Frieze Projects’ Paradox

LONDON—Frieze Projects, the curatorial program organized this year by Neville Wakefield, seems to have set itself a rather paradoxical task. On the one hand, the presence of works that are chosen by a curator and are not for sale is meant to lend prestige to an institution—the art fair—that critic Dave Hickey, in a lecture today, called “the embodiment of the [art world’s] current moment” and the epitome of “absolute raw rapacious capitalism.” On the other hand, the commissioned works, according to the fair’s promotional materials, are meant to “respond to the social and economic dynamics of the fair”—in other words, to offer critique of some sort.

So how do you simultaneously promote and criticize the same thing? Unfortunately, if there is an answer to this riddle, Frieze Projects failed to find it. Generally modest in scale and conception, the curated pieces were mostly easy to miss or simply overlook. And the most successful works simply forwent criticism for a clever reframing of the question.

Lara Favaretto, who had invited the Queen of England to attend the fair, displayed the resulting personalized rejection letter by Sir Robin Janvrin, the now-retired private secretary to the Queen, on a twiggy tree that was surrounded by a series of benches in one of the fair’s main pedestrian corridors. The idea here is that the rumor of the queen’s attendance is enough to cause a stir and get people talking and fantasizing; the more sober reality is that for fairgoers on their feet all day, celebrities are not objects of desire, but benches are.

Gianni Motti dressed a man as a Metropolitan policeman and had him practice yoga on the exhibition floor. The work is supposed to cause us to question institutions of authority and issues of security. Unfortunately, it works better as evidence of how in the West, yoga has been transformed from spiritual practice into a kind of callisthenics for sophisticates.

Elin Hansdottir distilled the white light used to display art into its component colors of green, red, and blue—which added some welcome color to a space cast mostly in black and white. But the work was unfortunately placed in the fair’s entrance hall, where it was lost among visitor amenities like the coat check, VIP registration, and press room.

And Kris Martin’s 4 p.m moment of silence at Wednesday’s professional preview probably provoked less contemplation than whispers, and otherwise registered as little more than a prolonged inverted hiccup.

A Few Successes
The market may be a devil, but it is certainly less an enemy of contemplation and meaningful engagement with art than half-baked ideas and unwieldy execution are. That’s one lesson to draw from the Frieze Commissions. Another is that institutional critique is tough. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most successful Frieze commissions offered less direct criticism of the culture of the fair than insight into how better to enjoy it.

Janice Kerbel’s Remarkable reminded us that if fairs are often compared to marketplaces, an equally relevant historic precedent is the carnival or travelling circus. Throughout the tent, her witty posters announced a series of contemporary showmen and freaks—from the Shyest Person Alive to Faint Girl, a “Heroine of sincerest and most infallible compassion,” who “swoon[s] in the face of any untruth.”

The idea of relating the fair to festivals of yore was taken a step further in the space set up by the Frankfurter Kunstverein. A makeshift theater designed by Tobias Putrih and built out of cardboard, wood, and scaffolding became the site of a series of interactive entertainments. On Thursday, a tarot card reader, a country singer, and a magician shared the stage—and shifted position by 90 degrees every few minutes as an alarm went off. On Friday, the philosopher Dr. Peter Cave, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans, lectured on absurdity and the meaning of life alongside a woman in a black bunny suit, and a Dalek, the villainous robot-like extraterrestrial from the British science fiction television show Doctor Who.

Curated Booths
If the Frieze Projects were meant to critique aspects of the fair, the criticism they offered was tired and ineffectual, lacking bite or sufficient complexity. A more potent critique came out of the curating done in the booths themselves. Strongest of all was at the Fair Gallery, where three independent dealers—gb agency of Paris, Jan Mot of Brussels, and Raster of Warsaw—had banded together to share a booth and asked independent curator Aurelie Voltz to shape the exhibition.