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Illustration by the author.In his 1942 short story The Library
of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges describes a universe consisting of a
potentially infinite library of adjacent hexagonal rooms. Convinced
that the library contains every imaginable ordering of twenty-five
orthographic symbols, the inhabitants of this universe search
incessantly, and futilely, for meaning amid the endless shelves.
While an individual art fair is never actually infinite, its
labyrinthine rows of cubicles can appear endless.
Like Borges library, a typical art fair consists of a number of
nearly-identical rooms containing (seemingly) unlimited
reconfigurations of possible forms, marks, lines, and pixels.
Rather than Borges hexagons, the booths of an art fair are usually
square, delineated by three walls opening on to a hallway. This is
because the repeated rows of cubicle-like walls serve as metonymy
for the white cube of a gallery, the dominant exhibition space of
art since modernity. In turn, the white cube is a stand-in for an
ideal of empty space not far removed from the film trope of a white
"void" as a representation of death or some "other" realm. In the
repetition of this double-removed and imaginary referent, the art
fair seems to attain towards the infinite.
In an art fair, the repetition of cubicle walls can create the
illusion of an endless space (or abyssal void). This effect is
perhaps attributable to the fact that the works themselves can be
overwhelmed by their context. In this photo manipulation by the
author the artworks of an art fair have been replaced by the image
of the art fair itself, in a pseudo-mise en abyme. Original photo:
Frieze London, via Inhale Mag
In reality, art fairs are much more akin to a hybrid of an
office space, a party tent, and a trade show. As viewers and buyers
migrate from booth to booth, the potential for meaning in any
individual art object becomes subsumed in the swarming crowds, the
champagne bars, the staggering enormity of capital contained
within.At an art fair, one must participate in a fiction in which
architecture is experienced as the semblance of another form
instead of in its actuality. This function is only possible because
the white cube has become so prescribed by the post-modernity
development of art that it is no longer even actually necessary.
This is a history of autophagy: the drive to carve out an isolated
space for art viewing now threatens the objects themselves.Art
fairs are akin to a hybrid of an office space, a party tent, and a
trade show.
For the most part, art fairs remain banished to the shadows of
simulation that parallels their formal description: they are
accepted as a proxy of the experience of a gallery or museum but
not taken seriously as unique, spatiotemporal situations
themselves. Other times they are actually reviled. For some, art
fairs and their attendants parties and peripheral events often feel
like an encapsulation of not just the fallaciousness of any art
world claims to political legitimacy, but also the disturbing
suspicion that art has become merely its market and that aesthetic
values have been unilaterally replaced by financial value and
cultural capital.
A tale of two cities: Protestors shutting down the I-195 in
Miami protesting police brutality and a Dom Perignon-hosted party
for ABMB-goers. Credit: Al Diaz / Miami Herald ; Billy Farrell /
the Observer (resp.)
For example, just a few weeks ago, demonstrators temporarily
shut down one of Miamis most important highways. Like in many other
cities across the US, they were protesting police brutality and
systematic racism, organizing around the memories of Mike Brown,
Israel Reefa Hernandez, and countless other young men of color who
were recently killed by members of a policing system that remains
seemingly immune to adjudication. Meanwhile, an estimated $3
billion worth of art objects were feverishly bought and sold amidst
a veritable orgy of celebrity, wealth, and excess at the annual Art
Basel Miami Beach.Across Miamis brimming field of infrastructure
and water, these two events were separated by only a series of thin
walls mere fabric in some cases.Included in the festivities were
shows like Zero Tolerance, organized by MOMA PS1s celebrity-curator
Klaus Biesenbach with works combine elements of political
demonstration and celebratory parades to create art of a charged
and ambivalent nature, responding to concerns specific in place and
time. The apparent division did not go unnoticed. On one side, a
protest movement defined by its symbolic, even aesthetic displays
of vulnerability and precarity: hands lifted in surrender, bodies
strewn on the ground as if dead. On the other side, a Janus-faced
behemoth of money and power that maintains claims to sociopolitical
relevance while simultaneously producing such extreme displays of
wealth and exclusivity as to make a 19th century industrialist
blush. Across Miamis brimming field of infrastructure and water,
these two events were separated by only a series of thin walls mere
fabric in some cases.
While inevitably including works by artists aspiring to
political commentary, for the most part art fairs unabashedly serve
as marketplaces. As Pat Hearn, one of the founders of Frieze,
stated, The art fair is simply an effort to move the product in
whatever way possible. Art fairs are the cultural equivalent to the
pop-up store, a form of temporary urbanism that mirrors larger
shifts in economics defined by the increasing freedom of capital to
flow across geographic terrains enabled by neoliberal policies of
deregulation and connective technologies like the internet, among
other forces.Art fairs are the cultural equivalent to the pop-up
store.Like the temporary boutiques, theaters and cafes that seemed
to proliferate after the crash of 07, art fairs only temporarily
set down on a site and the wealth generated or exchanged rarely
remains long enough to have any effect on the otherwise crumbling
urban economy. Similar to how Owen Hatherly described pop-up
stores, art fairs are urban placeholders, there to fill the space
until the market picks up. Moreover, because they explicitly cater
to a international class of hyper-elite wealth, they can feel like
brazen displays of the inequity that currently (and historically)
defines the global economy, and recently entered into mainstream
discourse after events like Occupy and the 2012 elections. In this
sense, the walls of an art fair seem to be used primarily to
signify that this is a place where capital be exchanged whether in
the form of canvas, clay, steel, acrylic, video or consumer items
placed on pedestals.
The walls of an art fair could be read as a photographic
backdrop. Image by the author.
Alternatively, the walls of an art fair could also be understood
as photographic backdrops, providing the bare minimum needed to
reproduce an object as jpeg, so that it can be bought and sold
online, often without the participating parties ever experiencing
the work in person.Today, art works may never even enter into a
space large enough to be seen after they were first exhibited and
photographed; instead they are often shuffled from
climate-controlled storage unit to climate-controlled storage unit.
And for the casual art viewer, works are increasingly experienced
first (if not exclusively) online on sites like Contemporary Art
Daily.
Images of the artist Artie Vierkant's work that can be found
online are almost always manipulated by the artist, reflecting the
equal value he gives to both the object and its representation as
image. Credit: Artie Vierkant
The nebulous category of post-internet art tends to capitalize
on the apparent usurpation of the screen over physical space in art
contexts. An artist-cum-theorist associated with this post-internet
climate, Artie Vierkant coined the term image-object to describe
the work of art [that] lies equally in the version of the object
one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other
representations disseminated through the Internet and print
publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations,
and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by
any other author. The proliferation in recent years of art works
that utilize the so-called photographic-seamless a large piece of
paper used as a blank background for product shots and portraits
references this new relationship between an object and an image.The
art fair appears as oriented towards the construction of generic
space through the anesthetic repetition of white walls.This
relatively old apparatus for creating an illusion of pure or empty
background space parallels the experience of a browser window as
the apparent literalization of the modernist ideal of extensio, or
the abstract conception of purely mathematical space (which is to
say, a non-place space). But just as an image of a shampoo bottle
surrounded by blank nothing requires metal stands and lights and a
studio, the grey checkers of Photoshop are supported by large data
centers and the plants that power them. Today, contemporary art
works require a white-walled room, or a simulation of one, in order
to take on life on the internet. Seemingly, it is not entirely
coincidental that the retail giant Amazon recently patented their
specific photo-seamless set-up: objects are thought to sell better
when they appear generic, which is to say, estranged from the
particularities of place. The art fair appears as similarly
oriented towards the construction of generic space through the
anesthetic repetition of white walls.
The artist Marc Horowitz utilizes the photographic seamless as
an repeated element in his work. Credit: Marc Horowitz
Despite this orientation towards genericity, it is wrong to
denigrate the art fair as a non-architectural space (or that there
has not been thought-provoking works generated specifically for
them, such as Shanzhai Biennales recent project for Frieze London).
In the first place, they are often designed by certified, if not
well-respected, architects. Far from non-architectural or even
non-academic, the contemporary art fair emerges out of the long and
convoluted development of modern art exhibitions.The history of art
since modernity is a dance with architecture.The history of art
since modernity is a dance with architecture, moving away from art
as a type of architectural ornament, to its isolation in the frame;
then beyond the frame and into the gallery, and even (to a degree)
beyond place itself. Moreover, art fairs cannot be thought of as
merely catering to the rich; a lions share of the attendees of
these events are students and artists and writers and even people
entirely unattached to the art industry. And, simply because fairs
are a significant component of the circulation and presentation of
art today, we must attempt to take them seriously as a significant
stage for art-viewing, regardless of the unease they may
provoke.
The White Tent art fair typology as a (un)decorated shed.
Manipulation of original drawing by Robert Venturi.
For the most part, the architecture of the art fair can be split
into two primary typologies: the White Tent and the Hermit Crab,
although both can admittedly be present at a single fair. The
former, such as Frieze London in Hyde Park, consists of the
circus-like construction of a large hall or series of individual
halls that are only in place for the duration of the event.
Basically, the White Tent is a (un)decorated shed. But, while
seemingly simple, White Tent structures can often be quite
ambitious projects, in particular considering the constraints of
their temporary program. At a New York iteration of Frieze, the
SO-IL Architects-designed tent was purportedly the largest
temporary structure ever built in the U.S., snaking some 450 meters
along Randall Island. The tent even had its own Twitter account,
@FriezeTent, mainly full of humorous brags about its size like,
Wondering what I've been up to since @FriezeNewYork 2013? I played
the role of Ark in Darren Aronofsky's biblical blockbuster
NOAH.
The massive Frieze New York tent designed by SO-IL architects.
Credit: Iwan Baan
On the other hand, the Hermit Crab typology refers to the
temporary takeover of an existing building that is not normally
used for the display and sale of art works, such as with the use of
hotel rooms by NADA (New Art Dealers Association), a periphery art
fair of Art Basel Miami Beach. Such parasitic or interventionary
events often still require architectural construction, but this
consists primarily of interior design, chiefly the organization of
walls and booths. New Yorks Armory Show intentionally invokes the
legacy of an older example of a Hermit Crab exhibition: the 1914
International Exhibition of Modern Art which was held in one of the
vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories and helped introduce
European modern art to American audiences. The present day Armory
Fair is a significantly different event resembling its precedent
only really in name and is housed mainly in Pier 92 and 94 along
the westside of Manhattan. On their website, the Armory Fair
notably places itself within both a greater urban as well as art
historical context as a means of legitimation. For the 2014
iteration, architecture firm Bade Stageberg Cox designed the
interiors and organization system for the fair. According to the
Armory website, they activated a series of thresholds the entrance,
the VIP lounge, the stairway connecting the modern and contemporary
sections supposedly in order to align passage and a place of
entering or beginning, with the erasing of geographic boundaries
that occurs in such an art fair. Interestingly, in this case, the
stated conceptual strategy of the architects falls in line with the
predominant characteristic of art fair design: namely, the
auto-erasure of architecture.
Designs for the Armory Show in New York by Bade Stageberg Cox
appears almost as a White Tent devoid of context, while in reality
it is a Hermit Crab. Via: The Armory Show
Hermit Crab architecture has defined the spaces in which art has
been viewed since the onset of modernity. The Louvre, generally
considered the first public and modern art museum, was, obviously,
not constructed for the purpose of displaying art. The original
medieval fortress was expanded (and deconstructed) slowly over
several centuries and continues to be reconfigured today. The use
of the Palais du Louvre in Paris to display art to the public is
usually considered to have begun in the aftermath of the first
French Revolution, granting the institution of modern art a
properly revolutionary origin.The French Revolution would help to
establish politics as a component of artistic productions
self-image.Actually, the Louvres transition from a royal palace to
a public museum has been slow and episodic, properly beginning with
Louis the XIV and the first Salon (note: which can, incidentally,
be considered the first modern art exhibit the two histories are
deeply entwined), and continuing to its current merger with a mall.
Moreover, its revolutionary moment consisted not of doors flung
open by the eager masses, but rather a relatively quiet affair,
largely overshadowed by a concurrent festival celebrating the
insurrection that occurred that day the previous year. Still, this
association with the French Revolution would help to establish
politics as a component of artistic productions self-image, as well
as aspirations, since then.
The Louvre was the first Hermit Crab museum. Photo-collage by
the author.
Art and media theorist Boris Groys writes specifically about
this origin narrative, citing the reprogramming of the Louvre by
the French revolutionaries as a major determining force for the
functioning of art since modernity. He contends that rather than
following the overthrow of a regime with a wave of iconoclasm as
was typical in other historical revolutions and conquests the
French revolutionaries defunctionalized or aestheticized the sacred
and profane objects belonging to the Old Regime. Groys continues,
The French Revolution turned the design of the Old Regime into what
we today call art, i.e., objects not of use but of pure
contemplation. This violent, revolutionary act of aestheticizing
the Old Regime created art as we know it today. While during the
ancien rgime, the paintings and sculptures were not properly art in
Groys modern sense. Rather, they served financial purposes as well
as symbolically buttressed the nobilitys power. With the opening of
the Louvre to the public, this symbolic function was dissolved; or,
more accurately, was diffused to the public qua the new ruling
class. Groys articulates that the Louvre, as a building, was also
aestheticized in its conversion into a museum, opening up its
potential to be read formally as (mere) architecture, divested of
its symbolic attachment to the monarchy (although one could argue
that the symbolism was actually diverted to the bourgeoisie and its
institutions rather than divested).
Allgorie relative l'tablissement du Museum dans la grande
galerie du Louvre (1783) by Jean-Jacques Lagrene was painting ten
years before the Louvre's "revolutionary founding" and is an
allegory for its conversion into a museum by the then-extant
monarchy.
A more contemporary example of a Hermit Crab museum is the Tate
Modern in London. Originally a power station, the building was
converted into a contemporary art museum by Herzog & de Meuron
at the turn of the new millenium. Replicating Groys analytic
structure, the museum could perhaps be symbolically read as
indicative of the triumphal replacement of Fordist capitalism by
neoliberal economics in the UK, the economy of manufacturing by
flexible accumulation in London, the laborer by the consumer (or
precarious worker) in the citys Zone 1.Space prescribes as much as
it accommodates.After all, the museum emerges from the
aestheticization of the space of industrial production.
Interestingly, the Tate is known as one of the first spaces that
could accommodate the emergence of large scale, often immersive
installations. But the space prescribes as much as it accommodates;
many of the exhibited works have been site-specific, which is to
say designed specifically with the Turbine Hall in mind as their
location, such as Doris Salcedos extraordinary Shibboleth.
Doris Salcedo's "Shibboleth" was specially made for the Turbine
Hall of the Tate Modern and consisted of a large crack carved into
the floor of the room. Credit: Luke MacGregor / Reuters
Central to the continuation of this process for over two
centuries is the change in the value of an art work.The aura of art
works manifests in the continued insistence that a work must be
experienced in person.In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Production, Walter Benjamin contends that what today are
called fine art objects have inherited an aura, or quality of
special significance, from their ritualistic origins and their
intimate connection to ruling powers.The aura of art works
manifests in the continued insistence that a work must be
experienced in person, and therefore in the control of the
individual and institutions that possess it.While Benjamin looks
towards photographic reproduction as a possibility for the
democratization of art, the power of the aura is still located in
the architectural space of the gallery, considered the de jure site
for the viewing of most works. While we may experience art through
the browser more often than in person, it's still fair to assume
that most people would say they prefer experiencing the work in
situ to its pixelated transmission.
A Google image search of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, one
of the most reproduced images in history that still draws massive
crowds to its physical iteration.
Running parallel to Hermit Crab museum history is the evolution
of buildings specifically designed to house art, lets call them Art
Palaces. A likely beginning in that history is the Altes Museum in
Berlin (incidentally originally named the Knigliches Museum or
Royal Museum). Commissioned by Friedrich Wilhelm II, a strong
proponent of humboldtian ideals, the museum was designed in the
neoclassical style by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, espousing a
historical connection to Greek democracies. If the Louvre is a
metaphor for one narrative of the revolutionary emergence of
bourgeois capitalism, then the Altes Museum is the perfect metaphor
for a non-revolutionary narrative of transition. Later, it was used
by the Nazis as a propagandistic backdrop before being damaged
towards the end of the war and later reconstructed by Hans Erich
Bogatzky and Theodor Voissen. Connective lines could be drawn from
the Altes Museum to contemporary projects like the Bilbao
Guggenheim, the new Whitney Museum, etc. In their designs, these
new museums also rhetorically suggest cultural-political ideals of
their time, whether in angled sheets of metal or in cardboard and
wood. Here, the architecture speaks metaphorically, acting like the
theoretical version of Venturis duck (deconstructive duck?). Once
could say that just as Schinkels museum did not actually institute
democracy, so-called deconstructive architecture does not actually
deconstruct architecture in the Derridean sense (as he himself
alluded), but rather only resembles or literalizes a metaphorical
version of deconstruction. For some, such as the performance artist
Andrea Fraser, the expressiveness of todays Art Palace can
overshadow the work contained within. In her 2001 video piece
Little Frank and His Carp, Fraser has an erotic encounter with the
Bilbao Museum as she listens to an audio guide rave about its
architecture.
An engraving the Altes Museum by Friedrich Alexander Thiele, ca.
1830. Via: Wikipedia
While bearing the inheritance of both the Art Palace and Hermit
Crab traditions, the art fair is more directly related to the
exhibition than to the museum. A genealogy of museums would
necessarily require the inclusion of exhibits, which is far too
ambitious a project for my word count. But it should still be noted
that exhibitions emerged alongside museums, and their histories are
intertwined. Simultaneously, they are directly linked to the rise
of world fairs and expositions. The Salon des Refuss of 1863 is an
important marking point of the development of modern art in that it
was perhaps the first time a space was carved out explicitly for
works that rejected the orthodoxy of art academies. It could be
argued that, early on, exhibitions outside of museums became the
site in which the future of art was fought over, while the museum
would later enshrine that future as past.
Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao is a contemporary example of the
Art Palace typology. Photo-collage by the author.
While exteriors may vary, it is only due to the interior art
spaces gradual homogenization that the art fair can operate as it
does (that is, through semblance). In his seminal 1976 book Inside
the White Cube: the Ideology of the Gallery Space, Brian ODoherty
investigates the historical emergence of the gallery space through
transitions in stylistic periods of art. ODoherty traces the
movement from salon-style exhibitions to the hermetically-sealed
environment of a white cube gallery through the struggle against
the frame, from a device to enclose a world rendered with
illusionary perspective, to abstracted and spatially-aware artforms
such as conceptual and performance art.We have now reached a point
where we see not the art but the space first."ODoherty writes, The
history of modernism is intimately framed by [the gallery] space;
or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes
in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point
where we see not the art but the space first. From Malevich to
Rothko, a litany of modern artists attempted to created
transcendental work that required presentation in places disguised
through white paint as pure space. Seemingly, only then could the
work itself be considered in necessary isolation. But, in a strange
reversal, ODoherty notes that by nature of this very attempt at
relegation, the placed-ness of the gallery actually steps into the
foreground. Artists of that time including ODoherty himself,
usually as his alter ego Patrick Ireland actively investigated the
place of art as they pioneered performance, video, conceptual art,
institutional critique. They made works through and about the
places they were in.
The white cube gallery space has become the dominant typology
for art-viewing. Image: London's White Cube gallery empty. Credit:
White Cube
Today, in another turn, inside the architecture of the art fair
it is the art object that seemingly renders invisible the place
that both we and it temporarily inhabit. It is because of the art
objects that we ignore the flimsy architecture surrounding it, that
the place appears to us as an art venue rather than as a party tent
or as a temporary car shelter. Assumedly, most works in an art fair
besides those explicitly commissioned by the organizers, ie.
performances were not intended by their artist to be backgrounded
by swarms of people with iPhones out, or interminable rows of other
artists works. If it were not for the cubicle-walls, an art fair
would simply be a large, un-curated exhibit (or a depository of
dollar signs). And when someone falls in love with a work of art or
decides to buy it, they assumedly imagine it within another
context, be it institutional or domestic (or as capital alone). The
modernist horizon of an isolated artwork has been reached but only
in our heads. If the artwork depends on the white cube as context,
then when we are seeing it in an art fair is it still working?The
art fair looks like a glamorized refugee camp.
While diffused, the legacy of prior exhibitions spaces haunts
the architecture of the art fair. In their Hermit Crab type, the
art fair seems to illustrate the limitless geographic range of
current economics, popping up in any variety of places in virtually
every major city worldwide. Parallelling the emergence of so-called
sharing economies and the diminution of accessibility to owning
property, the exhibition of today can invade any space,but exits as
soon as it came, without leaving substantial traces of economic
benefit. In its White Tent or constructed instantiations, the
ideology of the art fair is less immediately apparent, but
parallels that of Art Palaces.If the Altes Museum represented the
liberal ideals of the humboldtian era, the White Tent represents
the current economic situation, in which precarity has been
extended to nearly every class of people while simultaneously
manifested in unequal striations. That is to say, it is not
entirely coincidental that the art fair looks like a glamorized
refugee camp. In the current economic model, the privilege that
enables the bacchanalian festivities of an event like Art Basel
Miami always comes at the expense of the refugee. Increasingly, it
is no longer an automatic move for the ruling elite to wrap
themselves in philanthropic or idealistic principles. Instead, they
can inhabit the same typologies as the most marginalized people,
but this does not go both ways.
The architecture of the art fair is strikingly similar to that
of a refugee campus with the addition of champagne bars, oil
paintings, and consumer goods encased in lucite. Photo-collage by
the author.
If the architecture of the white cube gallery emerged alongside
the aspirational ideals of its contemporaneous art, towards a sort
of metaphysical isolation, the white tent was born out of the
markets transcendence over the object. But the distance between the
rise of public art institutions, as the ideological apparatuses of
a benevolent ruling class, and the white tent of the art fair,
perhaps devoid of such pretenses, actually suggests a horizon of
democratic possibility for art.Art no longer requires an
architectural support to be signified as such.While not necessarily
dematerialized (the art object is still often an object that is
physically exchanged), art no longer requires an architectural
support to be signified as such. For rather than the space
demarcating the object, the objects now demarcate the place so long
as they stand in front of a stage set. Art exists now in a strange
truce, in which an object is used as the establishing point for a
market as much as the market is used as the establishing mechanism
of the object. The fragility of this market has been
well-discussed; should it collapse, we will be left with art
untethered from the ideal of space. Freed from the necessity of the
white cube, the art object now has the potential to serve as the
means by which a place can be collectively designated as
significant. The stage just has to first be disassembled.
/.Feature