm’s latest offering in Beauty Business. The highlights, I have to say, were his drinking sculptures – abstracted desks holding bottles of whiskey and glasses evoking hidden bottles of alcohol in a home – with which viewers were invited to participate – ie – drink. It made for an excellent party.

Tomorrow – it’s the smaller and younger fairs – Pulse and Nada!

-Dina