Art Basel 40: One Statement of Many Parts

17 June 2009

(Art) Basel 40. Put the words together quickly and they bring to mind a madcap sense of organisational incompetence that, thankfully for the organisers, wasn’t in evidence here. There was a hotel on the art fair site housing the media centre, but despite recycling a constant stream of hacks, curators and gallerists through its doors, it was a far cry from ‘Fawlty Towers’. This year, though, the fair itself was the lively bazaar to the special-project exhibitions (Art Unlimited and Art Statements), which, in driving the hoards up and away from the ground floor, perhaps inadvertently boosted sales. For against all odds, the numbers are up on expectations according to The Art Newspaper’s post-Basel bulletin today and the official release. All good news, but for the spectacle-hungry visitor, the concern over what to show in the curated section was palpable.

Image courtesy of Dan Graham, Hauser & Wirth.

I had to keep checking the literature to see if the last ‘s’ hadn’t been knocked off ‘Art Statements,’ Art Basel’s solo-artist platform for galleries showing emerging artists. For the tone, if not always the scene, was very familiar booth-to-booth as if evidence of a control group subjected to the same grim set of making conditions. One can understand galleries avoiding overtly flashy or gimmicky displays this year, but there was something uniformly dull about the abundance of art-historically marinated assemblages of detritus. Especially, when you consider the viewing conditions of the fair – three-sided boxes are not the easiest things within which to create spatial tension (beyond generating a fear of stepping on something) with the best of works, let alone if all you have is a casket of badly made, black gloss-painted boxes (Michael Budny, Raster, Warsaw) or building materials, defunct technology and a mound of carpet (Nora Schultz Sutton Lane, London and Kantinka Bock, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, to name a few).

Aleana Egan at Mary Mary, Glasgow.
Art Statements 2009.
Image courtesy of Art 40 Basel.

Of the 27 solo-artist exhibits here, the first, Nina Canell’s (Baloise award winning) installation at mother’s tankstation in Dublin, set the Euro standard for object theatre in space. I can imagine that her particular placements of neon, metalwork and plastic might sing a less haphazard associative tune in the right context. While at Glasgow’s Mary Mary, Aleana Egan’s sculptural combo of ungainly masonry lumps and a floppy ribbon delineation of architectural space were plain baffling. For this reason, the desirable (Benedikt Hipp’s hopeful deconstruction of painterly conventions at Iris Kadel, Karlsruhe; Patricia Dauder’s Pointillist Super 8s at ProjecteSD, Barcelona) and the a-little-bit-bonkers (Guo Fengyi’s giant hairy pen drawings at Long March Space, Beijing and Stephen G. Rhodes’s lurid multi-media spectacle - think Genzken meets Ostretsov via Meese - at Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin) became significant for simply offering alternative routes out of the collective.

Patricia Dauder at ProjecteSD, Barcelona.
Art Statements 2009.
Image courtesy of Art 40 Basel.

Stephen G. Rhodes at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.
Art Statements 2009.
Image courtesy of Art 40 Basel.

It goes without saying that the art fair experience would pale without the special projects and events first developed by Art Basel. Also that the European art scene has been labouring under the weight of Modernist signifiers and a glut of found art and trashy assemblage. This year’s Art Statements, however, is less memorable for the brief capture of new breed energy than delivery of a pop-up shop of well-worn material trends and conceptual thematics.