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December 28, 2005

Art Basel Miami: A Seth's Eye View

Seth Adelsberger

Leaving the December cold of Baltimore for a week in South Beach was a no-brainer. Art Basel Miami is the largest Contemporary Art Fair in North America, with six other sub-fairs that feed off its pull (NADA, Scope, Omni, Pulse, Aqua, and Frisbee). I packed all of my smallest drawings and one larger deconstructed painting to be rebuilt on site in the hotel room at Frisbee. This being my first art fair, I had no idea what to expect. The sputtering and smoking cab that delivered from the airport to my hotel didn't bode well. But, after some Peruvian ceviche and a few Coronas, anything seemed possible. Over four days much art was seen, much dinero changed hands, great food was eaten, and alcohol became a permanent resident of my body. Here are the top ten happenings that made the trip transformative.

Hotel room installation at Frisbee. Works by Andrew Schoultz (SF), Ryan Wallace (Brooklyn), and Seth Adelsberger (Bmore).

[ed note: We’ll add links to these throughout the week; in the meantime, God gave us Google for a reason!]

1. Deitch Projects "Live Through This" Party. Off the chain: Paperrad, Taylor Mckimens, Misaki Kawai, Matt Leines, Devendra Banhart. All-star and out of control.

2. Aqua Art Fair. The best art fair, hands down. Almost all of the work here was top notch. Mostly West Coast galleries. Slick, hip, casual, clean, free entry, well lit, and reasonably sized. The layout was perfect, allowing it to avoid being overwhelming. Bought two works on paper from Winnipeg based Other Gallery. One: a collage from Billy Grant (of Dearraindrop.) Another from 23 yr-old up-and-comer Krisjanis Katkins-Gorsline (watercolors and drawings a la Inka Essenhigh).

3. Jacob Ciocci of Paperrad and Slow Jams Band: 1/2 Hour of Power at Frisbee Art Fair in the Cavalier Hotel (the "anti-commercial" art fair that I had work in -- I didn't sell anything. but i guess that makes sense). Shit got crunk. Props to Anat Ebgi and Jen Denike for organizing Frisbee, and Ben Jones on the projections.

4. Herwig Weiser's installation in Lisa Ruyter’s shipping container on the beach for Art Basel. Weiser is a new media artist working in Cymatics and Ferrofluid. The result: two interactive stations resembling turntables where you could turn different knobs that morphed the ones and twos (respectively a circular pool of black fluid and a tondo landscape of obsidian magnetic shards). Bleeps and woozy sounds resulted as the dark fields mutated according to the combination of frequencies. There were also precise, diagramatic, color drawings. Blew my mind.

5. Gavin Brown Party at Angel Ultra Lounge -- our last effort of Friday evening to get into an exclusive party and the closest I have come to what a Studio 54 experience must have been like. Notable historical context: Gavin Brown is notorious for being arrested at his controversial 2004 show "Drunks vs. Stoned."

6. Chillin’ on the beach. Cloudless sky. Fresh Air. Blue Water. Walking along Ocean Drive you could hear Christmas music coming from beachfront stores. Weird.

7. Neil Farber (The Royal Art Lodge) drawings: 2 juicy rainbow drawings with hundreds of tiny heads. Taylor McKimens’s large irregularly shaped collage on panel. Eddie Martinez's drawings at NADA.

8. Dinner with Elizabeth Huey, Erik White (both NY painters) and Jaimie O' Shea (Editor of Juxtapoz) on Espanola Way.

9. Grand Opening Reception for french Gallerie Perrotin’s Miami branch: a 13,000 sq. ft, two floor factory space, still unfinished. Large enough for three concurrent solo shows and 2nd floor group show. The walls were whitewashed plywood. Stacks of drywall accented the yard out back where hour devours and a gourmet dinner were served as DJ's spun remixed oldies. Among the artists Perrotin represents: Mariko Mori, Takashi Murakami, Bernard Frize, Maurizio Cattelan, and Sophie Calle. Frize’s tight, patterned, meditative, B&W op paintings made my head hurt (good). Maybe it was all the free wine and mojitos (also good).

10. Scope “Culture on the Verge” party, rooftop of Towhouse Hotel. Enjoyed free refreshments and reading material courtesy of Red Stripe and The Fader. Amazing views of the South Beach architecture.

+++++

Rock Heals loves Seth’s work – check out a piece of his that showed up here in the past:
Jansen Acid Test Dictionary Painting

Posted by Rock Heals at December 28, 2005 08:00 AM