Frieze Fair Highlights: Go to Frame!

by Art Fag City on October 15, 2009 Events

POST BY PADDY JOHNSON

Gareth Moore, Neither Here Nor There, 2009, Luettgenmeijer, Berlin, Booth R12

Which idiosyncratic Frieze art display do I start with first – The Incest Museum, Club Nutz, or the teenagers drinking whiskey from a bottle at a football game – as possible highlights? I tried each of these before finally opting for Gareth Moore’s, Neither Here Nor There, which only goes to say that most of the galleries in the Frame portion of the Frieze fair are worth highlighting.

A new addition to Frieze, Frame invites thirty younger galleries to exhibit at a subsidized rate.  There’s no carpet on these floors, and the space is generally filled with younger visitors, neither of which necessarily signal a better event. Overall however, the exhibitors launched riskier projects and the results were positive.

Gareth Moore’s real estate signs made from the seats of chairs provide an excellent example of this. With the booth spare but for these objects, the piece reads as a statement on its venue Frame, as the number of flags roughly correspond to the invited exhibitors.


Club Nutz, Booth G22, Scott Reeder, Tyson Reeder, Elysia Borowy-Reeder

Meanwhile over at Club Nutz, Scott Reeder, Tyson Reeder, and Elysia Borowy-Reeder’s collective follow last year’s recreated Icelandic bar in Reykjavik by Kling & Bang Gallery. Nutz offers a range of lectures and panel discussions throughout the course of the fair. When I asked what topics they’d be covering, the woman manning the door told me “Open space curatorial practice.”  This differed significantly from “Anything you want” which is what I later learned my colleague had been told.  Either way, I’d like to attend.


Simon Fujiwara, Museum of Incest, installation view, Neue Alte Brucke, Booth R12


Simon Fujiwara, Museum of Incest, exterior view, Neue Alte Brucke, Booth R12

Speaking of events worth attending, as the board above indicates, artist Simon Fujiwara will be giving tours of his Museum of Incest throughout the fair. Hoping to get a preview last night, I asked a dealer at Neue Alte Brucke how much of the piece was actually based on incest. I was told I needed to read the artist Simon Fujiwara’s book (available for 8 pounds). Not surprisingly, the Frieze party was not the time to attempt that, but I did manage to transcribe the introduction.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MUSEUM’S COLLECTION

Because of the near constant ban on incestuous practices throughout Western civilization, no art works or artifacts that represent the history of incest exist. While this could have posed serious problems for the museum’s displays, the curatorial team opted to represent the history of the taboo through architectural reconstructions from three periods of history where incest was prevalent. Regular live performances and historic re-enactments bring this history to life. The cast predominantly consists of local actors providing much needed employment opportunities in the local region.

Interestingly, Cartier Prize Winner Jordan Wolfson had a dream about string theory that he’s also having actors re-enact throughout the Frieze fair. In this case, he will be between the actors and viewer, dolling out instructions about whether they should be increasing or decreasing sex, volume and theatricality. It would seem that some sort of collaboration between Wolfson and Fujiwara really needs to happen.

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