And so ends another Frieze, where art lovers from across the globe gather to admire each other’s horn-rimmed spectacles, regulation black attire and wacky hairdos. Like so many creative events held in the capital, Frieze isn’t so much about looking at interesting artwork as being seen to be looking at interesting artwork. The fair is held annually at a temporary hangar in Regent’s Park and is essentially a spectator sport where leggy blondes eye up wealthy collectors on the make. Don’t even attempt to crash the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge.
When will contemporary artists get it into their diamond-encrusted skulls that the public are immune to their shock values?
For all of Frieze’s upmarket pretensions, the sight of icily self-conscious fashionistas feigning interest in the bits of detritus that pass for art these days is quite amusing. Do they realise how ridiculous it all is? Actually, that’s not fair. I did spot some decent art at the Masters tent, and I’ve no doubt there are plenty of buyers looking to add to their portfolios – I mean collections – but on the whole it all feels a bit, well, affected, which isn’t always a bad thing, especially if you fancy a laugh.
Listening to earnest arty types pontificate about the meaning of a rotary washing line draped in underpants was pure comedy. I overheard one American lady in a bright green beret (so many berets) describe Benedikte Bjerre’s flock of penguin-shaped helium balloons as ‘a much-needed conversation about the dangers of catastrophic climate change’. And if you think that sounds preposterous, wait until you read the piece’s official blurb, which includes this delectable word saladry: ‘Bjerre’s The Birds immediately maps on to the circulation of capital with its mechanisms of dispersion and dissolution, as the work offers reflection on how we all take part in a larger global system of distribution. Climate change obviously comes into play [you don’t say] with the work’s bold directness and its reference to Hitchcock’s horror film, with its nightmarish but arguably just reversals of power between humans and animals.’ And you thought you were chuckling at some balloon animals.
These descriptions read like the ravings of a critical theories lecturer high on their own pomposity. Such crimes against the English language are commonplace within the art world, when every piece of work must reflect a hyper-progressive narrative. Take this juicy morsel of nonsense: ‘Atul Dodiya’s avant-garde practice cultivates various image economies as a kind of cultural inheritance, growing our compendiums of knowledge through generative social, political and art historical arrangements.’ You couldn’t make this stuff up – although I suspect the author probably did, presumably for a bet.
Outside in the sculpture garden, I tittered at Theresa Chromati’s pendulous bollocks – or to give the work its proper name, Steadfast, step into me (allow silence to create the sounds you desire most) – described in the blurb as being part of a series of sculptures representing a scrotum flower, a symbol for the union of the feminine and masculine energy. The sculpture’s hybrid form, with its larger-than-life chicken feet, chunky legs and lipstick, symbolises a guardian. Come again, love?
The thing I can’t get my head around at events like Frieze is why we aren’t all up in arms at the sheer chutzpah of these indulged ninnies churning out the same drivel year after year. Our fear of appearing unsophisticated forces us to accept anything an artist labels as art. And yet if I erected a sculpture of, oh I don’t know, a giant yellow phallus dressed in a purple tutu and described it as the ‘interplay of patriarchal fantasy and non-binary ways of thinking’, I’d be sectioned and my friends would never speak to me again (either that or I’d win the Turner Prize). And yet we are being asked to take Jenkin Van Zyl’s video installation of bondage-attired go-go-girl-monsters cavorting round a sauna seriously. Why?
Oh, and what of the wall of children’s crayon drawings interspersed with erect penises? When will contemporary artists get it into their diamond-encrusted skulls that the public are immune to their shock values? Like most visitors, I gave the wall a cursory glance before moving on to the next pile of incomprehensibility.
Back in what I hoped would be the sanity of Regent’s Park, I was set upon by an anti-pork protestor dressed as a butcher, yelling at me through a megaphone. At her side lay a semi-clad woman pretending to breastfeed a plastic dolly. Was this meant to be art as protest, protest as art, or just another attempt to disorientate and unsettle? Maybe I’m just a philistine, but so much of what I saw at Frieze this year felt like, at best, deliberate obfuscation and, at worst, pure hustle. Mind you, those blurbs were worth the cost of entry. God, how I laughed.
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