Mark Handforth: “Star”, 2007
Gavin Brown Enterprise, New York
Courtesy MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel/Zurich) AG
Art 38 Basel: Art in Public Space
The exhibition area in front of the buildings hosting the international art show is once again scheduled to become an arena for art projects in public space. Nine projects by such internationally recognized artists as Wim Delvoye, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Anish Kapoor, Tadashi Kawamata, Paul McCarthy, Mike Nelson, Vedovamazzei, Not Vital, and Thomas Zipp will be installed there. Their artistic interventions will be connecting with the daily lives of passersby in ways now poetic, now alienating or surprising.
The «Public Art Projects» platform offers fascinating insight into leading contemporary artists’ interpretation of new art in public space. The nine works will be installed site-specifically on Exhibition Square in front of the buildings hosting Art Basel. Unlike a traditional sculpture exhibition, «Public Art Projects» showcases interventions in urban space. The exhibition concept was devised by experienced Basel exhibition maker Martin Schwander.
High above the visitors’ heads hangs the «Tree Hut» by Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata (Annely Juda Fine Art, London). The wood and metal hut, which is attached to a monumental flagpole, evokes associations of children’s playgrounds, but equally of indigenous or slum dwellings. Regardless of the interpretation, «Tree Hut» is an anachronism in the midst of a modern, urban environment.
Even if the house by Italian artists Vedovamazzei (Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, Rome) displays formal similarities to Tadashi Kawamata’s, it has a very different background. Vedovamazzei’s house is a reconstruction of the do-it-yourself house Buster Keaton spends a week trying to build in his first film (1920), unaware that his rival has sabotaged the project.
The result is inevitable: the walls are askew, the roof is too small, and the porch collapses. With their house, Vedovamazzei offer critical commentary on the modern belief in linear evolution, in cause and effect, and make a case for indeterminacy, chaos, and complexity.
Entering the 1954 GMC tourist bus that English artist Mike Nelson (Galleria Franco Noero, Turin) has turned into «The Pumpkin Palace», visitors find themselves in a claustrophobic, maze-like interior. A drug squad is working in one area, there is a travel agency for Third World countries in another, and a bikers’ bar in yet another: the whole ensemble gives the impression of a place for social dropouts, for the nomads and outsiders of a globalized world.
Though there are those who might X-rate «Santa With Butt Plug» by Paul McCarthy (Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, London), no one would question its monumentality. The 9-ton, over 6-meter high bronze sculpture modeled on a garden gnome holds an oversized dildo in one hand and a bell in the other. California-based McCarthy frequently uses sculptural figures as social metaphors via which he can question the validity of societal rules and social conventions. The corrosion of these conventions and the dissolution of rigid concepts of sexuality are at the center of his work.
«Flatbed Truck» by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye (Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, Miami) is 25 meters long, 5 meters high, and weighs 6 tons. Be they cement mixers, steam shovels, or other large pieces of construction machinery, Delvoye’s monumental sculptures combine industrial design with historical ornaments, probing both the banal utility and the sublimity of this equipment.
«Warm Regards» is the name Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset (Klosterfelde, Berlin) give to the kiosk where they sell postcards of their kiosk. With its evocation of modern urban architecture, the structure of glass and chromed steel is a lightArt hearted comment on the inflated marketing and kitschy souvenir industry of certain cities and their architectural icons.
Swiss artist Not Vital (Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Paris) will be presenting a very special kind of precision tool on Exhibition Square. «Bâton» is a delicate, 11-meter-high conductor’s baton made completely of aluminum. The monumentality of the baton not only highlights the beauty of the tool, but seems to transmute the conductor’s power over the orchestra into an emblem of power in general.
The works of German artist Thomas Zipp (Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna) frequently reflect the history and effects of certain drugs. Zipp’s piece for Public Art Projects deals with the controversial drug Delysid (II) (LSD) and its fictional reintroduction by Sandoz in 2013, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its discovery by Basel chemist Albert Hofmann. The work consists of a 7- meter-high steel spiral with a rotating wooden placard at the top bearing the inscription «Latet Anguis in Mens» (The Snake Lurks in the Human Mind), in allusion to a quotation from Virgil, «Latet anguis in herba» (The snake lurks in the grass). There will be a steel relief showing the chemical structure of LSD right next to the sculpture.
The piece that Anish Kapoor (Lisson Gallery, London) will be showing in Basel is based on the series of «Sky Mirrors» he has been developing since 2004. A round, concave mirror of polished stainless steel reflects its surroundings and the sky.
An exhibition of 60 further large-scale works (wall paintings, videos projections, sculptures, installations, photographic series, and performances) can be seen in the «Art Unlimited» hall.
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