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Faking It at Frieze

By Sarah Douglas

Published: October 17, 2009
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Photo by Sarah Douglas
Stephanie Syjuco and her copy of a Mark Wallinger, which sold for £500 ($820). It was a bargain compared to the original, which goes for £75,000 ($123,000) at the booth of Anthony Reynolds.

LONDON—Want to make some acquisitions at Frieze but afraid you'll break the bank? Tried to ask a dealer for a 97% discount — hey, isn't it a recession? — and got laughed out of the booth? Don't despair! Head on over to stand P7, devoted to Philippines-born artist Stephanie Syjuco's project "Copystand: an Autonomous Manufacturing Zone," which is part of the Frieze Projects series curated by Neville Wakefield. Syjuco and several of her artist colleagues have set up a workshop where they're recreating art being sold by other Frieze presenters out of humble materials, such as cardboard. All the copies are for sale, and all are priced no higher than £500 ($820).

Now, contemporary art's relationship with fakes has always been a little complicated. You've got your appropriationists, your rephotographers, your art world-approved, official fakers — Sherrie Levine, Mike Bidlo, Richard Pettibone, et al. — and then you've got your unofficial fakers, like Eric Doeringer, who used to set up a folding table outside art fairs and peddle his bootleg copies of works by Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and other household names.

Lately, Doeringer has been hawking his bootlegs inside art fairs, invited by Flash Art magazine, or even a fair itself, as was the case in Miami at the Geisai fair two years ago. And now, enter Syjuco's officially sanctioned project at Frieze, where, on Friday afternoon, she could be found standing next to what looked like one of Mark Wallinger's signature paintings depicting the single letter "I" in bold typeface. Syjuco herself had made this particular copy, which, unlike Wallinger's paint on canvas, is constructed from cardboard, wood, and paper; a pink dot on its label indicated that it had sold.

"There are two of these Wallinger paintings in the fair," Syjuco remarked. "So I wanted to make a visual play on the multiplication." This particular copy was one of the more expensive pieces on the stand, priced at £500 ($820). "It will probably cost more to crate and ship it than it did to buy it," she observed. Compared with the large Wallinger "I" painting at Anthony Reynolds, which goes for £75,000 ($123,000), her copy is a steal.

In Frieze's first two days, Syjuco and her colleagues sold a little under half of the 30 copies they'd made. Asked which of them are on the cheaper side, she pointed to one of her fellow Copystand artists, Otto von Busch, who was just then emerging from the workshop carrying a set of adorable, six-inch high cardboard-and-paint copies of classic Jean Dubuffet sculptures. "Those are just 10 pounds each," Syjuco announced. Just then, a couple browsing the Copystand asked to purchase one for their daughter, an art history student in Leeds who was disappointed about missing Frieze. A fair to remember, indeed.

Sarah Douglas is Senior Correspondent for Art+Auction, Modern Painters, and ARTINFO.

See all of ARTINFO's Frieze-related coverage here.

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