Art Basel Begins

In the Karma International booth in the Art Statements section of Art Basel, the temporary white walls are hung with small, spectral-like images of black space, each with a kind of dissolving star at their center. If the images call up the cosmos and the deep, meditative thoughts the larger universe usually inspires, the process that produced the works is infinitely more aggressive and ironic. To make them, the young Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz spit out performance enhancing drugs on black photo paper -- hence the powdery white aura haloing the seeming stars. This inspired act of regurgitation -- at once funny and brutal, seriously aesthetic and defiantly physical -- stayed with me as I moved through the labyrinthine art fair that is Art Basel 40. With more than 300 galleries showing work by approximately 2,500 artists, ideas of regurgitation and ingestion were weirdly relevant. For instance, how much art could the galleries throw up on the walls, and how much could a fair goer be expected to take in?

View Slideshow Franz Erhard Walther; Benedikt Hipp;

To deal with this problem of seismic overload, the always-illustrious Art Basel has expectedly divided its fair into myriad sections. Art Statements features 27 booths, each devoted to a single emerging artist -- Americans Josh Brand and Leslie Hewitt, and Germans Benedikt Hipp and Nora Shulz, among them -- often with engaging and lovely results. Art Unlimited focuses on 60 mostly new, outsize artworks, from Yoshitomo Nara's rickety, 26-foot-tall wooden house populated with his cute cast of big-eyed figures, to Sarah Oppenheimer's gigantic periscope embedded in a hall of mirrors (or hall of apertures) booth oddly dressed in the architecture of an airport lounge. Art Premiere is made up of 19 projects that feature two artists' works in dialogue -- Standard (Oslo) presented a curious fort-and-video installation by Emily Wardill and Oscar Tuazon, for example -- or a single artist, (or, lacking that, historical material). The redundantly titled Art Galleries section rounded things off, representing the bleary-eyed pastures of small white booths stuffed to the gills with high-end aesthetic goodies that one regularly expects from an art fair as prestigious and omnivorous as Art Basel.



Not surprisingly, Art Statements and Art Unlimited were by far the most interesting and easily navigable sections; with the international über-moneyed set let loose in the art galleries section during the VIP preview, these environs were left to quieter, less Blackberry-bound folk who rewarded the mostly laudable work with a museum-like hush. Statements seemed equally split between fields of austere, minimalist objects-some exceptional long wood boxes filled with black-laquered notebooks from Michal Budny at Raster; an elegant installation by Nora Schulz at Sutton Lane that simultaneously evoked John Chamberlain's floor flotilla works and the new abstract photography from artists like Eileen Quinlan and Walead Beshty-and more a exuberant, color-soaked attitude, exemplified by the curvy, violet graffiti of Kboco's installation at Sao Paulo's Razuk. At times these two sensibilities synthesized, as in Josh Brand's luminous series of unique c-prints at Herald St., with their minimal but gorgeously hued color fields. Another standout was Benedikt Hipp's romantically noir paintings, drawings, and objects at Galerie Iris Kadel; sold out by the preview, the young Munich artist-who studied with Sean Scully-kept Kadel's booth continually full.



At Art Unlimited, some odd trends emerged: carpets and rugs cropped up repeatedly, turning the section into a kind of postmodern rug bazaar. There was Farhad Moshiri's minimalist, Carl Andre-inspired Converted Handmade Persian Rug into a One Bedroom Apartment (2008), to Elisabetta Benassi's handmade carpet featuring a telegram from Buckminster Fuller, to Isamu Noguchi Explaining Einstein's Theory of Relativity (2009), to Franz Erhard Walther's magnificent installation 55 Handlungsbahnen (2003-2009). Multi-hued "action paths" of meter-wide fabric works are laid out in a grid on the floor, while a grid of watercolors depicting the floor forms hang on the walls above.



If the Art Galleries part of the fair lacked the distilled cogency of the smaller curated sections, it offered quantity, the quality of which was astonishing. Like a highly tuned aesthete's dream wünderkammer, the Messes's main two floors offered the best of nearly everything-all of which was available for a price. At Zurich's Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Bernd Ribbeck's beautifully kalediscopic series of India ink on paper works were going for 3,750 euros each, with two already sold. Galerie Rodolphe Janssen had some highly covetable black-ad-white "fold" photographs by Walead Beshty priced at 6,800 Euros. Elizabeth Dee, of New York, was offering some conceptually minded, afro-centric works by Renee Green and Adrian Piper; the latter's 1968 "Hypothesis Situation" series could be yours for between 60 and 80,000 Euros.



Most booths at Art Basel are packed with works-recessionary times have turned even the most elite salesman or saleswoman into an eager peddler. Dealers that chose to play according to the 2007 playbook and bring only a couple of works ended up looking a little lonely and ridiculous. In any case, art works-most priced lower than they were a year ago-appear to be selling, and the gallerists appear don't appear to be displeased. Nor do the fair-goers, moneyed or not. With such an abundance of aesthetic riches, what is there to be unhappy about? Well, perhaps the greedy economic practices that caused the recession in the first place. But that is another story.