Art Basel Miami Beach. A small text beyond the enclaves

2012 Art Basel Miami Beach was definitely better that its previous edition. In spite of having included works created by a large number of artists, the tour around the fairgrounds wasn’t exhausting or baroquely aggressive. On the contrary, every single element in that mega eclectic exhibition was perfectly flowing as the trade event did.

In terms of “modern” masters, there were lots of Lam’s, Boteros’and especially (this is not new) Joaquin Torres-Garcia’s. Oh! and Calder’s, there were sculptures galore! Recent works, Cy Twombly’s and John Chamberlain’s that, I guess, will be stepping out of their hideout-collections after their respective passing. The presence of pop art, geometric abstraction and Latin American kinetic art, specifically Soto y Cruz Diez’s, turns out to be overwhelming. It’s not a new phenomenon and I still don’t know the in extenso causes, but last year, for instance, Lolo Soldevilla’s work was a resounding success in PINTA NY and now everybody is looking for Sandu Darie. We are witnessing a pre-boom that is going to flood even the most unforeseen corners.

Liliana Porter swept everybody off their feet with her delicious installations and drawing –collages with miniature elements and plenty of poetry. Nevertheless, there was an artist that actually took the cake in terms of surprise, an 80-year-old artist who decided to paint by using a digital software and radically changed his poetics: an abstract painting, essentially beautiful and decorative, made up of over eight thousand colored lines, negatively or positively amazed those who read the caption: Gerard Richter.

Beyond the usual parties, blasted by many people that would have loved to be invited, the presence of the most powerful stars that go to Florida to show off, buy or simply enjoy the exquisite weather, Art Basel showed fine art. There is a pause to be made: fairs entail marketing.

I take my hat off to New York-based Jack Shainman gallery, which presented a magnificent list of artworks, mostly tackling otherness and popular cultures, an old-but-never-old-fashioned matter with excellent presentation. Jackie Nickerson, with a 2-meter-long printed picture, found the perfect format to project the idea of a tree-man in the middle of African tobacco plantations, in perfect harmony with rigorous Nick Cave’s kitsch-but-gorgeous sculptures. And that’s not it: two tapestries seem to be fabric-made from the distance, but they are actually metal, created by the acclaimed El Anatsui¹, an exquisite portrait (painting), signed by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who was handed the Future Generation Art Prize, delivered by Victor Pinchuk Foundation one day after Art Basel; plus the rest of the exhibited works increased the value of this New Yorker gallery’s proposal.

Art Positions, a section that sheds light on a sort of emerging artists that have already won succulent prizes and prestigious scholarships, seduced me again. Rumanian artist Andra Ursuta, who deployed a series of sculptures that paid tribute to the Paleolithic Venus whose fat bodies were substituted by metallic tubes, a clear allusion to the stripers and female prostitution, as well as the architectonic installation² created by Colombian Leyla Cardenas, who is obsessed with the metaphysic of time and the layers of walls as speaking archives, caught my attention every time I visited the fairground.

On the other hand, Los Carpinteros carried out their second and effective performance in public spaces³. This time round, with a Güiro in the Public Art section, Collin Park. It was a sort of hybrid musical instrument and brain for private parties next to the beach. It was a place apart, with null access in the middle of the public stage, which was disconcerting, although the work is a visual gift.

The public in Miami Beach had the opportunity to admire a lot of things in Art Basel: good and bad classic works, good and bad young people, artists that sell one image in their work and their behavior reflects the opposite, extravagance and the entire etcetera you can imagine. I, for example, have tons of new texts in my mind: little known artists, topics that indicate trends; the irreplaceable warmth of friends and the hope to revisit this fair, since another kind of approach wouldn’t be the same and would take against the wall with arguments that don’t belong to it.

Art Basel is described as the art show with more experience and consolidation in the international scene. from switzerland, its main venue, it has reached out other cities to reafirm its model within the complex panorama of today’s artistic market.

¹ One of his tapestries can be admired as part of the Metropolitan Museum’s permanent collection, NY.

² The topic of this architecture deserves a monographic.

³The other one was in Havana’s Biennial with their reversible Comparsa.