Interview

By Day 3 of Frieze, the fair had actually started. Even for the preview, the line (queue, as they say) was stretched around the block. We kind of wonder who was on the line, as the preview is intended for collectors and editors, neither of whom like to wait on a line. Our tip: cut the crowd (And the sculpture garden)!

For the full slideshow of our picks from Frieze, click to Art in America. For reports from White Cube's dinner for Damien Hirst's new show of paintings at the Wallace Collection, and more, click on.


Cyprien Gaillard, Cities of Gold and Mirror, 2009. Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery.

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The first stop of the day was James Richards at Hauser and Wirth's project space. The youngest artist at Hauser and Wirth is Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, at age 29; that doesn't put Richards, who is 26 and was recently featured in the New Museum's Younger Than Jesus show, so far out of the league of this bluer-than-blue chip gallery. His show here updates minimalist forms by using books that you can pick up an read as their constituent materials. The silver spine of A Woman in Your Own Right, Assertivenes and You advertised on its back cover, like so many works of art, as something that can "change your life." (LEFT: DAMIEN HIRST AT THE WALLACE COLLECTION IN LONDON. PHOTO BY MARY BARONE)

Life is the void for Anish Kapoor–such is the measure of success. Michael Govan, director of LACMA on a brief break from fundraising for the Tate openings (he's back in LA today), characterized the show as "quite a production." Indeed, in its most recent sculpture, Kapoor has computer programs drip cement in spirals and curls that invoke mind grindings and turds. The centerpoint is a train, shown previously in Nantes and Munich, that traverses the Royal Academy's longest stretch of arched doorways at an imperceptible slowness, pushing a bloody, fleshy mass of wax over the edges. In the catalogue, Norman Rosenthal likens it to the slow-burning terror; it reminded me of Hostel or some equivalent Japanese film. Elsewhere there is more yellow than the eye can possible bear, in the shape of a concave void. If all the exhibition doors were open, would you open the show with a giant, vagina-like wooden sculpture?  What kind of trauma has this man endured?

See our full Frieze diary–including dispatches on David Blandy, Ryan Gander, Damien Hirst, and more Anish Kapoor–on Art in America.

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It's a sunny week in London, without rains, without chills, and still, for a few days at least, without Frieze. (LEFT: THREE COLOR CURL (2008), WALEAD BESHTY)

Before the main fair preview Wednesday, before even the major gallery previews Tuesday, there is Monday–in the US a holiday that signifies the beginning of the end of British world dominance, so perhaps a time when London should take stock of itself. The economy seems to have settled (thanks surely to the re-payment of Gordon Brown's $20,000 in expenses) and dealers seem reservedly upbeat. As the typically quiet Frieze founder Matthew Slotower would say on this night, "You can't sell just anything, like you might have two years ago. You've got to bring something good... or you're dead." Giddy London, indeed.

En route to the charity auction for GRAFF auction for FACET (For Africa's Children Every Time: fairly self-explanatory in it's intentions), at Christie's, we fell onto Walead Beshty's show at Thomas Dane. There the gallerist was happy to explain the exhibition, which consists of the artist's signature abstract photographs in bright if rather industrial colors rendered through a complicated magnetic procedure, but also copper boxes that the artist ships to the gallery and in some cases stacks, once there. The boxes (Beshty showed glass versions at the last Tate Triennial) bear every mark of their transfer from the studio (or the fabricator's, as it were) to the gallery: that means packing tape and shipping labels, and oxidization every time the box is touched, primarily in the form of fingerprints. Was FedEx freaked out by the shipping order? "They were, but they'll take anything," explained Dane, and we'll take his word for it.

See our full Frieze diary on Art in America.

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Installation by Rafael de Cardenas.

"New York Minute" is curator Kathy Grayson's representation of the city's art community for a European context fashionably enthusiastic for it, and hesitant to it take seriously. The exhibition in Rome, sponsored by the DEPART Foundation, comprises 60 artists in three themed sections: "wild figuration," "new abstraction," and "New York shitty," with inevitable and substantial cross-over. Much of the responsibility to design the space came down to architect Rafael de Cardenas, whose effusively tactile, geometric designs unified the three spaces.

And how did he choose to represent New York to Rome? Of his pop-up shop for Aaron Bondaroff, he says, "The idea for shop was birthday party on steroids basically but enough to create something garish and frightening but cocoon like inside." Sounds like a New York tourists might never become accustomed to. For the shop, de Cardenas brought to Rome 1000 feet of mirrored patterned mylar, 4000 feet of black and white pennant flags, and 40,000 feet of neon pink, yellow and orange tape, all of which he bought on Canal Street. The installation was devised on-spot, and wasn't finished until the architect added 500 jumbo-sized black helium balloons.

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