Mini-Worlds In a Vast Space

BASEL, Switzerland—If you think Art Basel, with its endless halls housing hundreds of galleries, is an endurance test for dealers and collectors, consider the ordeal faced daily by artist William Hunt. Twice a day, Hunt climbs into a BMW sedan filled with water and sings through a special microphone—taking the occasional breath through a snorkel-like device. The car’s headlights are on, and one pictures the artist driving through the night crooning his bittersweet melody (which, his dealer at IBID Projects told me, is in fact a sort of love song, though Hunt is not divulging the lyrics). There are poignant touches: Before beginning to sing, Hunt adjusts the rearview mirror. Dim lights on the dashboard throw an eerie yellow glow on him; his red hair floats around his face; his face is distorted by discomfort. From the start, when the artist enters through the skyroof wearing all black and a solemn expression, you know he will have an arduous time.

Hunt's performances take place in the spacious exhibition hall Art Unlimited, which plays home to a curated exhibition of projects too large to fit into dealers' booths. There are a few standouts among them. Just beyond Hunt's BMW is an installation by Mathieu Briand, which appears to be an elaborate riff on 2001: A Space Odyssey, with gleaming white rooms housing space-age implements. There is a pod you can climb into, and a video screen inside plays footage of what appears to be the surface of the moon. Across from the pod, however, a small camera is set atop a rotating plinth, its surface a miniature version of the surface of the moon.

But wait—there is more. A simulcast feeds into the pod. Headsets are available; each has a camera positioned at the forehead, and a screen in front of the eyes feeds from that camera. Switch the channel, and the headset feeds in a simulcast from the cameras of other headsets—so you can look at yourself through another's camera. Briand seems to be meditating on perception, toying with a notion explored by Robert Burns: would that it were possible to "see ourselves as others see us."

Art Unlimited provides such vast amounts of exhibition space that artists can build entire mini-worlds within it. Witness Hans Op de Beeck's installation, which recreates a playground, at night, in winter. A blanket of snow coats the ground, while a swing set and a carousel, covered in thick black plastic, sit retired for the cold months. But from within comes the sound of childrens' laughter, along with the clanking of the carousel's metal machinery. It is all quite strange and chilling. Even the snow is realistic, scrunching underfoot like the real thing.

At the very back of this vast, hangar-like exhibition hall is a sprawling installation by Swiss artist Christoph Buchel that incorporates everything from a dumpster full of disused computer parts to a functioning bar and a shipping container packed with charred and ragged clothing. The work generated a fair amount of talk at Basel, perhaps, in part, because of Buchel's current dispute with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. (Buchel and MASS MoCA are in disagreement over the status of an unfinished work in the museum's main exhibition hall.) Lines of collectors awaited the chance to stroll about the rubble Buchel had assembled here. The result was a rather dissonant sight—the collectors in their finery, chomping at the bit to join the scruffy types (friends of Buchel?) who could invariably be found hanging out in the bar, beer cans in hand.

My effort to find out which of these works in Unlimited had sold and to whom turned out to be somewhat quixotic. In any event, most of the works are still unsold, which is not surprising given their ambitious scale. At the booth of Buchel's European representative, Hauser & Wirth, I noticed a more modest, editioned work that Buchel made by framing some of the documents related to the situation with MASS MoCA—letters from the museum's director, and legal papers recently filed by the museum.

When I swung by the booth of Anthony Reynolds to inquire about a Mark Wallinger piece in Unlimited—a giant mobius strip painted in candy cane colors—I discovered one of the fair's hidden gems, and quite possibly its biggest steal, price-wise. Artist Lucy Harvey has made a little envelope—the size of an ordinary business card—containing slips of paper on which are written "Daily Affirmations For Artists." Harvey’s work charts a weekly course of hopefulness, which is probably desperately unrealistic for most artists.