Day Three: Into the Fair

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 skip the sculpture garden)!

View Slideshow Darren Almond, Fullmoon@Kitandara, 2009.C-print mounted to aluminum in artist's frame. © Darren Almond, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.; Cyprien Gaillard, Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009)16 MM film, 8 minutes 58 seconds.Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery  ;

After various auction results at Phillips and Christie's (At one, Martin Kippenberger's Paris Bar took in a record sum, and bidders laughed; at the other, no smiles), the revelation of Frieze has been that sales were not that bad. Creatively, they were controlled. New York's Salon94 won the prize 10,000-pound prize for best booth, and while it's foolish to totalize any fair, it seemed like the solid galleries brought solid fare.

Unlike this summer's Basel, where every booth seemed required to bring a Wolfgang Tillmanns print, there weren't so many works by ubiquitous artists. Liam Gillick reached a certain quota, and there was a healthy showing of works in plaster and bronze by Rebecca Warren. Matthew Marks had large, colorful, ethereal landscapes by Darren Almond. White Cube had a series of truly sick, slick porcelains by Rachel Kneebone. At Reena Spaulings, Josephine Pryde showed a new series of photographs set onto metal tubes. They also had a series of k8 Hardy photographs in more romantic, less tough hues. Hardy, who's posing in her makeshift fashion costumes still looks tough, even if a feature in the Times' Style section makes her veritably fashionable.

At Marc Foxx, there was "brainy" work by Roger Hiorns—great preview of the Turner Prize favorite—who used to fill motor engines with great blue crystals but now dries out brains and put them in the machines, and other situations. Elsewhere, Hiorns has sprinkled contact lenses all over the ground to make precious little clickiity-clack sounds—like Jackson Pollock sprinkling paint vertically onto a canvas from a stick—and making this artist perhaps the most macho living artist. Maureen Paley brought a great new mixed media work by Seb Patane, who paired a Cadere-like marked piece of plywood with a painting that included one of signature, mysterious ink drips that looks like a blacked out portrait. Javier Peres had a revelatory photo collage of self-portraits by Dash Snow, the artist made present by the swatch of his pubic air that opened the series.

Frame, the section for young galleries presenting solo shows, was better than you'd see at Basel in Art Statements, and with a more thorough and convincing show of local galleries. London's Laura Bartlett brought Cyprien Gaillard, whose pursuit of endangered buildings brought him to Acapulco. On his way he found a gang of frat boys competing in chugging whiskey, and dark takes of a discotheque. The little guy wins the contest but that isn't really the point, so much as ritual and waste. This was shot in a tight, rich 16-mm, and scored to hypnotic effect by the artist himself. At Gaudel de Stampa, Ida Ekblad executed another of her scanvenger hunt for metal materials, and set them into concrete in the time it takes to dry. These are clever, anthropomophic little beasts that look cast in white powder, with capes and sometimes garlic cloves in place of a little head.

Lisa Cooley brought aunified, monumental photo series by Erin Shirreff, who photographs tiny little clay objects she makes and blows them up. Her fingerprints are all over them. Another Frame subject who emphasized the little things was Susan Collis for London's SEVENTEEN, who spends a long time painting and crafting objects that look like plywood dropped on the ground. And on a grander scale, even for the low walls on the booth at Neue Alte Brücke, was Simon Fujiwara's proposal for a museum of incest. The artist ties the logic that the world had to start with two of us into a complicated tale about his estranged Japanese father (he has a caucasian mother), who painted Fujiwara "Mediterranean." This was performed frequently throughout the course of the fair, making it somewhat of a revisited trauma. Lucky the artist put out a collection jar for his museum, so you can help him out.