On the Road to Nowhere

BASEL—Art Basel, as any fair veteran will tell you, involves a lot of running around. Alas, for a first-timer with an alarmingly poor sense of direction like myself, rushing from booth to booth does not always get you very far. Running in place, as I came to understand the droll, frustrating, and at times embarrassing activity I was engaged in, can evoke extremes of emotion, ranging from the dizzying exhilaration I felt before Jon Kessler’s The Blue Period (2007), a hyperkinetic, self-referential, ever-evolving installation with twirling cameras and video constantly looping back on itself, to the bewildering exasperation of Georgia Sagri’s Blood in the Sea Is Beside Us (2007), where after waiting in line for about an hour, I witnessed a five-minute personal performance that to my chagrin was, both literally and figuratively, all Greek to me.

But if these two Art Unlimited works offered metaphors for my angst, it was in the main section of the fair that I encountered artworks that responded with empathy to my situation and showed me that there can be dignity in all experiences, even repeat bouts of inadvertent backtracking and regressive wandering.

Had I found Jean Tinguely’s Shuttlecock (1990) in its earliest state, I might never have come to such a realization. The piece was once a sidecar, painted by the artist for racer Réné Progin, and used throughout the 1988 European season. That winter the vehicle was retired, then dis- and reassembled by Tinguely into a Méta-Matic incorporating racing helmets, the sidecar body and motor, and several wheels. Today, the creaky sculpture, offered by Zurich’s Galerie Renée Ziegler, spins, shakes, and twirls, but it doesn’t move an inch.

If you want to go nowhere slow, Carsten Höller’s Baja Buggies (2006), offered by Berlin’s Esther Schipper, can take you there. The artist has transformed a carousel that once entertained kids at a U.S. shopping mall into the dullest amusement park ride you can image. The colorful carousel, 16½ feet in diameter, is lined with miniature cars, motorcycles, and other speedy vehicles, but all appear to be running on empty, taking a full hour to do a single revolution.

Cologne’s Galerie Gisela Capitain offers a different sort of maddening carousel, Martin Kippenberger’s Karussell mit Schleudersitz (1991), which features an airplane ejection seat fastened to train wheels. The work is ordinarily at rest, but if you go to its control stand, turn on the power, and crank the wheel, you’ll send the seat spinning and the entire contraption revolving around a circular path of multicolored toy train tracks — like a crazy-man earth whizzing around a mechanical sun.  

Finally, at the stand of Paris’s Galerie Chantal Crousel comes the ultimate machine designed to keep you in the same place, and philosophize about doing so — Thomas Hirschhorn’s Nietzsche Car (2008). Even if you managed to clear away its books, dolls, posters, and assorted Nietzsche kitsch, power the engine, and drive far beyond the convention halls of the Messeplatz and its art-world hordes, at some point, amid the peace and quiet of the open road, you would be struck by the idea of eternal recurrence.

And should you locate your inner Zarathustra, you will realize that you have loved every moment of your life and would gladly live them over again, even those times at Basel when you could not, for the life of you, figure out how the hell to get from stand H7 to M3. Thus, all struggles are transformed into triumphs, and, returning in memory to the aisles of Hall 2.1, you proclaim, “You are a god and never have I [seen] anything more divine.”